A World Overturned: A Burmese Childhood 1933-1947 (Literature)

Born in the Shan States of Burma to an Anglo-Irish (Portestant) father of the Burma Frontier Service and a Burmese Buddhist mother, Maureen is, for her first 5 years, raised essentially as a happy Burmese child knowing only the Burmese language, which she and her parents speak exclusively. Disturbing things happen in her life and she is packed off to a convent run, ironically, by an order of Italian nuns who force her to speak only English and sort of cold-forge her into a more European type of young lady.

After the Japanese occupy Burma, she loses contact with her parents, and for three and a half years (1942-1945) lives a rather hardscrabble life with the nuns, whose Italian nationality shields them from the worst of the brutalities which the invaders exacted upon Europeans who had to stay behind. Following liberation, by then an adolescent, she discovers the fate of her parents and a story of heartbreaking betrayal. Nevertheless, ultimately reclaimed by friends of her father just before Burma's independance from Britain, she is taken away to a new homeland with its own astonishing revelations.

This story could be a soap opera script, but it is not so. The author has just cause for great resentment, but she evinces nothing of the kind. Rather, in the delightful reminiscences of a child's perspective of a Burma socity that is long gone, including the hurtful and the humorous parts in rapid succession, Maureen Baird-Murray reveals a thoughtful appraisal of her own personal experiences, and a compassionate, forgiving character.

Although limited in the period it covers, with leap to when the author is an adult, "A World Overturned" is likely the best autobiographical account ever written to date by the child of a mixed marriage in colonial Burma. Always a page-turner, it is informative, gripping, sometimes heart-rending, but ultimately soul satisfying.


A wonderful memoir of an amazing childhood in W War II   November 7, 1998
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This is a marvelous memoir of a young girl's surviving in Burma during the years leading up to and during World War II. Details are remembered with astonishing clarity and sharpness, the characters of those around her are quietly drawn, and the author stands forth as a bright child full of curiosity, resilience, and determination.

As the Japanese forces advance, young Maureen is left in a Catholic boarding school by her parents, a Burmese woman married to an Irish colonial administrator. Deprived of her mother's affection and language, she finds herself with a couple of British girls in the care of the Italian nuns who run the school, although speaking neither English nor Italian. When the Japanese military occupation arrives, with fairly dire effects, the author observes and describes the enemy soldiers with the same dispassionate clarity that she sees her teachers and companions. At the end of the War she is returned to her paternal grandmother in Ireland where the extreme culture shock after her life in Burma is dealt with briefly. The reader's heart yearns for her to be given the love and affection she has been deprived of during the War, but it is not forthcoming, yet the ending is neither bitter nor depressing. Clearly, the author has lived to become a successful person and parent in her own right, in Great Britain.

All this needs to become a terrific movie is dialogue to be added (there isn't very much--my only reason for not giving it 5 stars). The background is described sufficiently for the set-makers to get right to work building them.

To current discussions of racism and racial conflict, this adds an unusual Anglo-Burmese perspective.