I’m excited and grateful to be the recipient of the 2021 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship!
“The winning entry, Michelle Aung Thin’s The Japanese Photographer, crackles with energy and promise. The author’s long-term fascination and in-depth engagement with her subject matter – the historical and ongoing complexity of Yangon/Rangoon – is evident, and the writing is highly accessible, clear and immediate.”
https://www.asauthors.org/news/2021-blake-beckett-trust-scholarship-winner-announced
It’s a bit tricky getting to classrooms at the moment, given the Covid-19 restrictions. So, instead, I thought I could come to you virtually with this video.
How to use the Through my Eyes: Hasina story prompt video
The video is for use in the classroom as a replacement for face-to-face visits. It is around four minutes long. It is fast moving, with lots of images of Myanmar as well as footage of me talking to camera.
In this short video, I tell you something about the book, Hasina, the main characters and the real world events that inspired the story. Finally, I ask students to reflect on the character’s experience and relate it to their own life experiences to riff off the book and write their own story.
The story prompt asks writers to imagine what they would do if enemy soldiers came to their street and they had to save themselves and those close to them. How would they do it?
There are some questions to help them imagine the setting and get students started, including: have you ever had to do something really hard?
Other story questions for setting:
You might like to play the video in class and follow it up with a story writing session. It helps to have read the book, but I give you enough of an outline of the Rohingya situation to work with.
As I say at the end of the video, I’d be delighted to read some students writing and offer some generative feedback. If you’d have students who would like to send their work, please shoot me an email at: michelle.aung.thin@gmail.com
Earlier this month, I was delighted to find out that Crossing the Farak River was nominated for the Canada Writers’ Trust, #drawtheword challenge. Drawings need to be posted by the end of the month – so there is still time!
To enter, all you have to do is:
Take part and you can win books! Challengers, Margaret Atwood, Johnnie Christmas and Jenny Heijun Wills will choose 4 winners. The winning artists get a package of Canadian books and the features book authors receive $500 to help them write another. Take a look at the competition on the the Writers’ Trust website.
The Writers’ Trust promotes Canadian writing and supports Canadian writers with fellowships and prizes. It’s a unique organisation. The only one of its kind in the world.
If I was going to #drawtheword for Crossing the Farak River, I think I would draw the puppets from Isak’s family stall. Puppet shows are a big part of entertainment in Myanmar. In fact, public announcements on how to vote in the 2015 election were done as puppet shows in some of the more remote villages.
Back in 2017, I was lucky to meet master puppeteers at a Yangon University Creative Arts conference. Puppet masters train for years in the intricacies of puppet choreography.
Here’s the ogre that inspired one of the scenes in Crossing the Farak River:
Explore some of the other #drawtheword entries to get inspired.
I started writing this post a few weeks ago. But every day, I have had to start over again.
My new book, Crossing the Farak River (Hasina: Through my eyes in Australia), tells the story of Rohingya crisis from the perspective of a young girl. The book is for readers between 11 and 14 years. Originally, this post was going to be about how a novel can move the reader from pity to compassion and how the lessons I learned during the writing process might be applied in a classroom.
But the Covid-19 pandemic stopped me in my tracks. Suddenly, I wonder whether anyone will care about some faraway conflict when things are so frightening here at home. Around me people are losing their jobs. People are dying from a lack of medical resources. Day to day, things like going to the gym or having a coffee in a café, are now deadly dangerous. No one knows when this will end. Or when we will be back to normal, if we ever get back to normal.
These past weeks, as the world around me changed, I have written about what life is like right here, right now – and what life was like (and continues to be) for the Rohingya. There are many parallels between the two. Yet, I continually asked myself, why should people spare a thought for those suffering in Myanmar when people are suffering right here?
The sociologist Luc Boltanski sets out this exact dilemma in his book, Distant Suffering: Politics, Morality and the Media. He asks, are we only touched by suffering that is close to us? When we are moved by terrible suffering far away, does it prevent us from seeing what is under our noses? How can we even act to help alleviate suffering when there is so much of it? What is the right thing to do?
Questions like these went through my mind when I was asked to write Crossing the Farak River.
Like many of us in 2017, I watched and read coverage of the crisis as 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were forced them from their homes in Rakhine State, Myanmar to hastily erected refugee camps in Bangladesh. It was impossible not to feel pity for their suffering. But writing a book requires more than pity. It requires commitment.
That commitment means time and emotion spent on research. Reading harrowing firsthand accounts of the attacks. Imagining myself in the position of all the characters in the book, from parents forced to abandon children, to children who were suddenly responsible for keeping their families alive, to profiteers making money from the crisis. Even those masked-men tasked with burning people out of their homes.
The deeper I delved, the better I understood the complexity of the situation. That included the emotions that were involved and the histories behind those feelings.
I learned about the difference between pity and compassion. Pity is a very particular response to suffering. It requires a sense of distance to observe suffering. Compassion is different. While pity acknowledges suffering, compassion is defined as pity with help or mercy attached. Compassion allows for action.
Action itself can take many forms. We don’t have to be heroes, parachuting aid in. An effective action can be simply to find out more. This may seem small, yet it is a form of commitment. Once you know something, you can’t unknow it. And that changes your perspective on the world forever.
I’m not saying that knowing as an action will solve a crisis as complex and long-standing as what is happening to the Rohingya. But I do think that compassion can only help bring people closer to finding solutions for intractable problems. It is a form of action that anyone can take.
Our lives, the world we live in, have been ripped open by the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, the shocks we are experiencing now, are the same shocks experienced by Hasina, protagonist of Crossing the Farak River: grief over the loss of the everyday activities that make us who we are; fear for our livelihoods, fear for the survival of those we love, fear for our own survival.
We are all vulnerable to suffering because we are human. Because we are human, we are also all capable of compassion.
