The Coffin Tree by Wendy Law-Yone

First published: 1983

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1960’s through the mid-1970’s

Locale: Burma, New York City, and Chicago

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, a young Burmese woman whose father sends her to the United States
• Shan, the narrator’s elder half-brother, who accompanies her to the United States
• The narrator’s father, whose brief appearances in the novel only underscore his tyranny over the lives of his children
• The inhabitants of 3 East, a psychiatric ward to which the narrator is committed after she attempts suicide

The Novel

The Coffin Tree is the story of a young Burmese woman who leaves her country, where civil war is impending, to arrive in New York City in October, 1969, along with her elder brother, Shan. Their father, a revolutionary, had been in hiding in the hills of Burma for three years, but he manages to arrange for the safe departure of his two children. In exile in America, the narrator recounts the story of her childhood in “monsoon country,” the traumatic early years in New York City, the death of her brother, and the time she spends in a psychiatric ward after attempting suicide.

When The Coffin Tree opens, the narrator’s tyrannical maternal grandmother has just died, and she is left in the care of elderly maiden aunts. Her father is absent, presumably involved in the continuing Revolution of the Hilltribes, to which he has pledged his life. Readers are introduced to the family members in the narrator’s home: Auntie Lily and Auntie Rosie, whose collective primary function is to run the household; the inertia-gripped Uncle, a glutton; and the narrator’s adored half-brother, Shan.

There is a military coup one day, and the narrator’s father has fled to the hilly north. Although the tension is almost palpable, from the narrator’s matter-of-fact description of the murder of “Prince R’s” son to her recounting of her aunts’ efforts to procure food at the markets, there seems to be a suspension of time and space. The day-to-day has become the glue of existence. Before, such trivial details formed the invisible backdrop to life’s worthier moments; now, however, the mundane takes center stage, as if by necessity, so that sense can be made from ending up, as the aunts do, with two pairs of men’s undershorts instead of sugar, salt, oil, or aspirin. Uncle’s inertia turns into infectious fatalism, and the household becomes entrapped in a world explained by “must be!” Suddenly, two or three years after the coup, word comes that the narrator’s father has arranged for the flight of his two children, presumably to a safer place.

The narrator and her brother arrive in New York City. Fleeing the upheaval in their homeland, it would seem to the refugees that festive, year-end New York City is the perfect haven. Instead, it is the setting for their dissolution. The traumas of flight and severance from homeland are now juxtaposed against the escalating problems of being in a strange new city. When the promised funds from Burma do not materialize, the pair face unaccustomed poverty. Humiliated and penniless, they manage to reach a journalist acquaintance of their father’s, Benjamin Lane. During a year spent in the journalist’s basement, the narrator and Shan reach their nadir: Clinging to their pride, they decline to have their meals with the Lanes; instead, they sneak food from the Laneses’ kitchen to maintain the illusion that they are fending for themselves.

Meanwhile, Shan continues a descent from sanity. While the narrator had already wondered about her brother’s storytelling flights of fancy back in Burma, it is during their years in the new country that she begins to notice distinct signs that his grasp on reality is slipping day by day. Finally, in Chicago, both siblings imprisoned by Shan’s illness, Shan dies one evening from a heart attack.

The second half of the novel is about the narrator’s experiences among the fellow inhabitants of 3 East, a psychiatric ward, and of the events, after Shan’s death, leading to her attempted suicide. After Shan’s death, the narrator drifts through the numbing routines of a job and domestic chores. When she learns of her father’s death, the news paradoxically shakes her from her stupor. She has found a new purpose to her days: She will systematically direct herself toward suicide. Interspersed with these accounts are flashbacks to her childhood in Burma and memories of her brother and her father.

By the end of the novel, the narrator has left 3 East behind her. She comes to a reconciliation with, if not a resolution of, the disparate strains of her life: the ones that pull her to the “monsoon country” and the unresolvable nature of familial ties, and the ones that now bind her to the new country where she has spilled her blood. The narrator points out, with neither ecstasy nor regret, that the position she writes from is that of being alive.

The Characters

The narrator is a girl of fourteen when the narrative begins, and she is in her late twenties when the novel ends. She is the cloistered younger child of an upper-middle-class family in Burma, where her father is a revolutionary hero. Though cloistered, and pampered in the material sense as a result of her family’s wealth, the narrator is uncared for emotionally. To her recently deceased maternal grandmother, she was a “mother killer,” blamed for her mother’s death in childbirth. Her aunts seem to dote on her, yet their doting seems to derive from their own sense of function rather than from the fact that the narrator is a motherless child in need of love. With her father mostly absent, the narrator’s only emotional support comes from her brother, who tells her what she never tires of hearing: “You are my sister; I’ll look after you.” Innocent even in the turmoil of the last years in Burma, the narrator is compelled to become self-reliant and resourceful. When her brother becomes ill, she becomes his nurse, parent, and anchor to reality.

Shan, the narrator’s half-brother, is ten years older than the narrator. He is the charismatic older brother of her youth who tells her stories, shows her secret places, keeps a coterie of unsavory friends, and seems to charm everyone except his father. Best of all, he is the narrator’s protector. Daring and dashing in Burma, Shan is out of his element in New York City. Here he does not have the means to play prodigal son, and he has no hangers-on with whom to play. Like his sister, he is untrained for any but the most menial jobs, but while his sister diligently seeks work, he is almost reluctant to have to think about a necessary income. Shan seems to have left much of his bravado in Burma, and the chronicle of the early years in America recounts Shan’s rapid disintegration. Exhibiting such classic symptoms of manic depression as paranoia, sleeplessness, and wild mood swings, Shan becomes the narrator’s millstone.

If the narrator is the emotional center of the novel, her father represents the novel’s emotional void. Although he appears only sporadically, his very absence becomes a telling presence in the narrator’s life. In brief appearances at his home, he is nevertheless able to send his whole household into a fearful frenzy. He is a cold, calculating man, and he seems to be defined by the violence that is a part of his revolutionary work. He is a father who tries to beat the stuttering out of his son, who is remembered by the narrator for a single manifestation of fatherly love. Even in death, he plays a pivotal role in his daughter’s life, pushing her toward suicide.

Most of the inhabitants of 3 East have also attempted suicide. They are a varied group, but collectively they are a reminder of the depths to which the narrator has sunk in confrontation with life’s relentless demands. In their bantering and teasing and their matter-of-fact assessments of incarceration, however, they provide the necessary respite from the narrator’s lonely, guilt-ridden existence.

Critical Context

The Coffin Tree is Law-Yone’s first novel. Although Law-Yone was herself born in Burma and came to the United States when she was twenty, it is not clear to what extent the novel is autobiographical. The public events alluded to in the book roughly parallel the unrest, the uprisings by ethnic minorities, and the succession of military regimes that have ruled Burma for many of the years since its independence from British India in 1948.

The Coffin Tree was first published in 1983, several years before a pronounced escalation in the publishing of Asian American texts by mainstream publishing houses. A paperback edition appeared in 1987; however, relatively little critical attention has been paid to the novel. Law-Yone, a book reviewer for The Washington Post, also published a short story set entirely in Burma in 1988.

Bibliography

America. CXLIX, August 27, 1983, p. 96.

Aung San Suu Kyi. Freedom from Fear: And Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 1991. A collection of writings by the winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. Aung San charts her involvement with the Burmese National League for Democracy and the tumultuous political events of the late 1980’s in Burma. Provides a helpful context for Law-Yone’s fiction.

Donnison, F. S.V. Burma. New York: Praeger, 1970. This broad history of Burma and its people contains a chapter entitled “Military Dictatorship” which describes the military coup staged by General Ne Win in 1962, the event that forms the political backdrop to part 1 of The Coffin Tree.

Forbes, Nancy. “The Coffin Tree.” The Nation 236 (April 30, 1983): 551. Forbes notes that since The Coffin Tree is Law-Yone’s first novel, it is “not surprising that it reads like autobiography.” Forbes also states that the novel seems to be “on familiar terms with all experience, no matter how bizarre,” and that Law-Yone “writes with a cool sense of incongruity.”

Kim, Elaine H. “Asian American Writers: A Bibliographical Review.” American Studies International 22, no. 2 (1984): 41-78. The article gives a useful overview of various types of Asian American writing and its special concerns, such as the Vietnam War and gender issues, and discusses problems in the criticism of Asian American literature. Kim notes that The Coffin Tree is an important novel because it focuses on the unique experiences of a small minority group. As a refugee, the narrator has lost ties to the most important unit of identity in her culture, and there is no established ethnic community in the United States for her to join. The article concludes with a bibliography of primary works of Asian American literature.

Larson, Charles R. “Books in English From the Third World.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 58 (Summer, 1984): 383-384. Larson supposes that because the “horror of the tale is simply so convincing, so dramatically total,” Law-Yone’s book must be autobiographical. The review makes an interesting comparison between “Americans and Europeans going crazy in exotic climes” and the converse scenario faced by the book’s Asian protagonists.

Law-Yone, Wendy. “Ankle.” Grand Street 7 (Spring, 1988): 7-24. A short story that raises a few of the themes explored in The Coffin Tree. The narrator is a young Burmese girl who is plunged into the company of an unsavory couple as a result of the ineffectual protection of her parents. The story has some of the pathos of The Coffin Tree but is much more lighthearted, almost comic, in its treatment of childhood.

Law-Yone, Wendy. “Life in the Hills.” The Atlantic 264, no. 6 (December, 1989): 24-36. Law-Yone writes about the continuing civil war waged by the ruling government against Burmese ethnic groups, student dissidents, and communist insurgents.

Lee, Rachel, C. “The Erasure of Places and the Re-siting of Empire in Wendy Law-Yone’s The Coffin Tree.” Cultural Critique 35 (Winter, 1996-1997): 149-178. Explores the themes of diaspora and imperialism in Law-Yone’s novel.

Library Journal. CVIII, May 1, 1983, p. 920.

Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, et al., eds. The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology. Corvallis, Oreg.: Calyx Books, 1989. In her introduction, Lim explodes the stereotypical notion that Asian American women are a homogenous group. The book has an excellent comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 13, 1983, p. 12.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII, May 15, 1983, p. 12.

Olmedo, Esteban L., and Delores L. Parron. “Mental Health of Minority Women: Some Special Issues.” Professional Psychology 12, no. 1 (February, 1981): 103-111. Though written in professional jargon, the article concisely discusses the stresses and mental disorders that minority women in the United States are prone to suffer, some of which are traceable to racism and sexism. The problems described are applicable to immigrant populations as well as to native minority populations.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXIII, March 4, 1983, p. 86.