Suspect Solidarities
by Brian Hioe
Not too long ago, I organized an event with a Rohingya activist friend who was passing through Taiwan on vacation. It made me happy to be able to connect her to local Burmese activists; they were mostly ethnically Bamar, the majority ethnicity in Myanmar, or else Chinese Burmese, some of whom had spent all of their lives in Taiwan.
She asked them if they had ever met a Rohingya before. They hadn’t. To care about a people, you have to know someone from there, she said. But I thought to myself, was that true? Heck, I only knew three Rohingya people, all affiliated with the same organization. Yet maybe five years earlier, before the Covid pandemic, I got into a shouting match at a bar with a Burmese student who denied the Rohingya genocide: I hadn’t yet met a single Rohingya person. Still, that hadn’t prevented me from getting upset to the point of getting into a screaming match with a stranger in a bar.
I bring this up not to virtue signal or draw attention to my self-righteous nature, but to puzzle through the fact that I could get so angry on the basis of a somewhat abstract notion of events in Myanmar. I’ve never been there, due to the ongoing civil war, but I’ve organized a number of events to raise awareness and money for victims of the conflict. Someday I hope to go.
Keep us breathing fire!
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