Simon Wu at the Paris Review:
A coming-of-age ceremony, a Burmese bar mitzvah, a meditation retreat: I had called it all of those things to friends in the weeks before. It was a little bit of each but “more ceremonial slash familial than necessarily religious,” I’d qualified. We’d bargained with my mother for weeks to get out of it. We’re nearly thirty, my brother Nick reasoned. We’re adults. We didn’t want to shave our heads, wear monk’s robes, meditate all day. Maybe it is important to you, but we don’t care about religion, we said, armed with years of therapy.
We haggled it down from a week to a long weekend. My uncle Pawksa and my cousins would arrive from Boston late that night, and my mother was occupied trying to make sure they didn’t interact with my other uncle, Soe Aung, and his sons. Ten of us in total: me, my dad, my brothers Nick and Duke, my two uncles, my four cousins. One woman for whom the whole thing was actually for: my grandmother. My mother, one woman to hold the whole thing up.
more here.
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