Thingyan is the water festival that rings in the Burmese New Year in mid-April. In Myanmar it is exuberant and chaotic and joyful — days of soaking and being soaked, of pandals and buckets and the whole city turning into a gentle war. I grew up with it the way you grow up with a season. When I was small it was only noise and laughter and being very, very wet. By the time I was a teenager it had become something else. These are the years I remember, in order.
The year I was old enough to get hit
I was a kid in Yangon, and Thingyan was the one week of the year the adults stopped telling us to be careful. Everyone on the street was a target, nobody was safe, and that was the whole point. I remember hiding behind my grandmother's sarong on the first day — a cousin emptied a cup of water over my head anyway — and by lunch I was the one chasing strangers with a plastic bag knotted into a tiny pistol. I did not know what the festival was for. I only knew it was the best week of the year, that being soaked meant you belonged, and that the water was welcome. There was no sadness in it anywhere. I did not yet know that a festival could carry anything else.
The year I worked the pandal
Two years older, and I got handed a real job. My cousin's family ran a small pandal by the roadside — a decorated stage with hoses, where people spray whoever walks past. That year I was big enough to haul the hose and stand behind the barricade, and we drenched a whole street for hours. My arms ached, my clothes never dried, and I have never felt so purely, stupidly happy. There was a tin on the counter where people dropped coins, and at the end we used it to buy one enormous shared meal. I was beginning to learn what the adults already knew: the festival is not given to you. People make it together, and the work is part of the joy. I did not know, standing there soaked to the bone, that it would be my last thingyan in Yangon.
The year the street went quiet
By then we were in Singapore, and then the whole world stopped, and so did Thingyan. No pandals, no crowds, no queue for the food stalls. In the flat we still laid out the festival dishes, and on the video call home my grandmother set out her own with nobody beside her to share them. The screen kept freezing. I got embarrassed and turned away. Later that week a neighbour — not Burmese, not one of us — left a small tray of water and flowers on our doorstep with a note that just read "new year." I had never once told them about Thingyan. I did not even know they knew the date. That small thing undid me more than any street fight with buckets had. It was the first year I understood the festival was bigger than the water. It was about people bothering to notice you were celebrating something.
The year I started hearing what the songs were for
By 2022 I was old enough to follow the news from home, and I could not make it all fit together anymore. The country my family came from was in the middle of a coup, and the older generation carried it with them in ways I had been too young to read. Suddenly the songs at Thingyan were not just noise. The new year is supposed to wash away the old year's dust, and I began to see how much dust there was to move. Money from this side of the sea went home not for holidays but because whole months were hard. Somebody's uncle could not come. Somebody's brother could not text back for a while. I soaked people and laughed, and I stopped laughing, all in the same afternoon. For the first time the festival asked something of me. I could not just be happy in it. I had to be in it anyway.
The year I chose to keep it
The year I was a full teenager, Thingyan arrived and I finally saw it for what it is. A diaspora festival is not a faded copy of the one back home. It is a stubborn thing. Half of us had not been able to visit in years, some had no idea when they would see their families again, and we still dragged the plastic pools into the yard and stood around them with water guns, the way I remembered the street pandals of a childhood that suddenly felt far away. I used to think the point was the joy, and then I learned it carried grief too. This year I decided both were true, and both were the point. Nobody was pretending everything was fine. We were deciding, loudly and wetly, that the new year would begin clean anyway, that we were still here and still Burmese, and that we would keep handing the water to the next little kid no matter what the years threw at us. I am old enough now to understand why my parents never let us skip it. Some festivals are not for remembering the good years. They are for making sure the next year gets a chance.
The details change — plastic bags turn into water guns, the street turns into a yard, the pandals turn into plastic pools. The shape stays the same. Water, and people, and deciding together that the new year can start clean. When I was small I thought that was about getting wet. Now I know it is about choosing to begin again anyway. I keep choosing it, one year at a time.