The future of Burma: Children are like jewels

The Lokaniti states "aputtakam gharam sunnam" ("a home without children is desolate" [Pe Tin Thein 1992:2]). The home, the domain of children, is the space least invaded by the surveillance apparatus of the military government. In the parenting of children we gain a viewpoint from which to see the impact of militarism and modernization on the national private imagination. Such a viewpoint is fraught with conflicting tensions and representations of parents and of the kinds of adults produced during the child-rearing process. Parents were portrayed as virtual monsters by many Western theorists of the last century, and as hagiographical icons in uncensored contemporary Burmese writings, and children were depicted as reincarnated wise elders in Buddhism and Burmese folk traditions, and increasingly as pudgy little emperors and empresses by transnational Asian marketing companies. These images of the Burmese family are reconcilable within a historical framework that takes into account British colonization, the brief moment of culture and personality theory ascendancy among Western academics, the continued suppression of publishing of serious social concerns in Burma, the increasing recourse to religion under authoritarianism, and the partial liberalization of the Burmese economy in the 1990s that led to a conscious pan-Asian cosmopolitan model for parenting (Anagnost 2002) being espoused by transnational marketing companies in Burmese urban media. In this chapter I privilege the voices of Burmese parents in order to create another depiction of Burmese children: as the embodiment both of all that is valuable on the earth, and of an alternate genetic history of Burma, where value is made manifest through generational links.