Burma portraits No. 1

Two boys, Pyin u Lwin (formerly Maymyo), Burma (now Myanmar) (June, 2001). 35mm, Kodak Ektachrome slide film, PhotoCD, Photoshop.

This was taken in the countryside on the outskirts of Pyin u Lwin, a former British hill station established and coined Maymyo by the British, who would retreat to there from the heat of Mandalay in central Burma (now Myanmar). I was walking back from a local Shan village when I came upon these two boys. No doubt they were startled, though I can’t remember exactly their reaction. And I must have asked them to stop and allow me to take their photo, though I don’t remember that either. Why is it that I have forgotten such things?

I didn’t notice until much later, when looking at the developed slide, the younger boy’s t-shirt, which reads “Patience, My Ass” and underneath that, “I’m Gonna Kill Something.” This kind of discordance is common enough in Southeast Asian countries, where bales of used clothes are commonly imported from Western countries and sold very cheaply. The irony isn’t so much that local residents end up obliviously wearing statements so at odds with their disposition, but that more often than not, the used clothes that have been imported into a region like Southeast Asia, are in fact re-exported clothes that were originally produced by that very same region.