The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

Julia walks out of the tearoom. The merchant refuses to accept payment for her food and drink, saying, “U Ba’s friends are our guests” (8). Julia describes Kalaw as desolate, remote, and without resources. Though the streets are crowded, there are few vehicles. There is a wide array of people selling everything and many tearooms. Once Julia walks back to her hotel, she lies on the bed, noticing how sparse the room is. She wonders if U Ba truly knew her father. She mentally reviews her father’s disappearance. Though Julia asked her father about his childhood, the first 20 years of his life are a mystery. The last four years, since his disappearance, are also a mystery.

Julia describes her father’s disappearance, which occurred the day after she graduated from law school. He had an appointment in Boston for which he never showed up. At first, Julia and her mother thought nothing of the missed appointment. When Julia asked her mother if she was concerned about Tin’s absence, she replied, “No. Should I be” (20).

Soon, the police followed Tin’s trail from New York—where he is a noteworthy attorney—to Los Angeles, to Hong Kong, to Bangkok—where they lose track of him. Tin’s official record says he traveled from Burma to the United States in 1942, graduated from law school, and became a U.S. citizen in 1959.

Julia believes her life did not change with the disappearance of her father. Four years after he disappeared, she receives a package from her mother, Judith, containing her father’s memorabilia and a note from her mother, saying she no longer has any use for these things. Julia finds a letter addressed to someone named Mi Mi in Kalaw, Burma; Tin refers to her as “My beloved Mi Mi” (28). She starts to burn the letter, then decides to read it. It is clearly a passionate love letter from her father to this person. As her father is an unemotional person, the letter seems uncharacteristic. Julia decides to travel to the village to see if her father is there.

Julia visits her mother, Judith, to tell her that she’s going to Burma. Her mother expresses how unhappy she’s been in her marriage. She repeatedly asked Tin what happened in the 20 years before he came to the U.S., but he never answered. Judith found Tin’s love letter and said if she ever found another one, she would divorce him.

Judith describes Tin as tall and handsome, someone her friends would have wanted to date. She decided to marry him, though her parents never forgave her for marrying a man of color. When he refused to tell her anything about his past, she began to keep secrets as well—causing them to grow further apart. There was no intimacy between them at the time Tin left. Judith tells Julia that, should she go to Burma, “Whatever you find there, it’s no longer of any interest to me” (37).

Julia’s morning experience as the only guest in the only hotel in Kalaw is unpleasant—with no hot water, lukewarm coffee, and burned eggs. She runs through the village to renew her spirit and makes a list of what to do to find her father. She goes to the tearoom in the afternoon and finds U Ba, the man who spoke to her the day before. He takes her hands, and they sit together.

The narrative shifts to the third person as U Ba tells the story of Mya Mya, a young woman whose brother dies tragically when he falls into a swollen river. With her parents, Mya Mya begins to visit the village astrologer weekly. The astrologer warns them about certain days being ill omens for certain activities. As a newly pregnant wife, Mya Mya’s fear is realized when her firstborn son, Tin Win, comes into the world on a Saturday in December—an ill omen.

Two weeks after her son’s birth, Mya Mya sees a number of dead chickens. She takes this as a sign of future disasters. Then, her milk fails and she rejoices when another area woman takes over nursing Tin. U Ba describes this dynamic: “Mother and son were like magnets that repelled each other. Press as she might, they would never touch” (51).

Tin’s parents visit the village astrologer, who practices numerology, to ask if the child has a curse. Using the exact date and hour of Tin’s birth, the astrologer calculates, “The child will bring sorrow on his parents” (57). This will be the result of a medical condition related to his eyes. Though the astrologer calculates the child’s innate brilliance, he does not share this information. Tin’s father tries to minimize the issue as a medical problem, but Mya Mya attributes every negative happening to the boy.

Mya Mya withdraws from her son’s life. Eventually, Tin’s father accepts her belief that their son will be a perpetual source of pain and works as a caddy at a British golf course. Mya Mya cleans the two-story house owned by her husband’s family behind their own shack. One day, two policemen arrive to tell her that her husband is dead, struck in the head by an errant golf ball. Mya Mya blames the accident on Tin. She organizes a burial ritual, packs her belongings, and walks away, telling Tin to wait until she comes back.

Tin sits on a pine stump for seven days, waiting for his mother. A neighborhood widow, Su Kyi, finds him unconscious. She moves into Tin’s house and raises him as her own, promising him that she will stay until his mother returns. Tin asks her a number of deep questions, and she is astonished by his knowledge of life. Su Kyi tells Tin stories at night, as she knows not to directly approach him about his difficulties. She wants to express “that there are wounds time does not heal, though it can reduce them a manageable size” (77).

Tin gradually loses his sight. He cleverly compensates for his loss of vision, so no one recognizes the problem until he is completely blind at 10 years old. When Su Kyi realizes Tin is blind, “Her wail carried all the way down to the town, and for years afterward the people of Kalaw would talk about how deeply it had frightened everyone who heard it” (82). A doctor examines Tin and says his only hope is that his vision might return the same way it suddenly left.

Tin struggles to map out the area around his house so he can safely move about. Rather than adapting to his blindness, he becomes less adept. He cannot walk through the village on his own and cannot learn at the Catholic school. Su Kyi fears he may lose his other senses as well—believing “the boy could will his own heart to stop beating if he wished it” (85).

The narrative reverts to Julia speaking in the first person. She has listened to U Ba speak for several hours. He stops and asks if she believes the story. Julia replies, “I don’t believe in fairy tales” (86). U Ba apologizes, saying the story reflects the ignorance of people in Kalaw and is certain it is different where she comes from. Julia expresses what it’s like in New York and reiterates that she doesn’t believe in God. U Ba excuses himself and says he will meet her at her hotel in the morning and take her to his house to see some photographs. Julia believes she hears him softly say, “your father Julia, he is here—very near. Do you see him” (89).

Despite her objections to God and the supernatural, Julia remembers a Burmese fairy tale that her father told her when she was five years old. Her mother Judith hates such fairy tales because they read as bizarre and unhappy to her. Tin tells “The Tale of the Prince, the Princess, and the Crocodile”—one in which an isolated princess falls in love with a prince who lives across the river in an enemy kingdom. The royals cannot meet as the river separating them is full of crocodiles; however, a friendly crocodile ferries the prince to the princess until the other crocodiles intervene. In the resulting struggle, the royals die; the smoke from their funeral pyres entwine in the sky and float upward as animals begin to sing. Julia’s parents disagreed on whether the fairy tale had a happy or unhappy ending. Julia says, “I myself was never sure” (98).