Most months there is a transfer. Small, regular, unremarkable. You do it from your phone while waiting for a bus, and you type three numbers in, and it is done. The whole thing takes less time than it takes to argue about it later with a relative who says you do not need to, and who then, quietly, does not send it back.
Nobody is comfortable calling it love, so we do not. We call it helping out, or putting something aside, or just the usual. But the money is doing more than paying bills. It is the cleanest way a lot of Burmese people can say I am still part of this family, and I am still yours, without having to sit in a room and say it out loud. The transfer is a love letter that passes through a bank.
It is for parents, mostly, and for siblings still studying, and sometimes for the running of a house that a whole village leans on. Nobody sends money home because they are rich. They send it because the question is not whether someone needs it but when they did not. The expectation is old and soft and impossible to break, and mostly nobody wants to break it.
Here is what makes it complicated. You send money to show you are still there, and then you feel like the only way you can be a good child is to keep sending it, and the family feels like they have to accept it to let you be a good child. Both sides are doing a favour the other did not exactly ask for. It is generous, and it is heavy, and it is, I think, how a lot of diaspora love works — real and useful and slightly lopsided.