A Small, Finely Drawn Picture
covering burma and southeast asia
Friday, March 29, 2024
Magazine

BOOK REVIEW

A Small, Finely Drawn Picture


By EDITH MIRANTE DECEMBER, 2008 - VOLUME 16 NO.12


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At the end of his Burmese year, Delisle braves a three-day Vipassana Buddhist retreat and despite the inevitable discomfort (he needs four cushions for his meditation sessions), he wonders why he didn’t try it earlier, emerging “more peaceful than ever before, but also very alert.”

After the MSF France office closes, and the local employees have been assigned other jobs, the family prepares to leave. On a last neighborhood walk with his son, Delisle happens on a Ferris wheel of the low-tech Burmese type, being turned by one athletic longyi-clad man. It is a remarkable Buddhist image of the wheel of life and a most human symbol of Burma, so much effort for so little change—around and around it goes.

There is no postscript to Burma Chronicles to tell Delisle’s readers how things did begin to change in wondrous ways as the monks marched in 2007, or how things remain the same with the junta still in power in 2008.

Edith Mirante, author of Down the Rat Hole: Adventures Underground on Burma’s Frontiers (Orchid Press) and Burmese Looking Glass (Atlantic Monthly Press), is director of Project Maje: www.projectmaje.org



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