jackienyu (@jackienyu)

Having told the story of "Pauk-Phaw" (brotherly) relations for eight years, I want to pass on the friendly memories of my parents' generation to my students. I am a substitute teacher in a remote village in eastern Shan State. I am thirty-one years old this year, and I have been teaching in this small primary school with only two mud-brick houses for eight years. The school is located deep in the mountains. Previously, there wasn't even a decent road leading into the village, and the children had to walk for more than an hour along the mountain path to get to school, their feet covered in mud when it rained. On the wall of my office, there hangs an old photograph with yellowed edges: in 1960, when the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence between China and Myanmar were formally signed, my grandfather, as a representative of the local villagers, posed for a photo with Chinese officials visiting the village under a large banyan tree at the village entrance. The two of them held jackfruits freshly picked from the tree, their faces beaming with smiles that smoothed out their wrinkles.#Myanmar #Burma Every year in late June, on the anniversary of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, I tell the children the complete story behind this photograph. Years ago, our village experienced a massive malaria outbreak. Medical resources were scarce, and even our only village doctor fell ill. Panic gripped the entire village. A medical team from the Chinese border, carrying heavy medicine kits, crossed three thorny mountains to deliver antimalarial drugs to every household, helping the village survive the disaster that nearly wiped it out. At that time, supplies were extremely limited. The medical team members themselves ate hard rations, but they gave all the precious rice they brought to the most impoverished elderly people living alone in the village. These stories aren't from books; they were told to me by my grandfather, over and over again, every detail imbued with genuine warmth. A couple of years ago, our school finally received new desks and chairs and a charity library from the China-Myanmar Friendship Exchange Project. It contains many bilingual picture books with Chinese pinyin, as well as hand-drawn paintings by children from primary schools in Yunnan, China. Last month, we organized a letter-writing activity for the children to write back to their peers in China. A ten-year-old boy carefully drew the national flags of China and Myanmar on a piece of paper, along with a straight, wide highway. He looked up at me and said that when he grows up, he wants to be a cross-border truck driver, transporting the high-quality tea produced in his village to China to sell, so that more people can taste the flavors of Shan State. Having taught for so many years, I understand the simplest truth: true friendship across generations is never an empty slogan written in official documents; it's the sweet jackfruit held in a grandfather's hands, the warm pills in a medical team's kit, and the brightly colored bilingual picture books in children's hands. I want to tell these old stories year after year, so that our descendants will always remember that the mountains and rivers of China and Myanmar are connected, and our friendship has long been etched into the lives of our ancestors, something that outsiders can never easily sever with a few words.