"The Erasure of Places and the Re-siting of Empire in Wendy Law-Yone's The Coffin Tree."

Rachel Lee

Note: This article originally appeared in Cultural Critique 35 (Winter 1996-97): 149-78.

For some while now, Asian American Studies has been engaged in a frenzy of self-critique with regard to the changing parameters of the field. Critics from a wide range of disciplines have chastised each other for having taken the experiences of East Asian Americans (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) as paradigmatic for the whole of Asian America, thereby marginalizing the distinctive cultures of South Asian and Southeast Asian settlers in the U.S. More recently, the litany of "blindspots" has grown with Asian American Studies coming under fire for having neglected its affinities to area studies, Asian studies, Third World/postcolonial studies, and materialist critiques of global capital (Mazumdar, Hu-DeHart, Campomanes). One unintended consequence of what Sau-ling Wong has called the "denationalization" of Asian American Studies has been a disavowal of location—or placedness—and preference for the heralding of transient and transnational aspects of subjectivity and collective identity.

While I advocate the broader contextualization of Asian American political identities in the global struggle, I would also warn against a facile dismissal of paradigms of rootedness, territorial/national identity, and other geocultural factors of political identity. In my view, an attention to exile and diaspora—to the international and transnational dimensions of Asian American subjectivity—must be coupled with a rigorous scrutiny of the meanings of locations and the tactical—even temporary—choices of settlement that constitute Asian Americans as dislocated subjects. To illustrate the importance of such an attention to place and location in Asian American literature, I turn to a text that has been read predominantly without regard to its geopolitical nuances—Wendy Law-Yone's The Coffin Tree. Contemporary reviews of the novel, published in 1983, described The Coffin Tree as a "[book] about madness" rather than an Asian American novel or a portrait of Burmese immigration to the U.S (Milton, 12). In fact, critics championed the work precisely for its moving beyond its geopolitical contexts to portray a "cosmic" sense of dislocation (Milton, 12). I see such unsituated readings as symptomatic of an ongoing project of empire that in the past worked through the notion of the "universal" subject but which is now exerting itself through the nomadic, diasporic, nonterritorial subject. It is my argument that the "will to placelessness" underlying this latter school of thinking mimics an ideology of imperialism, even though some of the most ardent spokespersons for nonterritorial, nomadic epistemologies have aligned themselves explicitly with an anti-imperialist project.

Through my reading of Law Yone's novel, I explore how white liberal reviewers have a stake in obscuring the specificities of place in order to produce dislocated meanings. If Law-Yone's novel concerns itself with a madness that is "universal" rather than specific to Burmese refugees, one need not probe into either its narrative of political torture or its exposé on the role of Western institutions—e.g., the mission school, the insane asylum—in producing cultural difference as sign of mental instability. I also interrogate the way in which spatial tropes, such as remoteness and proximity, tellingly rank various characters' perspectives in the novel. Through this rhetoric of space one can read a semiotics of value—i.e., what is near has normative value, what is remote has an alien, degraded value. This semiotics of space is succinctly expressed by Law-Yone's first-person narrator who declares that her step-brother Shan comes "from a world too remote for belief" (115). This tendency to determine another person's credit worthiness on the basis of spatial distance is indicative of a larger pattern of (geopolitically) privileged subjects' not seeing, or disbelieving, acts of cruelty in the peripheral, grounded world. Law-Yone's text depicts the manner in which disbelieving buttresses the empire of the Western cartographic "eye/I"—the core, transcendent perspective that appears disembodied and detached from geographic grounds.¹ In contrast to such topographic mapping strategies, I produce an alternative schematic of space from the ground up.² Through this alternative schematic, I clarify the sited character of transnational identities.

Geopolitical Bodies

The Coffin Tree, told from the first person perspective of a Burmese woman, concerns the narrator's and her half-brother's experiences in Rangoon and the U.S. Sharing the same patrilineage, the narrator and her brother Shan come from otherwise distinct worlds. A native of the Hill States, Shan is the bastard son of a "hilltribe girl" from the "rebel stronghold in the border region of the northeast" (18). What Law-Yone terms the "Hill States" is clearly a transposition of the Shan States: thirty-four principalities of Thai (Siamese) descendants living in the northeastern area of Burma. "Shan," "Siam," and "Assam" all derive from the same root word meaning "free people" (Klein, 70), an especially evocative appellation given the history of Shan peoples' struggle for political and territorial autonomy from the Rangoon-based Burman government.³ In naming Shan after his hometown, Law-Yone symbolically merges him with all Shan peoples as well as with other minority groups of Burma who have sought political autonomy from Burman hegemony. Thus, Shan represents at once the individual—the narrator's half-brother—, the collective Shan nation, as well as the freedom-seeking minority factions that comprise Burma (Myanmar) in the late-twentieth century. ⁴

In contrast to the political geography emphasized by Shan's name, the unnamed narrator appears to fall outside such politically localized interpretation; her perspective in essence serves as a bridge perspective for readers outside the theater of Shan-Burman relations. Though the narrator remains geographically unnamed, she is not altogether placeless. Whereas Shan is the bastard son of a "hilltribe girl," the narrator is the offspring of Father's "official wife" who lives in the capital city, Rangoon (18). When not attending a Catholic boarding school, the narrator resides at a walled compound fortified against vagrants and madmen. Relatively innocent of political knowledge, the narrator provides the uninformed reader with an easily adoptable alter-ego.

The different dispositions of Shan and the narrator with regard to place—already suggested through their respective naming and unnaming—emerges further in their distinct reactions to emigration. After the two siblings move to the U.S., it becomes harder and harder for Shan to adapt to the "reality" of American socioeconomics. Midway through the book, Shan not only succumbs to mental "paranoia" but also contracts malaria and finally dies from a gastrointestinal crisis. Though physically undone by successive migrations, Shan ideologically resists these dislocations through his nostalgia for the hills. The narrator, on the other hand, more readily adapts to the unfamiliar geographies she encounters. For instance, with relative ease, she masters new technologies of movement and exchange by learning to drive, a marked contrast to Shan's wariness of car mechanics, and in her job as a bank teller, again contrasted by Shan's perpetual unemployment. After Shan's death, the narrator falls into a depression, and the remainder of the novel focuses on the narrator's prolonged recovery at a mental institution.

Because the narrative unfolds from the nameless narrator's perspective—and not from Shan's, the text is susceptible to apolitical, dislocated readings. For instance, Edith Milton, though aware of the geographic and historical specificity of the novel, dismisses its importance, declaring "the novel's triumph [in making] cogent...a sense of ubiquitous unreason" (12). In a similar move, James Breslin cites the disparate cultural geographies traversed in the novel only to discount their relevance. He claims that "far deeper than [the] geographic dislocations" of Law-Yone's protagonists "lies the foreignness within, the uncharted terrain of the family romance where father and daughter, brother and sister stumble their way toward sanity or madness....Out of the exotic comes the familiar, and out of the complex and the convoluted issues the simple" (97). Interestingly, Breslin would disassociate the psychological effects of "dislocation" from the material condition of being dislocated.⁵ In this way, all of "us," presumably his mostly white, middle-class audience, can familiarize "ourselves" with the psychic alienation and split consciousness that no longer pertain to the refugee—if they ever did. In other words, under the discourse of the "universal" subject, to which Breslin and Milton contribute, double consciousness and a sense of dislocation belong firstly to the modern subject, with the refugee only entering into that modern and now postmodern stage with his/her emigration to the First World. This critical attention to dislocation, then, reflects a desire to understand an "alien" culture only insofar as the Asian refugee's experience can be said to mirror or mimic "our" own.

In Milton's and Breslin's assessment then, literary merit resides in "universal" themes that go "beyond" both the locus of Burma and the sub-genre of immigrant fiction. One might conjecture, then, that both critics value The Coffin Tree's depiction of a "ubiquitous unreason" precisely because it assures the reviewers of the universality of Western preoccupations. To read for the ethnic and locational specificity of "madness" in the novel is to resist the recentering of the Western subject. Such resistance involves interrogating the "politics of placelessness" wherein locational and temporal markers that render this story specifically about the traumatic dislocation of Asian refugees are deemed peripheral to readers' assessments of value.

Even more troubling though is the covert reprisal of the "politics of placelessness" in certain theories of transnationalism. Arjun Appadurai, for instance, claims that "where soil and place were once the key to the linkage of territorial affiliation with state monopoly of the means of violence, key identities and identifications now only partially revolve around the realities and images of place" (413-4). He declares "the birth of a variety of complex, postnational social formations.... Chinese from Hong Kong buying real estate in Vancouver, Gujarati traders from Uganda opening motels in New Jersey...[are] examples of a new sort of world in which diaspora is the order of things and settled ways of life are increasingly hard to find" (420, 424). Good reasons underlie Appadurai's emphasis on a transnational context. For instance, Masao Miyoshi meticulously documents the "fall" of the nation-state and the concomitant "rise" of the transnational corporation as principle organizer of identity and public policy in the late-twentieth century (728-36). Though Appadurai correctly identifies the increasing permeability of political boundaries and the multiplication of geographic affiliations, his advocacy of "nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance" leads him to overstate the declining relevance of place as constitutive of identity (418). Wanting to disavow violence enacted in the name of territorial nationalisms, Appadurai champions the example of "oppressed minorities who have suffered displacement and forced diaspora without articulating a strong wish for a nation-state of their own" (418). Yet in doing so, he mystifies the places of residence and institutional locations already occupied by these displaced groups.

Put another way, Appadurai's polemic against the territorial component of identity obscures the way in which certain "nonterritorial, postnational groups" are sufficiently ensconced within the power structures of existing nations, thereby rendering non-territoriality a literally viable option for themselves. Such groups stand in contrast to those migrants who cannot afford to disavow safe spaces in which to live. He, thus, elides differences between "elite cosmopolitan" and "disenfranchised refugee" vectors of nonterritorial, postnational identities. Even more problematically, Appadurai assumes a moral highground when speaking for disenfranchised refugees; he alludes to their need for a language to speak their "forced" nonterritorial status and by association argues the political urgency of constructing a similar language for elite cosmopolitan exiles. ⁶

One perhaps unintended consequence of material pressures to reorder perception and interpretation through transnational epistemologies has been a willful blindness to the ways in which diasporic identities are also "sited," even if those sites fall out of national categorization. In other words, it might be valuable to construct alternative paradigms of space that are political—attuned to the effects of power—yet not restricted by the codes of traditional (topographic) mapping strategies. Such an alternate cartography must be flexible enough to accommodate the increasing porosity of national political boundaries, yet at the same time preserve a way of speaking about the locations of individuals and hence acknowledge the distinctions amongst transnational migrants. ⁷ As Oscar Campomanes observes, "the seasonal and highly contingent movements of a Mexican worker across the border are not the same as those exhilarating flights across oceanic distances of a Brahmin and cosmopolitan professor on a conference junket" (4-5). ⁸ Clearly, we need to develop better methods of mapping the heterogeneity within diasporic groups and amongst the peripheralized regions from whence they come. Just as the "Third World" was never an undifferentiated mass, neither is the diaspora comprised of homogeneous border-crossings subjects. The alternative cartography I am proposing attempts to reorient our perceptions of space in order to account better for those differences amongst exiles, in effect those that Law-Yone takes as her subject. I hope that this alternative mapping might generate other cartographies that help us to perceive and account for the locations of identities even in a transnational context of global capital and exchange. ⁹

Modalities of Space

Not easily overlooked, even by the casual reviewer, is the vast number of locations through which the protagonists in the novel travel. The Coffin Tree effectively presents not only the two Burmese sites of the Shan hills and Rangoon (itself split into Thieves' Market and the residential area of the family home) but also the variegated sites of urban-rich, urban-poor and rural America. Multiple-sited experience and the process of migration inform the protagonists' sense of habitation—"home" is always precarious, always prey to the vagaries of another forced relocation.

While various sites in the narrative are differentiated by degree of urbanization as well as national and local labels, virtually all of the text's spaces appear unsafe/unstable—either providing little in the way of shelter or offering "security" undergirded by violence. It is my argument then that the "choice" of places presented to the characters exists as the option between "safe" prisons and perilous "free" spaces. The quotation marks here point to the instability of these categories, which conceptually bleed into each other and contrast greatly topographic, geopolitical labels whose purpose is to delineate and to separate clearly one land mass from another.¹⁰

Though not locked in a simple dichotomy, the narrator begins as the inhabitant of "safe" prisons and Shan the vagrant of "free" space; their association with these modalities transforms under their successive migrations. Though America initially appears a third possibility—a space both free and safe, Shan's and the narrator's lived experience in various U.S. cities suggests its more appropriate categorization as another dystopic modality: one of free spaces under surveillance. Underscoring the minutiae of power and politics located in space, these three categories—"safe" prisons, perilous "free" spaces and free spaces under surveillance—suggest an alternative mapping of the novel's sites, by expanding the reader's traditionally national, regional, or global view of locations to a consideration of buildings, institutions, and the peripheral sites of cites within cities or pockets of inhabitation eclipsed by more powerful neighbors. Therefore, while recognizing the geopolitical area which topographically locates a particular place, I will focus upon a microphysics of the inhabitants' experience of places like the mental asylum, the convent, the mission school, the Rangoon compound, and the (Shan) hills. My exploration of these places deliberately counters a teleology of development from natural, underdeveloped sites to civilized urban spaces. In fact, I begin with the mental asylum, 3 East, the most overtly bounded yet most ambiguously located place in the novel.

3 East simultaneously evokes an address, a wing of a building and a cardinal direction. One might assume that the asylum lies somewhere in Illinois, since this is where the narrator attempts suicide; yet, 3 East—a partial address—resists placement in the "real" or topographically mapped world. The narrator describes the asylum as a "hiatus [from] time and responsibility.... Within the locked entrances at either end of the hall, we were free to pry open the trapdoors to memory and feeling.... We were no longer in the actual world..." (184, 97).

Though "actual world" paradigms fail to place 3 East, its microphysics of disciplinary power clearly locate it within the parameters of a "safe" prison. Of all the visible sites within The Coffin Tree, the ward is the only place in which the narrator feels explicitly "a prisoner:"

I felt the imprisonment throughout the endless questions and examinations and forms. I felt it increasingly as I saw the rules pinned to the wall [that] the door should be locked....

And when they wheeled me down the hall to my room, the signs on the doors ('Bath,' 'Office,' 'Supplies') triggered worse suspicions.... Surely some barbaric form of hydropathy went on behind the room marked 'Bath.' Surely the 'Office' was there for the third degree, and 'Supplies' for storing the instruments of torture.

The hysteria passed; behind those doors I discovered in time nothing but an ordinary bathroom...office...roomful of supplies. (87)

The asylum remains an equivocal space of imprisonment, with its rules literally inscribed in its structure yet justified in terms of the "community's best interests" (86). The narrator, however, tempers her damning vision of the asylum's resemblance to an overt prison by attributing these insights to "hysteria."

Interestingly, the narrator's willingness to disbelieve her perceptions into the disciplinary subtleties invested in this site recalls the dynamic described in Foucault's carceral city. Instead of enforcing patterns of normative behavior through the presence of guards, the carceral system distributes a microphysics of enforcement through the bodies of the inmates who internalize disciplinary measures through habits of self-regulation (301). An extreme version of the panopticon in which disciplined behavior is enforced viz the illusion of being under watch, the carceral city emerges when the former inmate, no longer under the threat of being watched, prefers the type of behavior recommended by the incarcerating institution. The success of the carceral city is a function of the degree and pervasiveness by which inmates do not know they are inmates—in other words, a function of the degree to which patterns of behavior are believed to be self-initiating rather than institutionally instilled, and I would add, the extent to which a subject dismisses other types of behavior as deviant, hysterical, or perverse.

The narrator's experience in the ward—though initially dismissed as "hysteria"—facilitates her recollection of other sites that do not appear structurally as prisons—i.e., that do not have locked doors—but whose guard(ian)s exhibit an incarcerating demeanor. During a therapy session at 3 East, a social worker asks the narrator a question and then, dissatisfied with the answer, "catechize[s]" the narrator on her "hostility" (92). The incident recalls to the narrator an experience at the Rangoon convent school where Sister Immaculata discovers a stack of imaginary love letters penned by the young narrator:

[Sister Immaculata called] me to the front, rocking on her heels with unconcealed relish....

"Tell me the truth and you won't be sorry," she said.... "Who is this person you are writing to?"

"No one, Mother"....

"You know you'll be sorry if you lie"....

... "I wrote them for fun. Not for anyone."

Mother Immaculata...took me by the shoulders and shook me..."Eleven years old and writing this smut?!" (93-4)

Though her first words are phrased in a question, Sister Immaculata quickly sets the stakes of the exchange—"you'll be sorry if you lie." Since lies are punishable, the narrator attempts to tell the truth only to discover that punishment will nonetheless follow. Resembling the structure of torture, Immaculata's interrogation superficially appears motivated by the quest for information; yet her dismissal of the narrator's answers reveals the underlying purpose of the questions—to assert the authority of the interrogator (Scarry 20).

Similiarly, the narrator describes Shan as subject to the Church's arbitrary discipline:

Once, down at the Catholic mission school where he was sent to learn his ABCs, one of the nuns saw him break off a piece of dirt and put it in his mouth. "'Oh, beast!' she cried, leaving angry finger stripes across his back. 'Oh, filthy, dirty!'"

But this was a necessary skill: to chew on small clumps of earth; to taste the soil for the sweetness of alkaline, where poppy would grow. (106)

Habits and skills practiced in accordance with survival in one site, in this case the Shan hills, clash with the disciplinary requirements of another. Interestingly, the nun reprimands Shan not so much for his putative rejection of "the ABCs" than for his mistaking of his new surroundings for his former environment. Shan must twice-over learn the conventions of spatial division appropriate to the mission school. Firstly, he must learn the spatial conventions of the "safe" prison wherein one's environment is no longer an organic extension of oneself—as in the earth that provides for one's livelihood—but rather becomes compartmentalized to facilitate the overseer's disciplinary power. Secondly, he must abide by the hierarchical distinctions between "here" and "there," allowing a core perspective in Rangoon to take precedence over alternative ways of seeing and inhabiting. In other words, Shan must learn to regard the Shan hills as remote, Other-wise places, that are distinct and distant from his present location.

"Safe" prisons operate through multiple levels of spatial division. In her portrait of another prison-like site, Law-Yone illustrates the way in which a refusal to abide by such spatial conventions becomes diagnosed as "madness." While the asylum, and to a lesser degree the convent, employ latches and physical barriers to keep people in line and inside, "home" as the "safest" of prisons operates by locking others out. The boundaries of the Rangoon compound come into view most tellingly in the chapter detailing Father's "response to madness" (135). In this episode, a strange man—not "quite right in the head" (136)—camps outside the narrator's bedroom window:

The vagrant was there...sitting down in the same spot beneath my bedroom window.... he came every day [taking] shelter in the shady orchards.....

One afternoon, the vagrant sat by the front gate making no move to leave.... The gardener...was about to shut the main gate when he saw the seated figure.

"All right, madman. Out! Disappear!" he ordered.

The vagrant looked up and smiled...and remained sitting. (137)

Two points are worth noting here: first the conflation of madness and vagrancy and second the exclusion of both from the safety of home. The narrator remains fairly consistent in her reference to the strange man as "vagrant" while the household staff calls him "madman," "lunatic" and "crazy." Madness and vagrancy therein become linked; both represent states of not understanding the spatial order according to which others seem to operate. This applies not only to the mistaking of one place for another but also to the making of seemingly incongruous associations between places based on alternative spatial paradigms. Because the narrator and Shan are also vagrants throughout the narrative, the relation of their cultural disorientation to madness is always informed by this merging of vagrancy with the lunatic fringe.

Second, in the above quotation, the vagrant prevents the closing of the gates, creating a crisis in the household through his refusal to leave. When Father returns home, he re-establishes the "closed" space of the compound by thrashing the vagrant with a fishing rod and driving him away from the household. The narrator turns from the violence of the scene:

I had seen enough; I wasn't going to stay for the inevitable savagery. But even before I could make it back into the house, I heard the whistle of the bamboo rod—and then the shrill expression of pain. Then came another whip, another scream, followed by a whip-whip-whip. (140-1)

Through a perceptual shift, the compound as a place made "safe" through the exclusion of others emerges as a perilous space of pervasive violence. It is not the vagrant's intrusion but Father's reclamation of space that sends the narrator fleeing to the security of the house; she cannot escape, however, from the way in which violence constitutes the home.

In this shift from comfort to discomfort inside the compound's walls, the narrator appears to move between what Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty term "the modalities [of] being home and not being home":

"Being home" refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; "not being home" is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself. (196) ¹¹

The narrator's experience of "not being home," then, speaks to a newly acquired dissonance in her perception of inhabited space. The house, for instance, is no longer a neutral structure of mere walls and rooftop but rather a dividing principle of space that determines who can(not) enter based on categories of race, class, region and rationality. The family's compound, the convent school, and the asylum, thus, compose more than a set of cosmic structures that house the narrator's mental distress; in fact, these places become invested with a politics of privileged center and disempowered periphery—a sliding scale of power expressed through spatial distance.

Like the "madman" whose marked race, class and (dis)location reveal to the narrator the politics of "home," Shan also encourages her widening perception of places outside security. Originating in the hills, Shan remains peripheral to the Rangoon compound, emerging from what might be a "free" space in the novel:

My brother's village sat in cloud country, high on the shoulder of a mountain ledge.... Mist billowed over the twenty-hut village, opening now and then to reveal the glint of a crooked needle in the gorges below.... The water was sea green, colored, they said, by a floor of solid jade. But the legendary treasure remained untouched, protected by the river spirit. (104)

The clouds and natural terrain initially protect the mountain village from the intrusions of neighboring ethnic groups. However, the narrator soon establishes this "free" space floating "beyond acres of mist" as more imagined than real. Speculators in precious stones, druglords, national armies, and rebel militias have infiltrated the village:

By the time Shan was born the trade routes had shifted, starting farther up, in the poppy fields along the ravines of the borderland rain forests, making their way down to the slippery hills to morphine refineries in the south.... Now it was the soldiers.... The poppy harvest had produced new kingdoms with armies that clashed along the shifting borders.... (105)

The transformation of (the) Shan's country into a morphine refinery repositions the hill people peripherally with respect to their land and resources. The primary purpose of the land now is to feed profits back into Rangoon coffers, and only secondarily and indirectly to provide sustenance for the mountain inhabitants. Though relatively "free" in their lack of walls or locks intended for purposeful exclusion, the hills feel perilous to their inhabitants both because of their subordinated labor to the heroin trade that they accomodate and because of the "endless wars" fought over shifting borders.¹²

From one perspective then, "free" spaces exist only as idealized and somewhat imaginary places to which Shan hopes to return. My point, however, is not that Shan only delusionally seeks "free" space but rather that his "habitus"—to borrow Pierre Bourdieu's term—is radically different from the "safe" prisons to which the narrator has grown accustomed. Relative to the types of "safe prisons" in which the narrator repeatedly finds herself, the spaces to which Shan introduces the narrator are both perilous and "free." The narrator herself recognizes their distinct affinities for disparate spatial zones:

Without [Shan], the world might have remained only as large as the compound in which I lived: a house bordered by hedges clipped in the shape of regimental birds just high enough to conceal the concertina coils of barbed wire.

Without him, I would never have dared creep through the holes in the hedges under the watchman's nose...or find my way to quarters as insalubrious as the Thieves' Market. (117)

Shan continually escapes the hedged-in space of the family's compound for the seediest side of the city, Thieves' Market, a place "where centuries' worth of refuse and filth seemed to have settled into maggoty compost heaps along the walls" (121). Because the narrator merely visits this "free" space, she experiences only its foulness. It is, in fact, her inability to adopt a perspective beyond those inherent to the family's compound that prompts Shan to bring her to Thieves' Market in the first place. To counteract her decided disbelief in the existence of a "man who knows everything," a man who knows of other places, Shan takes her to "a section of town [she] had never seen" where the coffin tree soothsayer lives (120).

The narrator approaches both Shan's and the fortuneteller's autobiographies with a skepticism founded upon spatial hierarchy. Shan's account of his adolescence lacks credence because the voice authorizing his biography "[comes] from a world too remote for belief" (115). Remoteness, tellingly, places Shan's location on the periphery of the narrator's implicit "core" perspective. "Too remote" also stresses the excessive distance of Shan's world from her own. Upon her arrival in Thieves' Market, the narrator tellingly expresses her skepticism through locational incongruity: "I could not believe that we had arrived at our destination, that here in the seamiest side of the city...with its rotting stench and the slime underfoot, was the fortune-teller's abode. I had expected a better address" (121, emphasis added).

Though physically in the space of the soothsayer, the narrator cannot escape her core perspective, seeing only the "sordid neglect everywhere apparent in that cell. Above the bed, torn faded scrolls with indecipherable symbols and characters papered the wall" (122, emphasis added). The narrator's inability to read the meanings etched in space foreshadows her later failure to understand the fortune-teller's tale of the coffin tree, both a fable of former glory as well as a memorial to a particular modality of space and inhabitation. Describing his life as a merchant in coffin planks, the soothsayer recalls a time when he came across the "biggest [coffin tree] of them all:" "What a tree! It alone would have made my fortune. It was...ah, don't try to imagine. It went up into the sky, up and up, higher than two hundred feet...I found it up there...on the high ridges of the Great Snow Range..." (123). The narrator disbelieves the fortuneteller, assuming that "his head has gone soft" from opium (124). Yet, the prospect of returning to the Great Snow Range informs Shan's convictions throughout the novel. Simply put, between the two protagonists develops a struggle over loci and modes of inhabitation. Whereas Shan proclaims the existence of elsewhere "free" spaces of easy fortunes, the narrator dismisses this vision as "dreaming" and encourages Shan to abandon Thieves' Market in order to start "earning money not messing around with opium eaters" (124).

Through spatial discourse, then, sites in the narrative become invested with certain authorities of "truth" or credibility. Greater authorities of truth remain specific to core areas, which also coincide with greater infrastructural development, investment allocation, and political persuasion. Peripheral areas, on the other hand, obtain lesser authorities of truth similarly coincident with lesser allocations of wealth.¹³ In other words, sites are characterized as "rich" or "poor" with distance or remoteness reflecting a class bias.

Immigrating to America, the narrator appears to traverse the space between core and periphery, experiencing a marginalization similar to Shan's in Rangoon: she now comes from "a world too remote for belief." Following a military coup that renders Father a hunted political rebel, the narrator and her brother flee to the U.S. only to encounter economic hardship and the tenuousness of American hospitality. When they contact Father's American friends, the Morrisons, the two protagonists become subject to a First World peripheralizing discourse. Claiming years of non-involvement with "your part of the world," Mrs. Morrison (whose voice has the unfaltering resonance of the "Voice of America") demarcates her and her husband's region of the world as separate from that of their former Burmese friends (48). This distancing discourse, implicitly linked to a policy of nonbelief, strategically absolves the Americans from offering the two refugees monetary aid.

Humiliated by the Morrisons' lack of hospitality, the two siblings are forced to reside in a flophouse as both are unable to find lasting employment. When Shan contracts malaria, the two finally appeal to their Father's last American contact—a journalist named Benjamin Lane. While the Times Square flophouse represents a place too dangerous for their survival, the Lanes' packed brownstone in the East Seventies likewise feels unsafe as a result of the small threats the protagonists feel from the Lanes' many children and in their sense of being scrutinzed for every mouthful of food they consume. This sense of surveillance finally culminates in Shan's belief that the CIA is everywhere. He announces at a dinner party, "Look, man, the CIA was in my country so I know...They've taken over everything. Opium and everything. They know who's going to be boss one day and who's going to bugger off the next day. So you tell me there's no CIA in your office?" (61-2). The narrator diagnoses Shan's hyper-awareness of surveillance networks as "paranoia," and from this point on, the brother and sister's perspectives split with regard to America.

While their early experiences of the U.S. are filtered through their shared sense of incongruity, of being watched and of being judged, the narrator here begins discounting her brother's perceptions. She characterizes their former sense of peril as "imagined" and "self-made" (60). Seeing the spaces of America more in terms of their freedom than their surveillance, the narrator characterizes her half-brother's observations on surveillance as untrue. Shan, on the other hand, cannot imagine a space that is unsurveyed.

This bifurcation lends a tremendous irony to the two immigrants' experiences in America—an irony engendered by the oxymoronic character of that third modality of space: free space under surveillance. Spaces remain "free" of explicit patrol precisely through the dispersal of surveillance tactics across multiple inhabitants, rather than consolidated in a single law enforcement body and by the restructuring of space. In other words, those people enjoying freedom in various sites are the very enactors of surveillance, enforcing normative behavior both in themselves and in others. If these inhabitants are regulating their actions according to a code of surveillance, they are not acting strictly free of constraints. Paradoxically, then, freedom and surveillance merge in this third modality of space with the narrator blind to and Shan obsessed with the surveillance capacities of this distinctly American space.

The ironies of meaning produced by the narrator's and Shan's differing perspectives are significantly flattened into singular meanings by the narrator's authoritative voice. The narrator's viewpoint, at once peripheralized in relation to an American core, itself peripheralizes another Burmese refugee's viewpoint. Law-Yone, thus, brings into relief distinctions amongst diasporic subjects. Despite their shared travels, the narrator and Shan are differently "sited"—one habituated to "safe" prisons, the other to "free" spaces.

To read against a core-periphery structure requires that one scrutinize those moments when the simultaneity of contrasting modalities of space is undermined by the narrator's overly authoritative assertions of Shan's paranoia. For example, the narrator offers the following evidence of Shan's growing mental instability: in speaking to a car mechanic in a "tidewater town" somewhere between South Carolina and the Florida panhandle, Shan mentions "We bought this car in another snake...drove it all the way from South Carolina. It's not a bad snake to live in...." The narrator corrects him, "'States,' I said to the mechanic. 'He means states'" (68). This episode would seem to be an account of Shan's many linguistic pitfalls; however, when the two return to the car, their ensuing exchange begs a more complex reading:

Once more on the road, I said, "What was wrong with you just now? You kept saying 'snake' for 'state.'"

"It's the same thing," he said; "don't you get it? State, snake...poisonous bastards."

"You need to have your head examined," I said.

"Then you do, too," he said. "How is it you knew what I meant." (68-9)

Substituting "snake" for "state" suggests the perilous nature of seemingly neutral grounds. Shan, thus, destabilizes the mundane geopolitics of states, a mundaneness suggested in map-making terms like "South Carolina." Reacting to Shan's wordplay, the narrator insists on the single meaning coincident with a single signifier. She buttresses this single, and seemingly neutral, meaning by relegating other charged meanings to the realm of madness.

Formerly sympathetic to Shan's inability to master English, the narrator begins viewing his linguistic slips as premeditated duplicities. Upon his premature return from Vermont, the narrator finds him on the doorstep of her Chicago flat and describes him as "never [having] looked more like a refugee" (72). Shan explains the reasons for his leaving his job at a hotel:

"At first [my co-workers] were good to me.... Then things happened. They asked me to move into a different room.... Why didn't they ask one of their own kind to move? They asked me because I was the foreigner. I was different... They punish you for being different, don't you know that?" (73)

The "punishment" meted out to Shan significantly begins with spatial isolation. Shan is effectively cordoned off from the rest of the group and then subject to other forms of harassment. The narrator, however, frames Shan's account of these events as part of "his increasing breach with reality" (72). Not surprisingly, she instantly disbelieves him when he tells her that he was raped by his co-workers: "I drove on mechanically, but my arms, my legs, my heart felt suddenly thick and heavy.... I didn't doubt he'd been genuinely upset. What froze me was that almost calculating mention of rape" (73-4). Shan's admission, "They raped me, you know" (73), nearly prevents the narrator's continued mobility; it freezes her. In this instance, disbelief becomes spatially troped in multiple ways. "Too remote" events—such as a rape that occurred in another state/snake—is subject to a perceptual disbelief that not only freezes the distance between interlocutors but also paralyzes one party, locking her into a single fixed position. Disbelief, thus, constitutes the cognitive impasse between the narrator and her half-brother as it also ranks her sensibilities over his.

By framing Shan's account of his rape as "a lie," the narrator pathologizes and dismisses his sense of cultural dislocation and subordinates his worldview to hers. Losing one's ground—the exact condition of exile and colonization—becomes tantamount to losing one's mind so that metaphors of dislocation and displacement almost always serve to detail "madness." For example, claiming that she is "becoming as ungrounded in [her] beliefs as was [Shan]," the narrator details her mental "sickness" as a function of not being able to "see beyond the ground in front of [her] nose" (78-9). Instability of ground and the inability to adjust to one's changing grounds act as metaphors for mental disorientation, diverting terms of displacement from actually speaking to the condition of displacement. In addition, the phrase "losing one's ground" presupposes a stable ground to lose; it may be the case that the ground is always imbricated with violence, so that losing one's mind— losing one's ground—becomes merely an increased sensitivity to tremors already in place.

After Shan dies from a stomach ailment, the narrator temporarily comes around to his perspective on things, experiencing her surroundings not as a neutral or "safe" environment but as a facilitator of disciplinary objectives. Thus, when seeing the room marked "Bath," the narrator imagines "some barbaric form of hydropathy" going on behind the closed door (87). I have already rehearsed the narrator's dismissal of the above perception as "hysteria." However, I want to propose that we bracket the pejorative sense of hysteria in order to reclaim hysteria as a paradigm—rather than an illness—that speaks to the vagrant's condition. The narrator calls herself hysterical precisely when she mistakes one place for another—when she produces an alternate cartography of places wherein locations are proximal not by virtue of their national borders touching on a map but by their associative similarities produced through the work of memory. What I want to elaborate upon further, in the next section, is the connection between a postcolonial geography and Law-Yone's hysterical spatial configurations. More specifically, I see Law-Yone's hysterical spatial configurations as emerging at the point where postcolonial, deconstructive approaches to space can go no further.

Topographic Mappings and Irrational Alternatives

Recent approaches to space have called into question the supposed "neutrality" of maps.¹⁴ Benedict Anderson, for instance, contrasts a European conception of territorial borders, derived from a bird's-eye view of space, to a horizontal method of mapping dominion through boundary-stones employed by Thai (Siamese) leaders in the mid-nineteenth century (172). ¹⁵ Though Anderson notes that by the end of the century Thai leaders had adopted the topographic mapping conventions of the British, he importantly emphasizes the constructed character of modern map-making:

Ever since John Harrison's 1761 invention of the chronometer, which made possible the precise calculation of longitudes, the entire planet's curved surface had been subjected to a geometrical grid which squared off empty seas and unexplored regions in measured boxes. The task of, as it were, 'filling in' the boxes was to be accomplished by explorers, surveyors, and military forces. (173)

This strategy of laying out territories, leaving no space uncharted, not only reflects but also buttresses the colonial project. Postcolonial theorists of space, trying to re-assess the operating assumptions of their field, have turned to both poststructuralist and postcolonial theories of representation to expose the complicity of modern map-making strategies with the imperialist project.¹⁶ In his seminal article on postcolonial cartography, Graham Huggan argues for a deconstructive approach to maps in order to expose their imperialist representational strategies of "reinscription, enclosure and hierarchization" that would "fix" space for Western consumption (115). Relying heavily upon Homi Bhabha's articulation of an ambivalence within colonial discourse itself, Huggan asserts that the modern map—as an instance of colonial discourse—sows the seeds of its own critique: "cartographic discourse can be seen to play an exemplary role not only in the demonstration of the empowering strategies of colonialist rhetoric but in the unwitting exposure of the deficiencies of these strategies" (120). Interestingly, Huggan gestures toward "alternative spatial configurations" that imperialist mapping strategies attempt to "cover over" (120). Yet, these alternative paradigms remain the undescribed Other of his analysis. In other words, Huggan posits an alternative to topographic models of space while rendering this alternative a blank, perhaps "subaltern," space that cannot be spoken. ¹⁷ Huggan's interrogation of maps as tools of imperialism—as instructive as it is—thus succumbs to the very topographic logic it seeks to critique.¹⁸

A different glimpse into the power and politics invested in sites is provided by The Coffin Tree's profile of dislocations. Instead of mapping or locating Burma from a topographic perspective, Law Yone maps the similarity—or proximity—of Burma's torture rooms, walled communities, and towns under military siege to America's "free spaces under surveillance." Through this alternative cartography of space (dwelling), Law Yone's novel upsets not only the imperialist logic of Western maps that reaffirm the West as center, but also the very topographic logic that structures both "traditional mapping" and its deconstructive critique. To counter the controlling viewpoint from above, Law-Yone supplies an "out of control," unruly characterization of places so that sites are constructed as mnemonically proximal—existing side by side in memory.

Moreover, this "out of control" perspective does not dismiss as "irrational" the vagrant's sensitivity to the violence in places. Within this alternate cartography, neutral locations seen "from above" are transformed into disciplinary structures whose violences are felt. For instance, when the narrator stands "balanced on [her] father's hands," gazing "from a height [she] had never seen" upon the family's compound, she sees "nothing extraordinary" in the expanse of manicured lawns and fruit orchards that are presented topographically to view (148). From her perspective on the ground, however, the narrator cannot prevent herself from witnessing the "savagery" of Father's exclusionary practices suffered by the vagrant (140). Whereas a "bird's-eye" view presents the narrator with a mundane sense of the compound's layout, her perspective on the ground and attuned to vagrancy jars her into the realization that violence constitutes the home.

Hysterical spatial configurations, thus, proceed from embodied memory. The feel of disciplinary effects upon the inhabitants establishes spatial groupings, in contrast to a scopic mechanism whereby the detached, ungrounded, bodiless "eye" classifies spaces from above.¹⁹ It is in the asylum, then, that the narrator recalls the exclusionary spaces of the family compound rendered "safe" through Father's whipping of the vagrant. In another associative leap, the narrator remembers Father's beating Shan in order to "knock [the stutter] out of the boy" (108). Hysterical mapping comprehends—and perhaps is structured by—the work of displacement. Not surprisingly then, it is through the narrator's mapping of space through memory that the text broaches the subject of torture.

One might recall that the narrator mistakes various rooms of the asylum for prison cells and interrogation spaces: she mistakes the "Bath" for a torture room, the "Office" for an interrogation site, and believes that "Supplies" refers to various instruments of pain. Though she dismisses these observations as "hysterical," I prefer to categorize these intuitions into space as "dis-placed"—literally, the mistaking of one place for another. Given the fact that torture commonly renders household objects and domestic spaces the very weaponry for abuse (Scarry, 40), the narrator's perception of hidden violences structuring the "bath" and the "office" are quite insightful. Coupled with other displaced revelations regarding torture, these "hysterical" readings of space suggest the narrator's traumatic—and suppressed—experience of being interrogated during the period of martial law in Burma.²⁰

Through Paddy's, a fellow 3 East inmate, letters to the narrator, the text obliquely confirms the fact of military interrogation:

I had a dream about your father as being a bald, Oriental, sadistic type, wearing a long robe with stars and half-moons printed on it. He was interrogating political prisoners by tying them to a cross on the floor and flogging their chests with a leather strap. (128)

A later missive supplements this portrait with the closing line: "So put in a good word for me if I am ever captured by your father—and point out to him that if the law is a secret, how can I be blamed for violating it?" (179). Paddy's letters regarding his dreams of Father's torturing techniques suggests a sublimated and doubly—if not triply—displaced event. Put simply, the fact that Paddy dreams of the interrogation frames the torture as unreal. The novel's burying of multiple violences through displacement and dreamwork speaks to both the narrator's own aversion to seeing pain as well as to the torture room as the site most readily "disbelieved" relative to other sites. Revising my earlier characterization of 3 East, then, this asylum may not be the only site in which the narrator feels explicitly "a prisoner."

That a simple narrative of madness cannot comprehend the narrator's particular dislocated history becomes remarkably clear through another mental patient's hostile question. Robin, who appears to be hospitalized for an eating disorder, says to the narrator, "'Why are you here? You're not like the rest of us; your past is so different; yet you know your way around.' It was an accusation, not a question" (102). Like Shan who senses his co-workers' distrust, the narrator realizes that, even among the other "ungrounded" inmates at 3 East, she can be "punish[ed] for being different" (73). Clearly, psychological dysfunctions are not homogeneous or "cosmic." Rather, the narrator's "hysterical" behavior stems specifically from her experience in a warring country where she has watched relatives disappear (31-2) and where she has been tortured. The healing prescribed by the asylum doctors interestingly requires her to distance herself from those events—in essence, to reorient herself to living in the "safe" space of the U.S. Thus, the narrator's recovered "sanity" is measured through her increasing adoption of a controlling viewpoint that hierarchizes the U.S. as "here" and Burma as a distant place over "there."

My point is not to denigrate the narrator's "mental recovery." Nor is it my goal to rank a dislocated Asian refugee perception of space over an American assessment of sites and locations. Rather, I wish to clarify the way in which the narrator's psychological and perceptual "normalization" in the United States is contingent upon her learning to consider Burma as "too remote for belief"—i.e., exclusively outside the boundaries of America's concerns and hence of the narrator's life while living in the U.S. Despite this conditioning toward normalization, the narrator's reflections produce alternative mappings that reveal various violences that are enacted spatially: e.g., the isolation of Shan by his co-workers, and the exclusion of the vagrant from "home." Law-Yone, thus, maintains a subversive edge to her fiction by highlighting the narrator's ambivalent "recovery"—especially when recuperation coincides with becoming indoctrinated to core U.S. perspectives.

Conclusion: From Coalition to Co-occupancy

Despite the novel's juxtaposition of conflicting ways of seeing, interpreters of The Coffin Tree have approached the text from locations that continue to construct the U.S. as center and that appropriate sanity for the West. Perhaps, this is because Law-Yone herself compromises by offering her nameless narrator as a bridge perspective that mediates between the controlling viewpoint of the Western imperialist "eye/I," like the Morrisons who have mapped and dismissed Burma, and the out-of-control, multiply colonized, surveyed perspective of an embodied "Other" textually represented by Shan. The Coffin Tree then ultimately concerns different orientations toward space—one orientated toward conquest, the other toward the utopian wish for free space. It is also about the unlearning of multiple, and oftentimes conflicting, perspectives on space for a singular, rational, topographic and controlled perspective coded as "sanity."

Accordingly, I have argued that Law-Yone's text requires us to reflect upon current methods of perceiving and communicating across space—a task that in turn affects the way in which we construct our relationship to the material world. My interrogation of the politics of placelessness has endeavored to remain faithful to a "politics of location"—that is, an analysis attuned to the specific geographies traversed in the novel—while constructing an alternative to topographic spatial paradigms through which one can more readily perceive the dynamic relationship between space/place and migrant identity. This alternative cartography still remains faithful to the specificity of locations; however, it specifies those locations not through the conventions of traditional mapping that rely upon a bird's eye view, but rather by degree and overtness of disciplinary control.

This alternative cartography demands a reconceptualization of geographic categories like the "First" and "Third Worlds," encouraging us to think simultaneously about the habitus of disciplinary institutions and the habitus of the subaltern. Shan's sustained vision of a free space for free people, moreover, prods us to question the motives behind the championing of nonterritoriality. Put another way, in celebrating and ranking as progressively "more advanced" the nonterritorial subject—i.e., the refugee who adapts to the "safe" prisons of the metropole—have we already succumbed to a cynicism of or resigned ourselves to disbelieving the possibility of free space?

This alternative mapping, thus, exposes an ideological component of nonterritoriality—its hidden normalization of disciplinary space. Appadurai eschews "territorial" or spatially defined identities precisely because, in his assessment, spaces are always already inscribed by political jockeying and aspirations toward dominance. The dangerous supplement to this all-encompassing, panoramic concept of space is Shan's notion of perilous "free" spaces that are continually disbelieved, distanced, spatially curtailed, and set aside all while territoriality is avidly disavowed.

Coming from a somewhat different angle, Sau-ling Wong also decries the vogue of diasporic paradigms, claiming that their persuasiveness inheres in their "essentialist core" (17). In her work, she contrasts the essentialist core of diaspora to the inherently coalitional qualities of Asian America, formed by virtue of disparate, descent-defined immigrant communities—Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, South Asian, Hmong, Burmese, and so forth—coming together around a shared location of political struggle in the U.S. Though coalitions emerge via recognition of a common ground for political struggle, theories of coalitional politics too often lose sight of that generative condition of co-occupancy as well as of the contentious negotiations over limited material resources endemic to inhabiting a room not entirely one's own. Having so thoroughly resisted the romanticization of space, postcolonial and Asian American critics might finally allow themselves to articulate the primacy of material locations to political identity and to the contingent, open-ended, and sometimes conflicted relationships engendered by sharing a living space. Looking ahead, how co-occupancy engenders coalition and how coalitions grapple with co-occupancy seem to be the next questions we must ask ourselves in assessing and formulating the continued possibility of coalitions respectful of differences.

Works Cited

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Notes

¹ Donna Haraway critiques the Western epistemological preference for such disembodied viewing, calling it a "gaze [that] signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White...the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere" (581).

² As Caren Kaplan notes, a viewpoint from the ground also yields a constructed notion of space and, in this respect, is no different from a topographic perspective (personal conversation). The point to be registered, however, is that a perspective from the "ground"—far from yielding a more accurate or more natural representation of space—remains a credible alternative, yet one traditionally superseded by topographic mapping strategies.

³ See Silverstein 1980 for an extended study of the multi-ethnic peoples of Burma and their political interaction. See Chao 1987 and 1989 for a Shan perspective on Shan-Burmese relations. Chao contests the Burman propaganda linking Shan rebellion to the heroin trade (Chao 1987, 58). He also views the Burman Army as "an extra-constitutional power in the [Shan] states...[these] states being reduced to being conquered or colonial territories vis-á-vis the Burman military" (Chao 1989, 94).

⁴ In addition to the Bamar majority, no less than sixty-six indigenous racial groups have been identified in the area, the following of which occupy settlement states—the Mons (the earliest known inhabitants of the area), Shan, Kachin, Karen (Kayin), Red Karen (Kayah), and Arakenese (Rakhines) (Silverstein 1980, 9-25; Klein, 67).

⁵ It is precisely the material conditions of fleeing under duress that become elided when the "hybridity" and "violent dislocation" of the refugee become metaphors for postmodern subjectivity in general. To reiterate David Palumbo-Liu's question, "does the postmodern present the moment for the ethnic to be conjoined with the universal, as everything is now in a correlate condition of fragmentation and revision, or does this condition erase at that moment the very specificity of ethnicity?" (58).

⁶ When Appadurai constructs the urgency of a language "to capture complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance," he turns to the disenfranchised refugee— "Armenians in Turkey, Hutu refugees from Burundi who live in urban Tanzania" are the exemplary groups who confirm the existence of displaced, diasporic, and non-territorial identities (418). Later, in the section subtitled "The Heart of Whiteness," Appadurai examines his own situation as a diasporic subject and implicitly holds himself up in a like exemplary manner. Interestingly, he betrays resentment over his not being able to completely inhabit the position of disenfranchised refugee: "However, diasporic we get, like the Jews, South Asians are doomed to remain a tribe, forever fixers and dealers in a world of open markets, fair deals, and opportunity for all" (422). Appadurai's lament over being "doomed to remain a tribe" discloses a desire not to be distinguished from other diasporic subjects: not to be named as part of a transnational group that enjoys economic success and that negotiates through global financial networks in ways wholly different from refugees like the Hutus from Burundi—to recall Appadurai's earlier example.

⁷ Wallerstein distinguishes migrants "on the top of the occupation scale... [who] neither 'assimilate' nor wish to assimilate" from "persons at the lower end of the occupational scale [who] when they wish to assimilate...are often rejected...[becoming], usually quite officially, a 'minority'" (98-9). For a more detailed account of the mobile cosmopolitan, see Hannerz.

⁸ Wong and Palumbo-Liu likewise enunciate suspicion over the way in which "identity and culture are increasingly decoupled from geopolitics" in critical theory (Wong, 9 and 5; Palumbo-Liu, 60).

⁹ This essay broaches, through literary analysis, the kinds of complex conjunctions explored in Neferti Tadiar's examination of Metro Manila where she links transnational capital to spatial design, and both of these to subjectivity effects. Focusing on a particular conduit of transnational flows—Manila's "flyovers" or raised freeways—Tadiar argues that "flyovers attempt to realize the transnational conceptual space...by allowing the subjective experience of 'the dissipation of all stable relations to local physical and cultural geography, the loosening of ties to any specific space...'" (292). The question becomes what alternative perspectives and subjectivities co-exist with this aerial transnational perspective. In constructing an alternative cartography from a ground-level view, I am not promoting the abandonment of traditional geopolitical categories. Rather, I am advocating the supplementation of topographic epistemologies of space with otherwise conceptions of place that emphasize "images of seriality" and mental maps of "adjoining objects on particular pathways" (285).

¹⁰ The initial temptation when looking at immigrant/refugee narratives is to categorize sites according to national paradigms: Asian "homeland," on the one hand, and America, on the other. The flux between these two locations are the crossings and recrossings of migrants as well as the international politics and policies which regulate the flow between the spaces. This nation-based taxonomy, while important, proves inadequate in the face of The Coffin Tree's structure, because of its easy slippage into temporal analogs: a before and after (America) account of the immigrant experience. Law-Yone's text effectively resists this temporal divide. During the narrative sequence, events and memories of Rangoon unfold in the space of America, so that the narrative's chronology subverts national boundaries.

¹¹ See also Caren Kaplan's analysis of "deterritorialization" and the costs undergirding "home's" security (192-4).

¹² Peril and safety are themselves designations issued by the state. For instance, Michale Aung-Thwin calls non-Burman regions, such as the Shan states, "un-secured" areas, highlighting how—in his assessment—safety or security is gauged by the degree of control the Burman military has over the area (24).

¹³ Edward Soja discusses the way in which "sectorally uneven allocations of capital investment and social infrastructure" create a geographic differentiation of sites coincident with their socioeconomic valuings (107). Furthermore, he links the division of space to processes of capital: "capitalism...intrinsically builds upon regional or spatial inequalities as a necessary means for its continued survival" (107).

¹⁴ For instance, Barnes and Duncan's 1992 edited collection is comprised of twelve essays that contemplate "the problem of representation as it pertains to the geographical world" (preface, xii). Jettisoning the idea that maps "mirror" the world, this volume focuses on the rhetorical strategies of cartographers. It includes a ground-breaking essay by J.B. Harley (originally published in 1989) that establishes the usefulness of deconstruction to probe the "blindspots" of cartographic representation.

¹⁵ Anderson here draws heavily upon Thongchai Winichakul's "Siam Mapped: a History of the Geo-Body of Siam" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney, 1988). A reminder: the Shan of Burma are descendent from the same tribe that settled Thailand.

¹⁶ Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose emphasize the political stakes involved in questioning the language of maps: "Maps are central to colonial and postcolonial projects.... Describing colonized space as constructed clearly undermines claims for mimetic representation by colonial mapping and imperialist history" (8, 13). See also Harley 1988, 1992a, and 1992b.

¹⁷ Huggan's deconstructive approach ends with the limits of Western mapping strategies, therein refusing to grasp these limits as the "enunciative boundaries of a range of other dissonant, even dissident histories and voices" (Bhabha, 5). Such an approach, by refraining from enunciating these alternative spatial configurations, remains topographically imprisoned. The prisonhouse of language thus becomes the prisonhouse of topography.

¹⁸ At first glance, Harley's "Reading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter" promises to go beyond a deconstructive critique of Western mapping strategies, by delineating indigenous cartographies that were only partially suppressed by European notions of space. Though Harley acknowledges the way in which scientific graphing methods have limited Western geographers' notions of what constitutes a map, he does not quite abandon the topographic perspective in his own alternative definitions of indigenous cartography. He reads a circular map of Teozacoalco as a means by which the Mixtec contested the territorial encroachments of European colonizers (528); yet, he misses the opportunity to contemplate the question of why pre-Conquest maps were circular: perhaps because from a perspective on the ground, mapping conforms to a circular sense of space, as opposed to a Western, topographic vision that is rectilinear.

¹⁹ One might recall here Tadiar's analysis which characterizes the detached and mobile "I" as a subjectivity effect of transnational capital and its reconfigurations of space. As Tadiar points out, "this transcendent perspective [offered to those on Manila's 'flyovers'] is not legitimately available to the lower classes who, as pedestrians and public transportation commuters, are routed through crowded ground-level streets" (Tadiar, 292). Their (laboring) bodies comprise the excessive or surplus traffic that must be simultaneously harnessed and avoided by the transnational class as they search for greater profits and as they dash from one corporate meeting to the next.

²⁰ In March 1962, General Ne Win deposed the civilian government, replacing parliament with the Revolutionary Council composed of seventeen military officers chosen by Ne Win. On September 18, 1988, another military coup was staged in order to prop up the "tottering [military] government" and an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 people died (Steinberg 1989, 103, 107). Since the onset of martial law, the government has launched nationalist, anti-insurgency campaigns. According to several sources, the Burmese army "has disregarded and violated the civil and human rights of the local residents in...border areas" in the name of national security (Silverstein 1989, 17). Because minority areas have been officially inaccessible to independent human rights investigators, the scale of these human rights abuses can only be approximated. Amnesty International records in its September 1987 report 177 killings and 59 torture cases involving Karen and other minority groups since 1984 and in its May 1988 report, 60 killings and 123 cases of torture.