This article was written by Moe Thet War, an English Literature student and tech journalist based in London.
I love books. I was raised on books, and picked up the habit of not going anywhere without a book from a very young age. When I went to college in the US, I realized that I could actually read books for the next four years, and so I majored in literature. And when I was a kid, receiving a new book was like receiving a new toy: it was an entire world that I could fall in love with and visit and revisit multiple times.
But I don’t need to convince you of how great books are. At the recent Nobel Myanmar Literary Festival, you shed light on the fact that rote learning in Burmese schools left little to no time or motivation for reading things that weren’t assigned in class. That’s true. But you also said technology is keeping young people from reading – and I find that comes from a narrow-minded approach to technology. Technology and reading are not mutually exclusive. Especially in our country, sometimes the best way to fuel a thirst for reading is through technology.
When I was growing up in Yangon in the early 2000s, I had to rely on technology, specifically the internet, to find great books. Whenever my mom went on trips abroad to Singapore or Bangkok, I scoured the internet for books. Books by my favorite authors or new books that I could read secretly, late at night, well past my bedtime. I compiled the titles into a list to give to my mom. “I wish you’d ask for something lighter than books,” she’d sometimes joke, but she never said no. I wouldn’t have found some of the best books of my adolescent and teenage years were it not for the internet.
You make a good point that there are extremely few, if any, good libraries in the country. Even growing up in a city as central as Yangon, the only fairly decent library I can remember is the British Library. It’s on Kanna Road, and apparently they now call it the Rangoon Library but when I was growing up, everyone referred to it as the British Library. My mom’s friend also had a “library” downtown that we’d go to every week. It wasn’t a real library; it was a small shop filled with books that we could check out and read for as long as we wanted, and when we returned them, we would pay according to how many days we’d borrowed them. She’d let us get away with a few free days because she was friends with my mom, and because my mom and I both always borrowed so many books.
Nowadays, we have hip new eateries opening up every day, but so few bookstores, and no new libraries. But, to a degree, that can be combated by the fact that young people now have access to technology. Sure, some kids might use the internet solely for playing games. (Not such a bad thing, either, but that’s another essay.) I reckon there are also kids who are using the internet the same way I did: to find books. In a lot of ways, the internet is the library, or the closest option to it.
As a part-time tech journalist, I’m well aware of how shiny and enticing today’s gadgets and games can be, but I’ve never felt the tech world pulling me away from my bookshelves. We both know how powerful a good book can be, and I find that even the most avid gamers can, and are, also book lovers. True, I’ve spent hours binge-watching Netflix, but I also spend hours researching obscure texts and material for schoolwork — texts that are thankfully made public and accessible through the power of technology. And when I come home during the holidays, I can worry less about bringing my twenty books’ worth of coursework with me because I know it’s all online.
Kids and young people like me are using the internet to find books, and, heck, my 73-year-old grandfather in Yangon does the same – with e-books. My mom and I got him a Kindle a few years ago, and it’s been his primary source of books. Sure, he still emails me a few that he’d like to have in physical form, but he doesn’t have to wait for my sporadic trips home to be able to read the books that he wants. Even with the country so rapidly expanding, there still isn’t really an equivalent to the kind of major bookstore chains and libraries that we see abroad. We can’t just pop into a Barnes & Noble or a Waterstones, but that doesn’t matter for my grandfather, because now he can just purchase his books directly on his Kindle and stay up reading late at night. Just like I did.
The views expressed in this opinion article do not necessarily reflect those of Coconuts Yangon.
