Sai Htee Hseng: Singer who engaged in dialogue

How could an ethnic Shan singer gain popularity among Burman audiences in a country where non-Burman ethnic groups continue to experience racial prejudice held by the Burman majority? The audience’s answer is that Sai Htee Hseng and Sai Hsai Mao, the other most famous Shan artists in Burma’s music industry, “have a Shan accent while singing in Burmese -- and they love that.”
 
Both of them sang about life in Shan State, offering listeners a glimpse of what it means to be Shan in a country dominated by the Burman majority. Burmese, the language of the Burmans, is simply a vehicle to carry their message to a wider audience, “thereby their ethnic struggle into a national struggle.”

 _{Sai Htee Hseng}

“From the audience side, nostalgia about the land they have never been to offers a sense of healing for the suffering present. The Shan become a subject for such romantic yearnings,” she wrote.
 
The following is an excerpt from his first and greatest hit, Mandalay Yauk Shan Galay Tayauk (A young Shan in Mandalay):
 
Whenever I hang around the campus, girls look at my Shan attire.
They smile.
Whenever at the hospital, I am roundly upbraided by the nurses.
 
However you discriminate against me
I will embrace those old stories with my love
I don’t swap my identity with others
I am proud of being a hill person
But it’s not easy to be a Shan living in Mandalay
 
The hallmark of Htee Hseng’s songs that distinguish them from those of Hsai Mao is that while the latter’s “are viewed as simply nostalgic and romanticizing Shan people,” audience tend to interpret the former’s songs politically. “Many of the Burman audiences, when they learn that I’m interested in Sai Htee Hseng’s songs, often ask me if I know of this (or that) song and that this (or that) song contains a veiled political meaning.”
 
An example given is Ngwe Taungdan hsi tho-thachin da bok (A song to the silver mountain ranges) which contains the following translated lyrics:
 
After ten years of waiting, for the moment,
They deserve love and kindness even just for the night,
Before separating each other forever.
Now they are in one another’s arms,
Although I am happy of a young lady,
I am worried for the boy from the hill.
 
The “ten years of waiting”, according to one of his song fans, refers to the ten-year trial period between the upland Shan and the lowland Burmese which ended in 1958, when the Shans would be allowed to choose their own future.
 
Ms Amporn concludes: It is by adopting dominant discourses as self-representation that their music is carried to a wider audience and allowing them to develop new social relations  with possibly profound political implications. Shan musicians do recognize the impossibility of standing outside totalitarian systems of domination and that one cannot transform society by standing outside of it.
 
May Sai Htee Hseng return with more great songs!