So, you are a hamburger, aren’t you?
So, you are a hamburger, aren’t you?
So, you are a hamburger, aren’t you?
So, you are a hamburger, aren’t you?
– Aung Cheimt, “Hamburger Eater”, trans. Zeyar Lynn
In childhood we pillow-fought our way through boys. With Cherry’s wrists locked under me I won the right to write this one tall guy whose name I never remembered, but he was tall, and the only tall guy in class. With an uppercut to my chin and sweet nursing all night long Cherry got to make Boy Who Reads Books a tape of Michael Learns to Rock. Let it be known that it did not always hurt. Cherry tickled me till fevering one afternoon to kiss Thein Maung “so soft it terrified him.” I made my first ever dinner in her kitchen to corner Htoo Htoo under the stairs where I asked him how to make a wife because Cherry told me he had already made wives of several girls at 14. He said you have to midwife a cry out of her, better yet if cries, and not because she’s sad. So Cherry and I tried it out. I read Cherry an Aung Cheimt poem about hamburgers, or hamburger eaters, or us, or them, but she just got angry. No enlightened tears. She said I was not enough of a boy to insist on her being a hamburger. Cherry had learned how to become a boy from Penguin ELT Readers’ 16-page Twelfth Night rewrite and the two sentences with which Viola’s good-friend-Captain “transformed this pretty lady into a gentleman.” Naturally I was made Captain. Naturally I rummaged her brother’s closet for a two-i Adiidas black tee and self-holed black jeans and a black compact mirror and expired black eyeliner. There she was now. Gentleman. Naturally by that point I had forgotten all about trying to coax tears out of Cherry. She had to climb close to my ear and shout “I’m gonna wife you now!” for me to remember everything. Everything was startling in her very nice hands. She had a beautiful pretense of method, the slow counting of my ribs, faux concern, faux-nurse massaging to her own words’ rhythm: cry, cry, I need you to cry. I could not cry. I was taken in. “Boy,” she breathed, “boy,” she continued breathing. She sobbed. She thumbed my face everywhere. “What will I be when you go to war?” Cherry, Cherry. “Who am I when you are man?” I did not know. I still do not. It ate me alive, that afternoon, when I was boy and she wifed me. Or when she was boy and I wifed her. It was titillating the power we had, the power we punched out from each other, all that we tried to forget of how we butchered words and words and boyish hurt.
