Life as a Minor Celebrity

I bet you didn't know that we were famous.  Well, we're not "internet famous" or anything, but we are famous in Myanmar.  Let me explain.

I know at one point you have probably seen an "US Weekly" magazine and perused through the "Celebrities: They're just like us" section.  It's ok, you can admit it.  While waiting for a flight to take off and I have the choice of reading through the drivel of the in-flight magazine or the super cheese of the US Weekly that someone left behind, I choose the US Weekly.  It's not art, but it's never boring either.

If you haven't seen it, basically it has photos of celebrities doing "normal" things: Jennifer Anniston buying groceries, Brad Pitt walking dogs, or Jessica Biel buying hemorrhoid cream.  I guess the idea is to show that they are "normal" folks as well and that they don't spend their whole day eating caviar and drinking champagne chilled by swan-shaped ice sculptures.  Shocking stuff, I know.

In Myanmar, however, we are those celebrities who do things "just like other people".  For the majority of the past 50 years, foreigners have been heavily restricted from coming into the country.  As such there were few fair-skinned people around and the ones that were here were largely confined to embassy compounds.  In other words, the only time that most people in Myanmar saw foreigners was  on their TV set in the form of professional movie stars.  If you put in in context, let's say that the only time that you had ever seen an Asian person was in kung-fu movies.  It would be pretty awesome, then, to see a real-life Asian person walking down the street.  So, in this way, we become minor celebrities.

When we walk down the street wearing longyis (local sarong-like garments) people point at us and tell their friends "Hey, they're wearing longyis!"  When we ride the local bus, people give us their seat so that we can have a more comfortable ride.  When we speak an ounce of Burmese, it is always followed with a surprised reaction of "You speak Burmese very well!"  When we ride a local bicycle trishaw in the street, people wave at us or pull out their cell-phones to take pictures of it.  Heck, when we take out our trash, people smile and wave at us.


We found out one day that we are even are even featured on the local "Map of the Stars" if there were such a thing.  A local friend of ours who we hadn't seen in probably 3-4 months wanted to find us, so what did he do?  He simply started asking around for the 2 foreigners, one man and one woman with yellow hair.  After only about 15 minutes of asking people he was able to find exactly where we lived and confirm that at the moment, we were still in our apartment.  Yes, we are that popular. 

Of course, with all things, it isn't one-hundred percent peaches and cream.  There are some days when we want to just walk anonymously down the street and go about our business.  It can be exhausting sometimes having people constantly commenting on our activities and whereabouts.  On the whole, though, it's gratifying seeing people generally happy that we are trying out different aspects of their culture.

To keep our sanity on the days that we don't want to be C-list celebrities, we keep reminding ourselves that in addition to being visitors to Myanmar, we are also ambassadors from our countries.  In the coming years, I know there will be a lot more foreigners coming to the country and hopefully our little bit of good will help pave the way for those people.  So, if you should decide to come here, don't be shy with your new found celebrity status: use it to spread goodwill so that we can all enjoy the hospitality of the Myanmar people.