MAUNG Day

"Children anywhere like to imagine there is rainbow somewhere and at the end of it, a gold pot full of chocolate and sweets.

Most of my childhood took place in the 80s and the 90s. I was born at a time when Myanmar was ruled under General Ne Win whose idea of the Burmese Way to Socialism put the country under immense economic pressure, poverty, and isolation. It was also the time when the first few TVs arrived in my neighborhood. One of them belonged to my aunt. TV put me under its spell immediately and I went to my aunt’s place every day. On TV, I saw chocolate bars, ice cream, and sweets especially in the foreign programs. I wanted them all. But at a time when foreign imports were illegal, chocolate was hard to find, especially for a child living in a remote new town established by Ne Win’s government. There were a few times I received some foreign sweets and chocolate from one of my uncles who worked at Inya Lake Hotel; I was so happy and ate them with relish. In these painting and drawings, I am remembering scenes from my childhood that are told by silhouette-like human figures and the stories unfold on the bodies of those human figures. What you will see are a group of children watching TV that is physically attached to the neck of an adult sitting face-to-face, and on their bodies are a series of scenes from my childhood and from the tales I read and was taught. As a child, I was constantly taught to be good and asked to read tales with moral lessons, but what I lived through even as a child was an experience of contradictions and hypocrisy manifested in the society in various ways.

Reconnecting dots with chocolate again, most chocolate I could have when I was young was oily cheap stuff and there were no local chocolate makers. But as I grew up, I started to see real chocolate at shops and over the past few decades, the products of a number of foreign chocolate brands could be found at local stores and marts, but still no local products. But then a while ago, I started to notice a local brand called Ananda in some stores and I have become a fan since. I was one of those children who dream of gold pots full of chocolate bars, and when I started working as a literary translator in the early 2000s, my first interest was children’s fiction, and my first translation was Charlie and Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl."