why i cry at seemingly random times
So yesterday, I watched a movie and at one point burst into tears.
The movie was actually a documentary called “Total Denial.” It detailed the myriad contrasting stories of the people involved in the building of the Unocal/Total oil pipeline through Burma, in which the Burmese military, having agreed to provide security for the project, used it as an excuse to perpetrate human rights atrocities against the ethnic Karen living in the area; and the lawsuit that the non-profit EarthRights International filed in American courts, to hold Unocal responsible for the crimes against humanity committed abroad under their auspices.
Though a bit melodramatic at times and not very balanced, the documentary was quite powerful. There were lots of images of Karen villagers sifting through the ashes of what had once been their homes; gangrenous lesions on the shoulders and backs of people press-ganged into forced labor to build the pipeline; incredibly dirty and malnourished children in refugee camps.
These images made me angry and sad. All the while, though, I was aware of how detached I was from it all. I’m not a Karen villager; I’m an American, pre-med, with a college degree and a master’s. While I can curse the Burmese military on the behalf of the Karen, I can’t, at least at this point, feel a deep and personal connection from watching them in a documentary.
What did choke me up was an interview with a Karen human rights activist named Ka Hsaw Wa. Like so many of the people my parents and I are friends with, both in the U.S. and Thailand, he was a product of the 1988 pro-democracy, anti-government student riots in Rangoon. After the riots, along with many of the other student dissidents, he fled into the jungle, walking for days, living in damp, mosquito-infested tents, being taught to shoot and fight by the ethnic insurgent guerrillas.
In the interview, he talked about his childhood. “I was an amazing boy,” he joked. He recounted how he had two pairs of Lee jeans and two teeshirts from America - one with a skull and crossbones, one with some other vaguely heavy metal, vaguely silly image - and he wore them all the time. He also apparently had both ears pierced, one of which had a dangling pig’s fang attached to it. “I went to university to study economics,” he said. “Because I wanted to be a businessman and I wanted to be rich.”
What pulled him into the pro-democracy movement was, in the beginning, not any sort of high and mighty ideals. He had a friend who was wanted by the SPDC. The SPDC interrogated Ka Hsaw Wa about the whereabouts of his friend. Ultimately, they tortured him. After that, everything changed.
For me, Ka Hsaw Wa’s story was like déjà vu. I had one friend in Thailand, Ko WM, who thought it was amusing that I was a chemistry major and intending to go to graduate school. Before the ’88 riots, Ko WM had been a stereotypically anal-retentive pre-med, from a well-off, urban family. Burmese university admissions operate on the British system, whereby your eligibility into certain pre-professional schools - medicine, engineering, law - is based on the scores you take on matriculation exams during high school. Ko WM spent high school with his nose buried in books, his focus on the matric exams. When he finally got to medical school, he did the same thing, which was study, study, study.
Ko WM wasn’t really sure why he got involved in the pro-democracy movement. He told me that it was almost on a lark: all his friends were doing it, it was the trendy thing to do. But then he saw kids his age, his fellow students, gunned down by soldiers during the ’88 riots. And thus he abandoned his dream of getting a medical degree to become an activist and organizer. Like Ka Hsaw Wa, he fled into the jungle and ultimately to Thailand when it became too dangerous for him to stay in Rangoon. When I saw him, he hadn’t seen his parents in almost 20 years.
What is the point of my writing all these stories? I’ve been trying to think more critically about why certain things make me cry. For example, when I saw Romeo Dallaire speak at Harvard; or when I watched “Hotel Rwanda.” I mean, yeah, the Rwandan genocide was fucking terrible; but something about the stories of Dallaire and Paul Rusesbagina really set me off.
To my surprise, about a week ago, I was sitting in my MCAT class and started crying. The day’s lesson was a workshop on the medical school personal statement. The teacher put up personal statements by real students, alumni of this particular MCAT prep program. And many of them were very well-written; one woman talked about the cardiology research she did, another talked about how her background in Slavic literature and chemistry made her excited, on many levels, about doing medicine.
The one that I cried about was written by a kid who started off saying that he had never been attached to the idea of being a doctor until he went on a vacation to a remote beach, during the time he was doing an internship in Cambodia. While on this beach, he saw a father pull an 8 year old boy from the ocean. The boy was unconscious. The personal-statement-writer tried to revive the boy, then rode with the family through back roads in a rickety jeep to get to the nearest hospital. When they got there, the hospital was closed: it was a holiday, and thus short-staffed. The boy ended up dying. The writer wrote that at that moment, he realized he wanted to be a doctor; because only then would he have the power to help reform fucked-up healthcare systems all over the world.
So I think that what sets me off in these stories is the very ordinariness of the people involved. They weren’t born intending to be heroes. They were ordinary people, going about their lives, until they found themselves in extraordinary, horrific situations. And in those situations, they decided to give up the world they knew - their comfortable lives, their easy paths to success - and stand up for what they believed in.
I look at my friends and peers and at myself, and I try to think what we would do in such extraordinary situations. For example, the undergrads in the Burmese students’ association, who are unilaterally pre-med with the exception of two mechanical engineers - what would have happened if they had been born fifteen years earlier and had been in school in Burma in 1988?
And what would I do? It’s easy for me to say that, given the right circumstances, I would do something heroic for what I believe in. There have been times - pretty frequent, actually - that I thought that, if the situation came to it, I would die for certain ideals - for example, for the dismantling of the dictatorship in Burma and the formation of a democratic, accountable, and transparent government.
But on a really gut-instinct level, there are certain things that, trivial though they may seem, I fear losing more than life. For example, that I’m pretty and boys like me. That (with the exception of graduate school quantum mechanics) I do well in school and tend to impress teachers and various fellowship and admissions committees. That I have a comfy bed, the convenience of a modern toilet, and a hot shower every morning. In some ways, facing the prospect of a future of loneliness and poverty, of being overlooked and scorned by the people around me, is much more terrifying than death. If I suddenly found myself in a situation in which I had to choose between these things and my sense of morality and what is right, would I have the courage to choose what's right?
The movie was actually a documentary called “Total Denial.” It detailed the myriad contrasting stories of the people involved in the building of the Unocal/Total oil pipeline through Burma, in which the Burmese military, having agreed to provide security for the project, used it as an excuse to perpetrate human rights atrocities against the ethnic Karen living in the area; and the lawsuit that the non-profit EarthRights International filed in American courts, to hold Unocal responsible for the crimes against humanity committed abroad under their auspices.
Though a bit melodramatic at times and not very balanced, the documentary was quite powerful. There were lots of images of Karen villagers sifting through the ashes of what had once been their homes; gangrenous lesions on the shoulders and backs of people press-ganged into forced labor to build the pipeline; incredibly dirty and malnourished children in refugee camps.
These images made me angry and sad. All the while, though, I was aware of how detached I was from it all. I’m not a Karen villager; I’m an American, pre-med, with a college degree and a master’s. While I can curse the Burmese military on the behalf of the Karen, I can’t, at least at this point, feel a deep and personal connection from watching them in a documentary.
What did choke me up was an interview with a Karen human rights activist named Ka Hsaw Wa. Like so many of the people my parents and I are friends with, both in the U.S. and Thailand, he was a product of the 1988 pro-democracy, anti-government student riots in Rangoon. After the riots, along with many of the other student dissidents, he fled into the jungle, walking for days, living in damp, mosquito-infested tents, being taught to shoot and fight by the ethnic insurgent guerrillas.
In the interview, he talked about his childhood. “I was an amazing boy,” he joked. He recounted how he had two pairs of Lee jeans and two teeshirts from America - one with a skull and crossbones, one with some other vaguely heavy metal, vaguely silly image - and he wore them all the time. He also apparently had both ears pierced, one of which had a dangling pig’s fang attached to it. “I went to university to study economics,” he said. “Because I wanted to be a businessman and I wanted to be rich.”
What pulled him into the pro-democracy movement was, in the beginning, not any sort of high and mighty ideals. He had a friend who was wanted by the SPDC. The SPDC interrogated Ka Hsaw Wa about the whereabouts of his friend. Ultimately, they tortured him. After that, everything changed.
For me, Ka Hsaw Wa’s story was like déjà vu. I had one friend in Thailand, Ko WM, who thought it was amusing that I was a chemistry major and intending to go to graduate school. Before the ’88 riots, Ko WM had been a stereotypically anal-retentive pre-med, from a well-off, urban family. Burmese university admissions operate on the British system, whereby your eligibility into certain pre-professional schools - medicine, engineering, law - is based on the scores you take on matriculation exams during high school. Ko WM spent high school with his nose buried in books, his focus on the matric exams. When he finally got to medical school, he did the same thing, which was study, study, study.
Ko WM wasn’t really sure why he got involved in the pro-democracy movement. He told me that it was almost on a lark: all his friends were doing it, it was the trendy thing to do. But then he saw kids his age, his fellow students, gunned down by soldiers during the ’88 riots. And thus he abandoned his dream of getting a medical degree to become an activist and organizer. Like Ka Hsaw Wa, he fled into the jungle and ultimately to Thailand when it became too dangerous for him to stay in Rangoon. When I saw him, he hadn’t seen his parents in almost 20 years.
What is the point of my writing all these stories? I’ve been trying to think more critically about why certain things make me cry. For example, when I saw Romeo Dallaire speak at Harvard; or when I watched “Hotel Rwanda.” I mean, yeah, the Rwandan genocide was fucking terrible; but something about the stories of Dallaire and Paul Rusesbagina really set me off.
To my surprise, about a week ago, I was sitting in my MCAT class and started crying. The day’s lesson was a workshop on the medical school personal statement. The teacher put up personal statements by real students, alumni of this particular MCAT prep program. And many of them were very well-written; one woman talked about the cardiology research she did, another talked about how her background in Slavic literature and chemistry made her excited, on many levels, about doing medicine.
The one that I cried about was written by a kid who started off saying that he had never been attached to the idea of being a doctor until he went on a vacation to a remote beach, during the time he was doing an internship in Cambodia. While on this beach, he saw a father pull an 8 year old boy from the ocean. The boy was unconscious. The personal-statement-writer tried to revive the boy, then rode with the family through back roads in a rickety jeep to get to the nearest hospital. When they got there, the hospital was closed: it was a holiday, and thus short-staffed. The boy ended up dying. The writer wrote that at that moment, he realized he wanted to be a doctor; because only then would he have the power to help reform fucked-up healthcare systems all over the world.
So I think that what sets me off in these stories is the very ordinariness of the people involved. They weren’t born intending to be heroes. They were ordinary people, going about their lives, until they found themselves in extraordinary, horrific situations. And in those situations, they decided to give up the world they knew - their comfortable lives, their easy paths to success - and stand up for what they believed in.
I look at my friends and peers and at myself, and I try to think what we would do in such extraordinary situations. For example, the undergrads in the Burmese students’ association, who are unilaterally pre-med with the exception of two mechanical engineers - what would have happened if they had been born fifteen years earlier and had been in school in Burma in 1988?
And what would I do? It’s easy for me to say that, given the right circumstances, I would do something heroic for what I believe in. There have been times - pretty frequent, actually - that I thought that, if the situation came to it, I would die for certain ideals - for example, for the dismantling of the dictatorship in Burma and the formation of a democratic, accountable, and transparent government.
But on a really gut-instinct level, there are certain things that, trivial though they may seem, I fear losing more than life. For example, that I’m pretty and boys like me. That (with the exception of graduate school quantum mechanics) I do well in school and tend to impress teachers and various fellowship and admissions committees. That I have a comfy bed, the convenience of a modern toilet, and a hot shower every morning. In some ways, facing the prospect of a future of loneliness and poverty, of being overlooked and scorned by the people around me, is much more terrifying than death. If I suddenly found myself in a situation in which I had to choose between these things and my sense of morality and what is right, would I have the courage to choose what's right?