Fragile creatures: A memoir of love and pain
A book review by Anne Sarzin
Fragile creatures: A memoir propels the reader into a world of darkness and light, suffering and strength, trauma and resilience. Although pain in many guises shapes the lives of the four protagonists, this memoir, crafted with sensitivity and honesty, is suffused with longing to resolve the difficulties and to heal the wounds.
Even in the author Khin Myint’s darkest moments, however, he is buoyed by hope of better times to come; his mother never loses faith in the potential recovery of her chronically ill daughter, Khin’s sister Theda; and the siblings’ father, despite his destructive impact on his children, ultimately returns in redemptive ways to the family fold. It is a tale of people losing their way and battling to secure a foothold among the insecurities and uncertainties of their complex lives.
This family saga is fraught with personal difficulties and innumerable trials that all four family members encounter and contend with in their individual ways. Set in Perth, the torturous family narrative evolves into an exploration of societal pressures, beliefs—true and false—conventions and contested identities.
The author delineates with care and compassion his family’s history. His mother comes from England and shapes her son and daughter in the image of the children who peopled her English village. Their father, the first Burmese to leave his village on an AusAID scholarship for Australia, where he qualified as a psychologist, is obsessed with instilling Buddhistic values in his Asian children and is resentful of their mother’s Western standards. These domestic tensions and conflicts are magnified at the ‘bogan’ schools in Perth, where racism surfaces in cruel and relentless bullying that scars both children in irreparable ways.
This anti-Asian hatred and ostracism of the ‘other’ in Western Australia fed on xenophobic propaganda, such as the views Pauline Hanson expressed in Parliament—in 1996, she stated ‘We are in danger of being swamped by Asians’. This racism found a ready echo in the school playground and both children endured ritualised bullying, cruel comments and physical torments, inflicted on them by their white compatriots. How the children negotiated these complex worlds, the consequences of their exposure to trauma, and the crucial absence of professional resources, adult support and compassion, is described with sensitivity and honesty.
Aside from the racial divide that Khin attempted to bridge more or less unsuccessfully throughout his school years, he also researches the medical myths and toxic pharmaceutical therapies seized on by desperate patients with, as yet, undiagnosed conditions. His involvement in his sister’s ill health and his observations as she spirals rapidly down into a psychotic state, trigger for him massive doubts about the treatments that specialists recommend and, indeed, supervise, for diseases such as chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme disease. The destructive impact of many unproven curative measures is exacerbated by media shining a sensationalist light on these anecdotal findings and controversial healthcare issues.
Khin’s scepticism about his sister’s medical regime reveals his capacity for independent thought and his refusal to subscribe to the conventional wisdom of the day. He documents his insights into psychosis and suspects that, in his sister’s case, it is linked to repressed emotions that manifest as physical pain. Sadly, dedicated to her wellbeing, he is unaware of the impact vicarious trauma has on his own psyche. How he and his mother collaborate in Theda’s care, how they sustain the home front and a semblance of stability, despite the suicidal impulses and acute depression that plague the family in their unenviable isolation, makes for an absorbing and compelling read.
Khin has authored a memoir that is a contribution to our understanding of persecution and racism in Australia and their dire consequences in personal lives and their impact on national cohesion. It is an especially relevant message at this time, given the horrendous way ethnic bias and hatred threaten Australia’s social fabric. It is a brave attempt to decode many of the complexities that bedevil the lives of those on society’s margins. Khin is to be commended for baring his soul with such integrity and humility.
Fragile creatures: A memoir
Khin Myint, 2024
Black Inc., Collingwood, Victoria
