Another Leaf

Another Leaf: A Refugee Story
by Marg Epp as told by Ma They Yare
Published by YNWP
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 ISBN 9781778690310

Ten years ago, while backpacking around Thailand, I visited a Karen village to photograph a woman with gold rings elongating her neck. I knew nothing of Karen culture and was shamelessly after the sheer spectacle. While that experience deserves to be in a “How Not to Be a Culturally Sensitive Traveler” file, it did have me especially eager to read Another Leaf: A Refugee Story, the memoir of a Myanmar-born Karen woman, Ma They Yare, as told, with the aid of translators, to her friend, Marg Epp. A small reparation, yes, but a step in the right direction.

Epp and her refugee sponsorship group at Wildwood Mennonite Church in Saskatoon were responsible, with assistance from the Mennonite Central Committee, for the immigration of single mother Ma They Yare and her five children to Saskatoon in 2016. Ma They Yare bravely fled war-ravaged Myanmar (formerly Burma) with her family, and they remained in Thailand’s Mae Ra Mu Luang refugee camp for fourteen years before their arrival in Canada (sans the children’s father), where everything—food, clothing, currency, weather, customs, language—was new and strange. Epp’s compassion for the immigrant experience was partially informed by her own family’s wartime escape from Europe to Canada.

The author explains that Ma They Yare “has spent much of her life searching in order that she and her family might live lives that are about more than just survival,” and a Karen proverb about a caterpillar continually and necessarily searching for “a new leaf” to eat “in order to survive and grow” is used as a metaphor. Epp writes: “Like the monarch butterfly [Ma They Yare] has crossed borders in search of safer habitats and has shown us that just living is not enough. There is more to life than mere survival.”

Unable to read or write herself, Ma They Yare stresses the importance of education for her children. Three of the five were born in the refugee camp, and Epp’s included touching letters they’ve penned to their mother in this fascinating story that puts a distinct face on the ongoing civil war in Myanmar (frequent and brutal attacks by the Burmese army on Karen villages continue today); details what life’s like in Thai refugee camps; and records the joys and struggles of integration into Canadian society.

I get a strong sense of Ma They Yare’s strength, directness and hopefulness in her conversational, first-person accounts, from village life and running from Burmese soldiers in the jungle to “things happening to women that [she doesn’t] want to talk about” in the refugee camp, and being terrified in Canada by the house-rattling wind and the smoke alarm’s initial “deafening shriek.”

It was interesting to read about bamboo houses, dugout canoes, the custom of Karin women getting tattoos “all over [their] body” as protection against snake poison, and Ma They Yare’s “traditional Buddhist Marriage”. Actually, the entire, book was a welcome education for this reader. It’s a story the anti-immigrant faction of Canadian society would be well-advised to read.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM