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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

Wendy Law-Yone

by C. L. Chua

Other literary forms

In addition to her novels, Wendy Law-Yone has published short fiction as well as works of memoir, journalism, and technical writing. Like her novels, most of these other pieces are set in or concern her native land, Burma (renamed Myanmar in 1989). For instance, “Drought” (1993) is an erotic short story set on an island kampung (“village” in several Southeast Asian languages) about an ostracized Eurasian girl who cares for a European pilot left comatose after a plane crash and who empowers and pleasures herself with his unconscious body. “The Year of the Pigeon” (1994) is a memoir about Law-Yone’s wedding in Rangoon, Burma, to Sterling Seagrave on their second date (after two years of intense written correspondence between them) and her attempt to escape Burma’s military regime, her imprisonment, and her eventual release into exile.

Several of Law-Yone’s most vivid and insightful journalistic pieces spring from visits she has made to her native Burma from exile: For example, “Life in the Hills,” which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in December, 1989, details her frustrating visit to a jungle hideout of dissident Burmese students after the brutal suppression of the prodemocracy movement by the military junta in 1988; and “The Outsider,” which appeared in the Asia edition of Time magazine in August, 2003, tells of her unsentimental journey to the hellscape of her former family home in Rangoon (now known as Yangon) some thirty years after she had fled it.

Law-Yone’s technical writing has appeared in Architectural Digest, and she has also published the business administration text Company Information: A Model Investigation (1980).

Achievements

Wendy Law-Yone’s novels have been translated into several European languages, and her works are highly respected, especially by Asian American literary scholars, for their insightful rendering of the problematic issue of immigration in the United States, their sympathetic portrayals of mental illness, their feminist construction of women characters, and their staunch prodemocracy stance on contemporary Burmese politics. Law-Yone has received a number of awards and honors for her writing, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Carnegie Endowment, a Harvard Foundation Award, and a David T. K. Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, England. She was nominated for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1995.

Biography

Wendy Law-Yone was born in 1947 in Mandalay, Burma, and she grew up in Rangoon, the capital city. Her father was Edward Law-Yone, a patriot who played a leading role in Burmese politics; he fought on the side of the Allies during World War II, joining an American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) unit. After the war, he became the editor and publisher of The Nation, Burma’s leading English-language newspaper during the years before and immediately following Burma’s achieving independence from Britain in 1948. When General Ne Win staged a military coup in 1962 and wrested control from the democratically elected U Nu, Law-Yone was imprisoned. He remained in custody for six years before being freed and exiled from Burma; he then attempted to organize armed resistance to the military dictatorship and held the portfolio for foreign affairs in the shadow cabinet of the Burmese government in exile. Edward Law-Yone died in the United States in 1980. These political events, occurring so close to home and family, left a deep, lasting impression on Wendy Law-Yone, and she revisits them frequently in her creative writing.

When growing up, Law-Yone was recognized as being gifted with unusual musical talent, and upon graduation from secondary school (about the time of her father’s imprisonment) she was offered scholarships to study music at Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in the Soviet Union as well as at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her father’s arrest and the cancellation of her passport made it impossible for her to accept either offer, however; she was even forced to quit attending the University of Rangoon and could keep herself intellectually occupied only by studying German at a language school.

In 1967 Law-Yone married American journalist Sterling Seagrave (son of Dr. Gordon Seagrave, the “Burma Surgeon” of World War II fame); she had met him at a concert in 1965 and then carried on a two-year correspondence with him while he was in the United States. They married in 1967 when the Burmese authorities granted Seagrave a twenty-four-hour visa. After a failed attempt to escape Burma, Law-Yone was incarcerated for several weeks, but eventually she was allowed to leave the country; she then lived temporarily in Bangkok, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where she remained for two years and started drafting the beginnings of The Coffin Tree.

In 1973 she emigrated to the United States, where her father had taken up residence in 1971, and she attended Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Graduating in 1975, she divorced her husband (she was by then the mother of twins) and went to live in the Washington, D.C., area, where for three decades she freelanced at The Washington Post newspaper and worked on her fiction writing. She also married a Washington attorney, Charles A. O’Connor III, and had two children with him. In 2002 she was awarded a fellowship at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, and she subsequently took up permanent residence in the United Kingdom while retaining her American citizenship.

Analysis

No fiction writer on the world stage has written as authoritatively and effectively as Wendy Law-Yone about contemporary Burma, that area of political darkness in the heart of a troubled Southeast Asia. Her authority stems from the grit of her experience garnered as she came of age in a family close to the center of political power and ideological foment during a time when the war-torn postcolonial nation of Burma was aborning and then toppling into bloody military dictatorship. The effectiveness of her fiction derives from the myriad facets of a talented imagination: the utterly convincing social and psychological realism of situations and characters, the clever and witty unfolding of plot, the rich and intricate use of archetypal patterns drawn from ancient Asian religion or of iconic prototypes drawn from contemporary American pop culture, the candor with which the problematic of U.S. immigration is explored, the honesty with which the real pain of mental illness is made palpable, the skill with which the malignancies of patriarchy are laid open by an unerring feminist scalpel, and the critical intensity of the light of democratic and humanitarian principles that is shone upon the dark deeds of a military dictatorship.

The Coffin Tree

Law-Yone’s first novel, The Coffin Tree, set partially in Burma and partially in the United States, has received many accolades from reviewers. It has been praised for its supple prose, telling imagery, and compelling presentation of the difficulties that can confront immigrants in the United States as well as for the painfully realistic depiction of the mental illness that afflicts the unnamed Burmese narrator and her elder brother, Shan.

Shan’s psychosis is partially attributable to heredity; his mother, a Burmese hill-tribe woman, was mentally ill. Much of the blame for the children’s psychosis, however, is justly laid at the door of their father and his treatment (or neglect) of them. He is a legendary freedom fighter and founder of a guerrilla force struggling against Burma’s military dictatorship. Of patrician background, he sacrifices his whole life and his family to his unquestionably worthy political cause. Haughty, taciturn, and sudden of action, he is a powerfully distant and largely absent father figure. (Interestingly, the obverse of this portrait of the dynamic and driven Asian male is the relative called Uncle, who only eats, sleeps, and picks at his skin all day.) Their father brings up Shan with a heavy hand—for instance, slapping him to cure him of his stutter. He is perceived as an enigma by his daughter, for he can be deeply affectionate when she falls ill but is profoundly indifferent at other times. The narrator’s neurosis is also associated with her feelings of guilt and inferiority toward her mother, who died giving birth to her, and these feelings are exacerbated by her grandmother’s calling her “mother-killer” and repeatedly disparaging her plain looks by comparison with her mother’s beauty.

For their safety, the narrator and Shan migrate to the United States when their father takes to the jungle to head his guerrilla force. Upon their arrival in New York, however, they find that their father’s contacts are unhelpful and uncomprehending, so they must fend for themselves, wandering through Florida, Vermont, and Illinois. Their efforts in the hoped-for promised land are met by failure. Shan is unable to hold a job and sinks into paranoia and cerebral malaria; he finally dies, clutching in pain at his chest, in Chicago. The narrator is able to hold on to low-level jobs but is so devastated by Shan’s death that she attempts suicide herself. She is committed to a mental institution, which is described in vivid detail (one of Law-Yone’s brothers worked in a mental institution). She makes a slow and tentative recovery that seems to hold out the possibility of a new life—a process also intimated by the novel’s title, which is an allusion to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which describes the soul’s journey toward reincarnation after death.

Irrawaddy Tango

In Irrawaddy Tango, her second novel, Law-Yone creates a picaresque narrative about female identity formation and empowerment in a context of political repression. Her settings are again Southeast Asia and the United States. This is also a dystopian novel in which much of the action takes place in an imaginary military dictatorship called Daya, which is readily recognized as Burma. Furthermore, Law-Yone seems to be using a witty kind of narrative collage in telling her tale and developing her protagonist.

As the female protagonist-narrator relates her picaresque career, during which her identity as an Asian American woman is formed, the author appears to lead her through several phases of development comprising a collage of iconic female identities drawn from American pop culture. For instance, Tango’s career begins chronologically with an “Evita” phase during which she, like the Eva Perón of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1970’s stage musical, starts out as a winsome and willful village girl who becomes a star tango dance contestant and rises to be the consort of her country’s military dictator, Supremo. Then Tango undergoes a “Patty Hearst” phase during which she, now a wealthy socialite, is kidnapped by guerrillas calling themselves the JLA (Jesu Liberation Army) and brainwashed into championing their cause and bedding with their leader; this parallels the 1974 kidnapping of the wealthy California socialite Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, which became a huge media event, the subject of several books and films. Tango’s kidnappers are eventually destroyed by her husband’s forces, who treat her as a traitor and imprison her. From this, Tango is rescued by an American activist named Lawrence (not of Arabia) who marries her and brings her to Los Angeles, planning to make a blockbuster film based on her life. Both film project and storybook marriage fall apart, however, and Tango drifts into anomie, alienation, and serial promiscuity as a directionless immigrant in the United States.

In the final empowering phase of her adventures, Tango is invited to return to Daya because Supremo has fallen ill and the Dayan astrologers feel that Tango can help revitalize him. Here Tango morphs into an avatar of the Spider Woman—a reference to Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1979) and the 1993 Broadway musical based on the novel. She thus returns to Daya, mates with Supremo after performing a veritable feat of arousal, and then bludgeons the dictator to death, thereby empowering herself and setting her people free.

Bibliography

1 

Bow, Leslie. “The Gendered Subject of Human Rights: Domestic Infidelity in Irrawaddy Tango and The Scent of the Gods.” In Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Employs a postcolonial and feminist perspective to make an illuminating comparison of the treatment of the politics of human rights and domestic infidelity in Law-Yone’s Irrawaddy Tango, set in Burma, and Fiona Cheong’s The Scent of the Gods (1991), set in Singapore.

2 

Cowart, David. “Immigration as Bardo: Wendy Law-Yone’s The Coffin Tree.” In Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction in Contemporary America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. Provides a detailed analysis of Law-Yone’s first novel, emphasizing the themes of immigrant nostalgia and madness in relationship to the work’s allusions to the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

3 

Har, Janie C. “Food, Sexuality, and the Pursuit of a Little Attention.” Hitting Critical Mass 1, no. 1 (Fall, 1993): 83-92. Presents a close reading of the food imagery in The Coffin Tree and argues that the characters compensate for their inability to give love or sex by offering food instead.

4 

Ho, Tamara C. “The Coffin Tree by Wendy Law-Yone.” In A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and Stephen H. Sumida. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001. Sound and useful guide to the study of The Coffin Tree. Includes helpful sections on the historical contexts of the book.

5 

Law-Yone, Wendy. “Beyond Rangoon: An Interview with Wendy Law-Yone.” Interview by Leslie Bow. MELUS 27, no. 4 (Winter, 2002): 183-200. Wide-ranging interview covers Law-Yone’s early life in Burma, the theme of sex and power in her writing (especially in Irrawaddy Tango), and her methods of composition. Also discusses her work on a nonfiction book about the history of her family’s origins in China.

6 

_______. “Wendy Law-Yone.” Interview by Nancy Yoo and Tamara Ho. In Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. Law-Yone discusses her family and her adolescent years in Burma, her feelings about being Asian American, and her treatment of mental illness and immigration as themes in her works.

7 

Lee, Rachel. “The Erasure of Places and the Re-siting of Empire in Wendy Law-Yone’s The Coffin Tree.” Cultural Critique 35 (Winter, 1996/1997): 149-178. Analyzes the novel’s differentiation of space into safe prisons and perilous free spaces, and warns against reading it as universal or transnational, arguing that such readings tend to uproot Asian American works from their Asian roots and dislocate them from their native terrain, which is tantamount to imperialist appropriation.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Chua, C. L. "Wendy Law-Yone." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_13700141000060.
APA 7th
Chua, C. L. (2010). Wendy Law-Yone. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Chua, C. L. "Wendy Law-Yone." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.