Elizabeth Shick Brings Burmese Recent History to Life in 'The Golden Land'

Award-winning author, Elizabeth Shick, stops by to discuss her debut novel and winner of the 2021 AWP Prize for the Novel, The Golden Land. A historical fiction set in dual timelines, “The story is about…Etta, she’s the narrator. It’s first person and she’s grieving the death of her grandmother, her Burmese grandmother, who she had a very complicated and difficult relationship with. So as the novel opens, Etta is sorting through her grandmother’s belongings and confronted with a flood of memories, childhood memories, and some of those memories are very difficult and some are happier of course, but most of them revolve around this 1988 family reunion that Etta and her family spent in what was then Burma. It was right before it changed its name to Myanmar, and then meanwhile, so Etta is, kind of, dealing with these, these emotions around the memories, when her sister who is seven years younger, so has a completely different set of memories from that same trip, decides somewhat impulsively and against Etta’s wishes to take their grandmother’s ashes back to Myanmar and this leaves Etta with this dilemma of what to do, whether to stay in Boston where she feels safe with her fiance and her career, which is going well, or to follow her sister back to Myanmar and face these memories.”

Having lived six years in Myanmar and twenty-five years abroad gave Shick the knowledge and experience she needed to write in the perspective of her Burmese-American protagonist. “It sort of came to me when I started writing. The very first line I wrote which I didn’t end up keeping was… ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about Burma,’ and I just kind of went with that that I just had this voice in my head of this young woman who couldn’t get Burma out of her mind.” Schick also explains why the names Myanmar and Burma are used interchangeably when referring to the country. “It changed names in 1989. So, Burma was the British name for the country, for the colony. That was derived from, I mean my understanding is, it was derived from the word Bamar, which refers to the largest ethnic group in Myanmar and then the military government decided to change the name. What they said was that they wanted a name which was more inclusive, so they came up with Myanmar… so what you really have is one name which was given by the colonizer and another name which was given by the military regime. So that’s why both names are still used. In the United Nations, it’s Myanmar, but the U.S. Embassy is the U.S. Embassy in Burma. So the official name is Myanmar, but there are still some countries which refer to it as Burma and many people, depending on what generation they belong to, will also refer to it as Burma.” She also added that for those seeking more information, she has a page dedicated to Myanmar on her website. “I list many of the books that I read when I first moved there, and I also list different organizations that you can get involved in and support the resistant movement there now that the military has come back.”