The first floor apartment at N° 1122 St. Vincent Street, Utica, upper New York State, is a long way from the bamboo huts and jungles of Southeast Asia. On this particular day, Kin Soe Moe rises at 5:30 a.m. prepares a simple lunch of rice, beef and soup before leaving for an early shift at work.
Outside, the sidewalks are covered in several inches of snow— that is not too bad, really, because sometimes during the long winter drifts many feet deep bury the place—and with icy gusts blowing through the deserted streets temperatures have dipped to minus 30 degrees below freezing.
"It was so cold when we arrived in this country and it is still so cold. Oh so cold," the diminutive Kin Soe Moe shivers as she begins the short drive to the surgical instrument plant where she earns nearly eight dollars an hour assembling precision equipment. “It took me two times to pass my driving test,” she giggles as she recalls her early efforts to come to terms with a new life in America. “I had never seen snow before let alone drove on it. It is still so scary.” At home, 9-year-old Kapaw Sasam and her 8-year-old sister, Kapru Htoo, scurry around their first floor home, packing school satchels, cuddling their brother, 4-year-old Thomas Dale, before donning winter overcoats to catch the school bus at 7:30 a.m. for a private Catholic school.
Husband Aung Tin Moe drives his son to a day nursery fifteen minutes later. Three times a week, he works a 12-hour shift at the same plant as his wife. On the other days he is a fulltime student at the Mohawk Valley Community College studying electronic engineering technology.
Late in the afternoon Kin Soe Moe collects her son and returns home to prepare the family evening meal. “Ah, I am so tired. I have a headache. I will rest for just three minutes,” she says, slumping on a sofa briefly. She collects her daughters from an after-school center before returning home, completing a dozen other household chores, serving dinner and, if there is no other crisis, slumping into bed before 9 p.m. Between work, school and study, husband Aung Tin Moe often gets only three hours of sleep a night. They have little waking time together and already worry they are not spending enough time instructing their children in their native language.
It is difficult ‘living the American dream.’
The family are minority ethnic Karens from Myanmar (Burma). Aung Tin Moe was a student activist against that country’s military regime and was forced to flee into the jungle where he married his wife and where, in bamboo huts, his two daughters were born.
“Many pregnant women at the time were suffering from malaria. Some newly born children died of brain damage,” Kin Soe Moe remembers. “I was one of the very lucky ones. I didn’t get malaria and the girls were lucky, too. They were healthy.”
The family moved on to neighboring Thailand in the late 1990s, but living in a refugee camp their future was unclear. Returning home would certainly mean a hazardous life on the run from the army and possible death.
He decided instead to make an unauthorized trip to the Thai capital, Bangkok, to seek official refugee status and, perhaps, a new life in another country.
“I hitched a ride on a truck,” he remembers. “Before each police checkpoint, I would hop off, make a long detour around the checkpoint and then get back on board. It took me two days to reach Bangkok.” When his wife and children tried to join him later they bribed a policeman to take them in his official car. “When we reached each checkpoint, I concentrated on breastfeeding my youngest girl and didn’t dare look at anyone else,” she said. “They thought we belonged in the car and let us pass.”
After living in Bangkok surreptitiously and working on a construction site—had they been picked up by the police they may have been sent back to a camp or to Myanmar—they obtained the coveted refugee status. Since they had no immediate family or direct sponsor in the United States which would have made it easier to apply, it took them another full year to obtain permission to enter the country for resettlement. There is a small but thriving 250- strong Burmese community in Utica, mainly ethnic Karens. Four-year-old Thomas Dale Moe was the first child to be born within the group. The family sends some of their wages back to Myanmar to support family back there. Even on modest salaries, they nevertheless also decided to send their daughters to a private school for a top education and at the Our Lady of Lourdes school principal Carol Polito calls her two Karen pupils “Delightful. They are a credit to the school and to their parents.”
Aung Tin Moe will complete his studies at community college this year, but then plans to continue his education at the State University of New York for two more years. The phrase ‘Living the American Dream’ is often overused and devalued, but in this particular case, difficult though it may be to achieve, it could be true.
By: Ray WIlkinson
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