The Southern California Burmese Chinese Friendship Association is located at 5411 Valley Boulevard. We call it the “Pauk-Phaw Home.” Every weekend, it is as lively as a market. Traffic fills the street outside, while laughter and conversation fill the rooms within.
As soon as you enter, you see small pennants of many colors hanging everywhere. They were presented by Burmese Chinese associations from different parts of the world. The sight stirs emotion. No matter where Chinese from Burma now live, no matter how far apart they may be, their hearts as fellow overseas Chinese remain connected.
On the wall hangs a calendar showing a beautiful Burmese woman, along with glittering Burmese embroidered handicrafts. Burmese music plays through the room. Through sight and sound, you feel a kind of warm Burmese Chinese *pauk-phaw* kinship.
On the left is a wide, large counter covered with newspapers, books, and magazines. There are the *World Journal*, *Sing Tao Daily*, *The China Press*, *International Daily News*, and others, along with beautifully printed pictorial magazines, a stack of *Myanmar Chinese News*, and some Burmese-language magazines. Members sit around the counter reading quietly. Now and then, when someone finds something interesting, they begin discussing it with one another. Some criticize America’s policy on the Iraq War. Some are excited by the rapid industrial and agricultural development of the ancestral country. Others cheer the successful return of the Shenzhou spacecraft.
On the right, the men and women in the international ballroom-dance class, drenched in sweat, stop as the music ends. Their time is up. It is time to make way for the flower-arranging class.
Everyone becomes busy moving tables and chairs. Working together, they push two ping-pong tables side by side and set out more than thirty folding chairs. Roses, baby’s breath, evergreen leaves, and bunches of flowers whose names I do not know are placed on the tables. The flower-arranging class favored by the women members begins.
Whoever has the skill becomes the teacher. Members teach one another and learn from one another, with an experienced member who knows flower arranging taking the lead.
Many similar classes have been held over the past two years. There have been computer classes, Burmese cooking classes, occasional talks on health and well-being, and discussion meetings on various subjects. Members take part with great interest and gain a great deal from them.
All the association’s equipment and everyday supplies have been donated voluntarily by members. There is a large television with an excellent picture, a karaoke machine containing more than twenty thousand songs in English, Cantonese, Fujianese, and Mandarin, a video recorder and player, computers, a photocopier, a health-massage bed, ping-pong tables, a billiard table, exercise equipment, specially made Chinese-chess tables, and more than two hundred folding chairs.
If you are interested, you can pull up a chair, pour yourself a cup of piping-hot coffee, and take a bite of a sweet Burmese pastry. You will feel comfortable and warm. Familiar Burmese music reaches your ears, while your eyes watch programs from the homeland of the peacock.
This is the feeling of “home.”
Here, a shared desire to live together and support one another has brought everyone into one place. People are united and friendly, watching out for and helping one another. Everyone does whatever he or she can to do something good for the group.
Every year they hold a spring banquet, celebrate Mother’s Day, and honor the elderly during the Double Ninth Festival. Every event is lively and bustling.
A Burmese Chinese woman from Taiwan who was visiting relatives in America came to see the “Pauk-Phaw Home” and exclaimed, “It is really lively here. Everyone is so united!”
Another woman visiting from Canada, formerly a Burmese-language teacher at Beijing Foreign Studies University, met classmates and school friends she had not seen for many years. Enviously she said, “There are so many of you gathered together here, and it is so lively. I really envy you. Where we live, there are only two or three Chinese from Burma...”