How can Bo Bo in Burma, only 12, help his parents?

The Heart Remembers is the third novel in a series set in Burma (now Myanmar), written in German by Jan-Philipp Sendker. The first two novels in the series are The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (2012) and A Well-Tempered Heart (2014) While it is not necessary to have read these two to enjoy The Heart Remembers, I suspect the new book will send readers to them to live a while longer with these interesting characters.

Sendker, who was born in Hamburg in 1960, traveled first to Burma in 1995 as a journalist and several times later as a novelist. He was Stern’s American correspondent from 1990 to 1995 and its Asian correspondent from 1995 to 1999. His books have been translated into Burmese even though they criticized the military. For example, the military is said to have kidnapped young men and sent them into minefields as human mine detectors. “My translator at the time said that as a foreigner I had a kind of fool’s license,” says Sendker. “A local writer probably would not have been able to express himself in that way.”

While there is nothing so horrific in The Heart Remembers, the Army does confiscate a piece of land a character owns and will not sell. And it is clear that the military is a force to avoid if possible.

We follow four main characters, 12-year-old Ko Bo Bo; his uncle U Ba, who is Bo Bo’s caretaker; Bo Bo’s mother Julia Win, who is U Ba’s sister, a Burmese-American lawyer; and Bo Bo’s father Thar Thar, who is a Buddhist monk and former soldier. Bo Bo tells his part of the story in the first person; Julia’s and Thar Thar’s stories are told in the third. Bo Bo has not seen his mother in seven years; he sees his father for only a week or so once a year because Thar Thar cannot leave Julia alone for long in Yangon.

The action takes place in  Kalaw, a village in central Burma interesting enough to attract foreign tourists; in New York City, where Julia has been a high-powered lawyer; and in Yangon, a large city to the south at the confluence of the Yangon and Bago Rivers (formerly Rangoon). One of the many pleasures of The Heart Remembers is the tension Thar Thar feels moving about New York City and the stress Julia feels in unsettled Burma, where she had never lived. 

The book is set in the current day and twelve years earlier when the military junta was officially dissolved following a 2010 general election, and a nominally civilian government was installed. This, along with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and political prisoners, improved the country's human rights record and foreign relations.

The narrative is set in action when Bo Bo discovers letters his uncle U Ba has written about his parents’ love story. He presses U Ba to tell him about Julia’s courtship with Thar Thar, a romance that unfolds against the uncertain backdrop of the Saffron Revolution, a series of mass protests in 2007, spurred by increases in fuel prices and a long history of military government rule. At the time, Thar Thar is in New York with Julia but feels he must return to Burma to participate in the revolution.

Back in the present day, Bo Bo hatches a plan to help his family by employing his acute emotional perception. He tells us, “I can tell that a person is sad even when they’re laughing. I can tell that someone is getting angry, even if they pretend that everything is fine. I can tell when rage is a mask for fear. I can sense the uneasiness behind a friendly voice. Your eyes will give you away. They can’t pretend. They can’t lie, even when they want to.” Believing he can cure his mother, Bo Bo sets off to find his parents and bring his family back together.

The Heart Remembers is smoothly translated by Kevin Wiliarty. It is an absorbing and persuasive evocation of a place and situation about which few readers will know much more than what television news has reported. In other words, almost nothing.