Akyidaw - Aung Myay

Trouble is a joke that will happen in the future...

Trouble is a joke that will happen in the future... It may be true, but that's how I see it. And in the life we've been through, trouble is like a bridge that can't be described. We only worry when we cross this bridge, but when we cross it, everyone is happy.

That's my feeling. Even when I crossed the bridge, knowing in advance that I would still be successful when I got there made my anxiety much less.

Now... let me tell you a little about us... This is the time on the bridge I mentioned earlier. Even if it happens somewhere, take a moment to review the motto that "sadness is a joke that will happen in the future." Think about it a little more. Then decide for yourself whether it is true or not.

Now... let's look into a part of our lives..

I have a little place that I call Aung Myay. My mother bought it for ten thousand baht ten years ago. It is in a new township on the outskirts of Yangon. We spent a part of our lives there. There were about ten of us, including myself. At that time, we were all young people trying to make a living in the art world. Now, we have all found our own places in life. Those who love art are artists and designers, and those who love writing are writers. I think this is also a good thing that my mother bought us for our Aung Myay.

“Our homestead is a small bamboo house, only about twenty feet wide. Inside the house there are only two small bamboo huts. Everyone sleeps on those huts. Except for the two bamboo huts, there is nothing else on the ground. The ground is clay, so it is very slippery. So at night, we sleep on those bamboo huts, tightly packed together. During the day, no one can sleep.

People who paint, people who write, and people who write, all do their work with aplomb.

Then, we would take all the food we had prepared for the day to the city and make it for dinner. Usually, my main job was designing art. I worked hard on that job. For dinner, I was afraid of spending money on eating out (I couldn't eat it, actually), so I cooked it at home. I couldn't eat well. I had to eat a lot. For ten people, fish cost twenty kyats, and the rest, chicken and pork cost fifteen kyats, and I had to eat a simple dish called "Khao Maung Khao Kaew" (a type of rice stew with vegetables and fruits). If it was nutritious, it was delicious, right?

Anyway, we all had our own hopes, so we were so happy to be in that little house like that. We all ate a lot, told jokes, and had a great time.

(Later, when I wrote it, I ended up rewriting many of the jokes I said there. People who read it said it was funny.)

Now, it has been four or five years since we left that little village. Almost everyone who lived in that house moved with us. But when we were bored because of work, we would go to that little village and sleep on our backs all day. The little village was the same as before. The cracked wall was still covered with tarpaulin and the roof was still broken. When we got to that little village, ah.. it reminded us of where we had started our lives and gave us new strength. This is what we called our return to Aung Myay.

When I return to that land, I can still enjoy the sound of pigs squealing from the house next door, the sounds of fights in the neighborhood, the shouts of vendors, and the sounds of animals bleating and bleating, while sleeping on my back under a broken roof. Nothing can replace the Ayurvedic medicine that I have been given.

Hey... I'll tell you from the beginning...

When we arrived at that house, it was the rainy season. They said that we shouldn’t move during the holy month of Waso, but we had to move because we didn’t have any faith, and we had to move because we had to. The reason we had to move was that we couldn’t continue to rent our house. The current house costs more than 3,000. Our painting job doesn’t make us earn 3,000 a month. So, since we couldn’t move from our current house, we moved to the 10,000-tonne plot of land that my mother had bought for us. Unfortunately, the place where we were going to move was in Taung Dagon Seikkan. My mother, who came to visit us for a while, hired a carpenter to build a house worth more than 3,000.

"It's been built and moved in..."

During the two months of building the house, I had to apologize to the current landlord and pay him monthly.

About two months after building the house, I heard that voice from the carpenter. From that time on, we started preparing to move house. We had arguments among ourselves about whether to move house during the day or at night. We all wanted to move house at night. Because we didn’t want people to see our broken belongings. At that time, I had been in Yangon for over five years and had collected two old rice cookers, a steamer that could not cook rice but was still cooking, two mosquito nets that I had bought with great foresight to save for when it was cold, two or three sets of old clothes that I wore every day, two water tanks that I had to carry with me everywhere because I had to buy water (I couldn’t rent a house with water and electricity), other old and new books, and papers.

So, we all wanted to move at night because we didn't want to see those bastards with our own image at the same time.

But that plan was completely ruined when I met the driver who was supposed to pick me up.

"The place where you are being sent is a place where no one can reach and no birds can breed... On the way, we have to cross a large field for two hours... If I have to send you there at night, it will be like digging my own grave... I won't even die..."

He said it with a stern face and a cruel tone.

We couldn't make any arrangements with the driver, so we had to change to daytime.

When we loaded our belongings onto the truck, the driver laughed so hard that he couldn't stand it. He looked at the pots, he looked at our faces, he looked at the mosquito net, he looked at our faces, he laughed so hard that he couldn't hold back his laughter. Then he said,

"You guys... why would I rent a car when I can rent a rickshaw with this stuff..."

Yes. His car is a big Dyna. The things he has are only one pack of personal items more than what I just said. If you count the car, it's not even a fifth of the size of the car.

“Wait a minute...” That was all I had to say. When we all got in the car, the driver was surprised. There wasn’t much luggage, but there were only twelve people. If there were a lot of people in the house, they would come with a bunch of fun people who would come and help move around.

So, they set out to move house with a pile of trash and a bunch of strangers. Not to mention, the day they moved, it rained heavily.