August 6, 2018
U.S.A.
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 9
Area refugees from Burma try to help those back home
GIVING BACK. Refugees from Myanmar who
currently reside in High Point, North Carolina talk
about their concerns about people in their home
country in this July 2, 2018 file photo. Approximately
300 people from the country’s Kachin ethnic group
now live in North Carolina; most of them came to this
country to escape the violence and oppression of their
people. In addition to High Point, they live primarily in
Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, New Bern, and Mebane.
(Bryana Reichard/The High Point Enterprise via AP,
File)
By Jimmy Tomlin
High Point Enterprise
H
raping of women and children by soldiers
in the Myanmar Army.
“They abuse villagers,” says Roiji
Kinraw, who came to High Point in 2010
and lives here with her husband and three
children. “They rape women, and then
they rape their children. Our people don’t
like this. Why you do to our villagers the
suffering and abuse? Why you do this? It’s
not fair.”
Fighting between the Myanmar Army
and the Kachin Independence Army has
displaced more than 98,000 civilians,
according to Amnesty International, a
worldwide human-rights advocate. They
are known as IDPs — internally displaced
persons — and most of them live at an IDP
camp in the Kachin state.
“Our people want peace — our people
want fair — but the government not like
that,” Kinraw says. “They ignore what our
people want. The civil war is very long,
long, long, and because of that case, more
people are homeless, and they just stay at
the camp area. They’ve lost their rights
and their hope. Their children have lost
their future. There is no education, there is
no health. Everything is lost.”
According to Marip, Buddhism is the
predominant religion in Burma, but most
of the Kachin people identify as
Christians, which exacerbates the
persecution.
Zauhkawng Nmawn, who lives in Dur-
ham, says the suffering of the Kachin
people has been tremendous.
A play about straight white men on Broadway makes history
By John Carucci
The Associated Press
EW YORK — The play that just
opened at the Helen Hayes
Theatre on Broadway may have a
cast dominated by white men, but history
has been made behind the scenes.
Young Jean Lee became the first
Asian-American woman playwright to
have a play open on Broadway when
Straight White Men made its official debut
late last month.
Breaking the glass ceiling for Asian-
American woman playwrights was a
special honor for Lee. But that distinction
comes with some pressure.
“It makes me really hope that this show
does well because it puts a little additional
pressure on you because you want that
door to stay open,” Lee said.
N
The playwright is thankful for shows
like Hamilton for helping pave the way, by
proving “shows by people of color,
featuring people of color ... could fill
houses.”
Her father-son drama stars Armie
Hammer, Josh Charles, and Paul
Schneider playing brothers. Stephen
Payne plays their dad. The story takes
place on Christmas Eve as the family
gathers for the holiday, eating Chinese
takeout in their plaid pajamas and
trash-talking one another. But when a
question is raised that they can’t answer,
they are forced to confront their own
identities.
Lee said she was inspired by the idea of
white men feeling marginalized because
they were now being labelled. But she
wanted to show both sides of the issue, and
Chinese leukemia patient livestreams to pay for treatment
Continued from page 5
Some have criticized Dying to Survive
for vilifying the foreign pharmaceutical
company behind the expensive drugs
while absolving Chinese authorities of
responsibility. But such a portrayal may
be necessary to accomplish the unusual
feat of at once being critical and assuaging
censors,
said
prominent
social
commentator Shi Shusi.
Dying to Survive was able to “walk the
thin tightrope of the regulators’ tolerance”
because it addressed serious issues in an
indirect, at times slapstick form, Shi said.
“Capitalists have held our moral values
for ransom in modern Chinese society,” Shi
said. “But this movie shows the desire of
Chinese audiences for high-quality art.”
For Su, the leukemia patient in Harbin,
the movie spelled out her experience with
cancer when one character intoned, “There
is only one disease in this world — the
disease of being poor.”
On her livestreams, Su sometimes
wears a surgical mask. Often, her broad-
casts are interrupted by a nurse or doctor
who has come to check her blood levels.
She thought at first that she was just
stricken with the common cold. One night,
she was walking home from a noodle
restaurant when she suddenly felt dizzy.
By the time she reached her apartment
just a few blocks away, she was so weak
that her cousin had to carry her to their
sixth-floor unit.
Then came the diagnosis, which her
parents had at first attempted to hide. We
were an “average family,” Su said, with a
stable income from her father’s salary as a
public servant.
But it’s not enough to cover her
treatment for the next five years — the
length of time her doctor estimates it will
take for the cancer to be removed from her
system — even when they had already sold
their house and spent nearly 400,000 yuan
($58,979) in the last four months.
So Su downloaded Inke, a popular
Chinese livestreaming app, and started
making videos about life with leukemia.
After six weeks, she had nearly 800 fans —
enough to make up to 400 yuan ($60) at a
time from the virtual gifts her viewers sent
her.
The meager earnings are not yet enough
to make a real dent in her medical bills, Su
said, but livestreaming boosted her
confidence and staved off the loneliness of
being stuck in a hospital room.
“I am sick, but I’m happy,” Su often tells
her viewers. “I know I can be cured.”
let the audience draw its own conclusions.
“I just noticed that you know there was
this sort of historical shift happening in my
lifetime where all of a sudden, straight
white men were suddenly experiencing
what it’s like to get labelled,” she said. “So,
I just got really interested in exploring
that.”
Hammer, whose film roles include Call
Me by Your Name and The Social Network,
is making his Broadway debut in the play.
“This was an amazing chance to really
look at the concept of white privilege and
what it means, and how people in this situ-
ation communicate with each other and
understand each other,” Hammer said.
“Their situation is very bad situation,”
he says. “We Kachin people are very under
the military group oppression all of our life
— that’s why we very little educated.
Because the government, they oppressive
of our education system, of our religion
right, of our human right — everything,
they oppressive. We don’t have freedom to
speak, no freedom to do anything.”
It’s those people that the Kachin people
in North Carolina are trying to help with
their donations.
“The first thing they need is food,” Marip
says. “They don’t have food, and they don’t
have clothes, because when they run away,
they don’t have time to prepare — they just
run. They left everything they have. So
they need food and clothing, and medicine,
too. And they need education to learn.”
So far away, there’s only so much the
Burmese refugees can do to help their
people, Marip says, but they’re doing what
they can.
“We are here by the grace of god,” she
says, “and there’s one thing we can do for
our people. We collect what we can and
send it back to help them.”
Once sidelined, romantic
comedies rise again
Continued from page 8
She compares it to how Moonstruck, which
won three Oscars in 1988, helped get the
genre out of the cynical Annie Hall phase
and pave the way for When Harry Met
Sally and all the classics that hit spawned.
“People have written the romantic
comedy’s obituary over and over and over
again,” Carlson said. “But the genre will
always survive as long as it’s pushed
forward in ways that reflect contemporary
society. And it will also survive as long as
love and relationships elude and fascinate
us — that is, it will never go away.”
PARDON THE DELAYS.
ROLLING OUT A FRESH
HIGHWAY TAKES TIME.
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PDX
IGH POINT, N.C. (AP) — Say
this for the dozen or so refugee
families from Burma now living
in High Point: Their English may be
difficult to understand at times, but not
their hearts.
“In our country, we are like a hopeless
people,” says Mun Ra Marip, who came to
High Point in 2009 after fleeing the
civil-war strife of her homeland. “That’s
why we try to help our people there. We
collect donation money for them. Our
English is poor, but we try.”
Marip, who lives here with her husband
and two daughters, is one of approximately
300 people from Burma’s Kachin ethnic
group now living in North Carolina, most
of whom came to the U.S. to escape the
violence and oppression of their people. In
addition to High Point, they live primarily
in Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, New Bern,
and Mebane. They have come here for a
better life, Marip says, but they have not
forgotten the people they left behind in
Burma — also known as Myanmar —
which includes other family members and
friends.
Last month, a few of the Kachin people
gathered at Marip’s home in High Point to
talk about what’s going on in their
homeland. They spoke of the country’s long
civil war and of blatant human-rights
violations being carried out against their
people, including such atrocities as the
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