Reviewed by Amy Grier
The Golden Land
by Elizabeth Shick
University of Nebraska Press
Sept 2024, 324 pages, ISBN: 9781496241740
Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel
After the death of her Ahpwa, or grandmother, thirty-something Etta returns to her Ahpwa’s homeland, Myanmar, for the first time since she was thirteen. At first, she resists going, even as her younger sister, Parker, claims their Ahpwa’s ashes and jumps on a plane. Etta wants the long-buried memories of the year her family lived in Myanmar—a year of love, adventure, chaos, and violence—to remain tucked away in her psyche, allowing her to live in the stable, if predictable, life she shares with her partner, Jason. But the mystery of her Ahpwa’s past, the unresolved grief of being torn away from her first love, Shwe, and the memory of the violence she witnessed compel her to join Parker in Yangon and attempt to piece together the events of her youth.
Searching through her Ahpwa’s closet, Etta discovers several yoke thé—Myanmar handmade marionettes. In her memory, they live as the beloved and beautifully maintained characters who embody the stories of her youth. But the state in which she finds them—hidden, neglected, and dismembered—reflects the secrecy and turmoil that pulled her family apart:
[They] remain a jumble of estranged body segments—necks, upper and lower thighs, calves, feet, hands—a few still connected by a frayed piece of string, others completely severed from the correlating parts… the marionettes seem so helpless, damaged all those years ago, then stashed away at the top of Ahpwa’s closet like a dirty secret.
With this striking metaphor, Elizabeth Shick sends us on a journey with Etta as she reconnects with Myanmar, her sister, her first love, and the painful recollections of living in a country where she wonders, “How is it possible for such beauty to exist alongside such evil?”
Shick expertly pulls us into Yangon life and culture through glimpses of people, streets, food vendors, colorful gardens, and ancient temples. As Etta strolls through a working-class neighborhood, she notes how “makeshift shacks are stacked one upon the other like the slipper seashells I used to collect at the beach as a child,” then passes a man who “stands in front of his shack, his longyi hiked up to his groin as he lathers soap over his bare chest and legs.” We see how the present coexists with the past when, through a taxi window, Etta spies “a shop selling bright blue PVC pipes, then a gold-trimmed monastery with billowing burgundy robes pegged to the clothesline.” Later, she marvels at “a man cranking the wheel of a hand-operated sugar cane press” and “women balancing baskets of goods on their heads. Life being lived out in the open.” Amidst the everyday beauty of Yangon life, she asks herself, “How could I have forgotten all this?”
Shick also takes care to show the varieties of Myanmar food, from markets to street vendors to restaurants. One passage detailing a group dinner stands out as a delectable depiction of a Yangon meal:
The salads begin to arrive—fresh pennywort leaves mixed with green chili, sour lime, and roasted chickpea flour; succulent river prawns combined with fleshy pomelo then tossed with crispy fried onions, crunchy roasted peanuts, and fresh green coriander; pickled tea leaves mixed with hard green tomatoes; crunchy fried peas and tiny dried shrimp. Sharp, spicy, crunchy, salty, sour—every bite is an explosion of flavors.
While experiencing the sights, sounds, and flavors of her 2011 visit—a moment when Myanmar seemed to be headed toward a more democratic government and freer society—Etta witnesses evidence of ongoing oppression. She learns that her childhood love, Shwe, drives a taxi to support his real work—writing an anonymous blog calling out the injustices perpetrated by the Myanmar government. As Shwe describes smuggling his subversive articles out of the country in baskets of dried lentils, Etta realizes that this freer-seeming Myanmar is mostly a façade. Shwe carries the literal and psychic scars of a brutal imprisonment to prove it.
Crucially, Etta also witnesses the small acts of defiance that allow Myanmar people to survive. When she visits an internet café, the owner explains that he is required to take a screenshot of her computer every five minutes to ensure she isn’t visiting any banned sites. He also explains that he tends to cough right before he takes that screenshot. Etta marvels at his creativity in finding a way to preserve his autonomy and dignity even while doing what his government requires.
As Etta considers Myanmar’s complicated history and ongoing struggle, she gains insight into what she calls her Ahpwa’s “America the Beautiful” phase, the time after their fateful family trip in which she eschewed everything Myanmar—refusing to wear her native clothes, cook her familiar food, or speak her first language. She realizes that her Ahpwa was “trying to convince herself that, living in the land of freedom and democracy, we’d escaped the horrors of Burma’s military regime.” Etta comes away with an empathetic revelation, one she takes to heart—that pain and grief live inside of us and cannot be outrun; that repressed memories will crack through our psyches no matter where we are; that “democracy doesn’t preclude loneliness and suffering. Freedom of speech is of little comfort if no one is listening.”
Shick extrapolates Etta’s newfound wisdom into a larger understanding of how oppressive governments destroy families as well as freedoms, and that the impact of violence, estrangement, and secrecy does not disappear, or even stay hidden, if ignored. The pain and grief we hide from younger generations and refuse to process ourselves never goes away—it is a weight we hand down and force them to carry, a dark mystery they strive to untangle within their own confusion and guilt as they wonder why their relationships fail and their carefully-built worlds never truly feel safe.
Ultimately, Etta must confront the brutal act of violence she witnessed at thirteen—the moment that seemed to drive the final wedge between her parents, between herself and Shwe, and between her Ahpwa and Myanmar. By summoning the courage to revisit that place, she learns that confronting the most frightening and painful parts of ourselves does not destroy us. It destroys the power of those memories to keep us afraid, confused, and closed off. We may still feel pain, but we feel it as we move forward with a strong and open heart.
About the reviewer: Amy Grier is a writer and editor who earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Lesley University. A singer and classically trained pianist, she has taught music and English in the United States and Japan. Her work has appeared in The Hooghly Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Solstice Literary Magazine, Poetry East, the Brevity Blog, Eratio Postmodern Poetry Journal, Streetlight Magazine, and others. Her memoir-in-progress, Blood is Thicker, is about living with chronic blood cancer and her estrangement from her parents.