Born This Way

Episode #640: Eugene Sein’s life has repeatedly been shaped by categories imposed from outside: Karen people cast as dangerous through Myanmar’s Burmanized education system, refugees treated as dependent, and gay identity condemned as sinful inside the Christian community in which he grew up. After leaving Myanmar at thirteen, he spent seven years in Mae La refugee camp, where his Karen language returned and the history he had been taught began to unravel. From the road, the camp could look beautiful beneath the mountains; Eugene refers to it “a pretty prison.”Inside that confinement, he turned education and music into routes outward. At sixteen he was already teaching English; at nineteen he left the camp for the first time to pursue an online diploma, later moving into Karen human rights advocacy, UNHCR communications, and university study in Hong Kong and the Netherlands. Yet achievement also became armor. With no affirming gay figures around him—and after growing up with ridicule, religious condemnation, and fear—his first internet search asked whether being gay was a mental disease. Lady Gaga’s music, first encountered on a pirated CD in the camp, eventually helped him begin accepting himself.Returning to the border after graduate study changed his relationship to service. Mae La’s poverty, widespread displacement Karen State, Myanmar’s post-coup conflict, and years inside advocacy left him increasingly exhausted by problems he could not solve. His UNHCR experience reinforced that unease: refugee repatriation could be presented institutionally as success even when families themselves returned to hardship.In his early thirties, Eugene is now reconsidering the life plan he once built around proving his worth. He still works on refugee rights, but he is giving more space to violin, art, and projects that turn abuse and pain into creative expression. He remains unsure where he can securely call home, and visa and passport questions still follow him. His shift toward himself is therefore not a clean departure from Myanmar’s crisis, but an attempt to keep engaging without making his own life another thing the crisis consumes.

Episode #639: “I don't want this kind of accident to be happening in our new generation.” Htoo Chit Chit, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Education and Development in Thailand, carries that warning from his own years in resistance into more than twenty-five years of work with Myanmar migrants, refugees, displaced people, and children. The 1988 uprising redirected a life he had expected to spend in volleyball, academics, and government service. After supporting the democracy movement, he was arrested and interrogated, later transferred as punishment to southern Myanmar, and eventually crossed into Thailand without proper documents. Thai authorities detained him, and he later spent more than a year as an undocumented migrant worker. Those experiences taught him that political change alone cannot protect people from wage theft, trafficking, legal insecurity, interrupted schooling, or the daily vulnerability of living without documents. They also left him wary of resistance movements reproducing the abuses it opposes. He recalls leaving a revolutionary organization after fighters killed the wife of a suspected informer who had escaped detention. Today he supports collective leadership but argues that fighters and political leaders need stronger education, critical thinking, accountability, and respect for human rights. That principle runs through FED’s work in Thailand and his concern for Myanmar’s post-coup generation. He opposes blanket pressure on younger children to abandon school for political reasons, worries about young adults who have lost years of education, and is developing vocational options for those who cannot spend years pursuing university degrees. In Thailand, schooling and language can also determine whether a migrant can find safer work, understand legal protections, or approach authorities. Htoo Chit Chit sees the same generation being squeezed by war, displacement, weak institutions, precarious migration, and shrinking humanitarian support. His concern is not only whether Myanmar can defeat military rule, but whether young people can reach that future without losing the education, rights, and habits of restraint that any future democracy will require.

Episode #638: Leslie Hover has inherited an extensive archive documenting the life of her father, Robert Hover, an American aerospace engineer who became an early Western teacher of Burmese vipassanā meditation. His journey took him from California’s aerospace industry to Sayagyi U Ba Khin’s International Meditation Centre in Rangoon in 1961, and later to teaching retreats across several continents. Leslie remembers a father whose scientific curiosity shaped both his approach to Buddhist practice and his willingness to investigate experiences beyond conventional explanations. Robert helped establish the Vipassana Newsletter in 1974, connecting a growing international community of meditators. His teaching career changed dramatically in 1977 after a dispute involving an alleged psychic communication from the deceased U Ba Khin. Mother Sayama withdrew institutional support, and Robert continued independently. Leslie possesses recordings and correspondence documenting the aftermath, but the original letter remains missing. “That is one thing that I would really like to know,” she says of its contents. Her father also developed Internal Moving Healing, a method based on concentrated attention to bodily sensations and the removal of what he termed “faint matter.” Leslie learned an early version at seven and continues to attribute extraordinary personal healing experiences to the technique. She also recounts her father’s investigations into psychic phenomena, extraterrestrial spacecraft, and underground civilizations, drawing upon his unpublished writings and her own spiritual experiences. These claims remain distinct from the documented history of his meditation teaching. Leslie regards Robert as her greatest teacher, even though she never attended one of his formal retreats. Her account preserves both her devotion to his memory and the difficulty of establishing the full historical record. Among the cassettes, newsletters, manuscripts, and carefully ordered correspondence, she continues searching for the missing document that might explain why one of U Ba Khin’s early Western teachers was pushed outside the institution he had served.

Episode 637: Anthropologist Céline Coderey's research in Rakhine State examines why people combine biomedical treatment with astrology, Buddhist rituals, traditional medicine, and spirit healing, often pursuing several approaches even when earlier treatments fail. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2020, her book The Power of Remainder explores the relationship between suffering, Buddhist cosmology, and political marginalization. The concept of remainder originates in astrological calculations that reflect the karma inherited from previous lives, believed to influence a person's circumstances and possibilities for action. Coderey extends this understanding to include unresolved illness, marginalized healing traditions, and the consequences of neglected healthcare. These limitations can also create opportunities for further treatment. One case involves Aye Tan Shin, a woman whose persistent abdominal pain led her family from a regional hospital to a monk astrologer, a divination master, and eventually an exorcist. Biomedical drugs, enchanted water, meditation, offerings, and protective objects became part of an overlapping search for relief and explanation. “The illness is a family business,” Coderey observes, emphasizing the financial, emotional, and social responsibilities shared by relatives. Coderey also examines how successive Burmese governments used religious and medical classifications to marginalize practices considered impure or illegitimate, while privileging institutionalized, Burman-centered traditions. Astrology and alchemy could be suppressed despite their continued influence, including among military figures. Meanwhile, inadequate public healthcare and mistrust of medical authorities further constrained people's choices. Rather than treating alternative healing as simply a substitute for unavailable biomedical care, Coderey argues that these practices address questions of meaning, agency, and relationships that patients consider inseparable from illness.

Episode #636: The second episode in this seven-part series explores how Buddhist law and institutions have shaped religious life and continue to intersect with secular legal systems. Historian Peter Alexander, a PhD candidate at York University, discusses his research into the Shwedagon Pagoda Trust. He argues that an institution many people today regard as a longstanding feature of Burmese Buddhism is actually the product of an interaction between pre-colonial kingship, British colonial law, changing economic conditions, and expanding lay participation. By tracing the trust's creation during British rule, Alexander shows how new legal arrangements permanently reshaped the governance of sacred sites and the relationship between religion and political authority. Before the British conquest, responsibility for the Shwedagon rested with the Burmese monarchy. Successive kings renewed both religious merit and political legitimacy by restoring it, while unauthorized repairs could be viewed as challenges to royal authority. That system changed after Britain annexed Lower Burma. When a major restoration was organized in 1869, local Buddhists invited King Mindon to sponsor the replacement of the pagoda's great hti. Although British officials initially viewed this as a personal act of devotion, they soon recognized its political implications and appointed five local leaders to oversee the project. Those men became the first trustees of the Shwedagon, transforming a broad community movement into a permanent body recognized under colonial law. Court reforms in the 1880s refined this model, which was then replicated across Burma as the standard system for administering major Buddhist monuments. Alexander argues that these changes reflected wider transformations under colonial rule. Monetization, printing, and expanding lay participation enabled new forms of Buddhist practice, while institutions such as the pagoda trusts gradually came to appear as natural features of Burmese Buddhism even though they had colonial origins. He also notes that questions surrounding trustee accountability, political influence, and the relationship between religious institutions and state power have persisted from the colonial era to the present. His ongoing research explores how English trust law intersects with Buddhist ideas of merit, highlighting the ways religious practice continually evolves within changing historical, political, and social conditions.

Episode #635: “The thing that works the best is always to humanize the numbers,” says Australian journalist Libby Hogan. That principle has emerged from more than a decade of trying to report Myanmar without reducing the country either to a democratic success story or to whichever crisis temporarily commands international attention. Hogan first encountered Myanmar as a backpacker before the NLD’s 2015 electoral victory, then returned through an internship with the Democratic Voice of Burma that became years of reporting during the country’s fragile political opening. The limits of that opening became impossible to ignore during the violence against the Rohingya. Restricted access to Rakhine State complicated reporting while Facebook filled with hate speech and misinformation. From Yangon, Hogan watched international images of mass displacement alongside a far more muted response around her, forcing difficult questions about prejudice, fear, restrictions and the responsibilities of local journalism. International coverage created another problem: editors initially wanted almost nothing except Rohingya stories, then gradually lost interest even as the crisis continued. Now working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Hogan has to persuade an audience thousands of kilometers away to keep caring about Myanmar. That can mean telling the story of menstrual pads stopped at a military checkpoint because they might be used as bandages, or documenting scam compounds along the Thai-Myanmar border where trafficking victims are forced to defraud strangers online. Inside one raided compound, Shunda Park, investigators found thousands of SIM cards, photographs used for face-swapping, scripts for cultivating romance-scam victims, rows of computers and isolation cells for workers who failed to meet quotas. Yet even these large compounds are changing. Operations are appearing deeper inside Myanmar and becoming smaller, more mobile and harder to observe. Hogan is still pursuing the problem that first drew her to the country: finding ways to make hidden realities visible when both access and international attention keep narrowing.

Episode #634: Christopher Titmuss has spent more than fifty years teaching Buddhist insight meditation, yet he warns that the very practices intended to bring liberation can become sources of attachment. Having trained as a monk in Thailand and India before helping establish Western insight meditation institutions, he has witnessed how spiritual traditions can gradually elevate particular teachers, methods, and organizational forms into unquestioned authorities. “If you totally identify with one teacher, one form, one method, one technique, one language, or whatever, this might be imprisoning and not liberating,” he cautions. His understanding developed through intensive monastic practice under Ajahn Dhammadharo, the teachings of Ajahn Buddhadāsa, and encounters with spiritual traditions throughout India. His experience with S. N. Goenka reinforced both his appreciation for disciplined meditation and his concern about claims of exclusive authority over Vipassanā. For Titmuss, no single form can contain the full possibilities of the Dhamma. That conviction carries ethical consequences. Myanmar’s continuing suffering under military violence highlights the responsibility of Buddhist practitioners to confront harm rather than retreat into private spiritual cultivation. Titmuss argues for unwavering commitment to nonviolence without identifying with political factions, while distinguishing moral clarity from anger and self-righteousness. He also questions whether secular mindfulness, despite its demonstrated benefits, has neglected the explicit ethical commitments found in Buddhist teachings. His critique extends to meditation itself. Present-moment awareness is useful, but fixation on the here and now can obscure the causes of suffering and the consequences of present actions. Retreats likewise offer valuable training without encompassing the speech, livelihood, relationships, and responsibilities that occupy daily life. Drawing on his experiences with death contemplation and the Buddhist understanding of non-self, Titmuss continues to examine how a path intended to dissolve attachment can remain free of attachment to its own methods.

Episode #633: “We’re in the dreams-come-true business.” Barry Broman uses that line to explain the human side of espionage, but it also captures the path that took him from teenage photojournalism in Thailand to combat service in Vietnam, twenty-five years in the CIA’s clandestine service, and eventually the station chief’s office in Rangoon. His career was built around access: finding people, earning trust, entering closed places, and learning what could not be understood from a distance. Broman first reached Thailand in 1962, when he left college for a year and became an Associated Press stringer in Bangkok. He later studied Southeast Asia and Thai, served as a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam, and entered the CIA only fifteen days after leaving the Corps. In the Agency, he made his reputation as a recruiter of human sources, a method that later shaped his work on Burma and the Golden Triangle. As chief of station in Rangoon from 1994 to 1996, Broman worked in a country where U.S. relations with the military government were poor but narcotics cooperation remained possible. He helped pursue intelligence against Khun Sa’s heroin network, defended working relationships with Burmese military officials, and drew a sharp distinction between corruption and state-directed trafficking. He rejects claims that the CIA itself participated in the regional drug trade, while acknowledging that later developments in the borderlands extend beyond the period he knew firsthand. After retiring, Broman kept returning to Burma with cameras rather than classified reporting, producing books and documentaries on the country’s rivers, architecture, ethnic communities, narcotics economy, and politics. One film took him to Aung San Suu Kyi under surveillance; another brought him into Wa territory. Now the war has shut down many routes he once traveled along the Irrawaddy, Chindwin, and Andaman coast. For a career built on going closer, Burma has again become a place where access itself is uncertain.

Episode #632: “I was not political at all until 1988,” says Dr. Maung Maung Myint, the National Unity Government’s (NUG) representative to Norway. He describes how dictatorship, exile, and decades of activism have shaped his conviction that Myanmar’s military regime will eventually fall. Born in 1958, he grew up under military rule. After General Ne Win’s 1962 coup, his family’s home and business were seized. He became a dentist in 1983, but the 1988 uprising changed everything. Angered by poverty, propaganda, and the killing of two students, he led a student union, organized protests, and published an underground newsletter. After the crackdown, he was sentenced in absentia to four years in prison; in 1989, he fled to Norway. In exile, he joined the Norwegian Burma Committee (NBC), helped establish the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), and later worked for Radio Free Asia (RFA). He credits Norway’s early support, including its hosting of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB) and funding of DVB, as “the biggest thing that happened for us.” He appreciates Norway’s post-coup policies, in particular its shift to bypassing the junta and funding local civil society directly for humanitarian needs. Maung Maung Myint feels that today’s opposition to the military is more hopeful and far more committed than during the transition period, when the military was able to entrench its influence in government. Unlike in the past, it no longer revolves around a single figure such as Aung San Suu Kyi. Instead, a younger generation is taking a leading role, with broader participation from ethnic minorities in a genuinely inclusive way. This, he says, gives him hope. Despite decades in exile, his resolve remains firm: “We just have to keep going. Because this is the only way. We cannot give up.”

Episode #631: “Community for me is an other-making category.” Judith Beyer, a legal and political anthropologist and the author of Rethinking Community in Myanmar, uses an ordinary word to expose a long political inheritance. Her fieldwork in Yangon began with Muslim and Hindu individuals who presented themselves to an outsider first and foremost as members of ethno-religious communities. But the closer she looked, and the more acquainted she became with these individuals, the less stable this self-categorization became. In her book, Beyer traces the category back through British colonial rule, when law, land grants, religious property, and trusteeship helped organize migrants into corporate ethno-religious groups. Those arrangements survived independence and still shape property, personal-status law, and the way minorities are recognized by the state and present themselves to others. Yet the same temples and mosques that embody these classifications also contain relations that exceed them. For example, at the Mahapeinne Temple in Yangon, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, trustees, priests, workers, and worshippers can occupy the same space without becoming one coherent community. In the life of Mukhtaar Bhai,a Muslim of Shia identity, class, skin color, intermarriage, and his Sunni business relationships repeatedly cross the lines that supposedly define him. The danger of fixed belonging becomes clearest in Beyer’s discussion of the Rohingya, whom she places at the far end of Myanmar’s long practice of making an excluded other. After the attempted military coup of 2021, the same problem follows people into exile. Beyer now prepares country-of-origin reports for British asylum cases, where courts may question whether someone is genuinely Rohingya or stateless. Rather than treating identity as an essence to be verified, she examines how states categorize people and what those classifications do to their lives. She has not returned to Myanmar since the attempted coup because visiting her interlocutors could endanger them. The book grew from relationships she once expected to continue in person; now many of those relationships came to an end due to death or are separated by exile. While the categories she set out to question keep determining who can belong, who can be protected, and who can return.