While I watched Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, it began with a segment from Orwell’s Why I Write.

Orwell’s writing career was but two dozen years, and he died shortly after completing his last novel, 1984. This one line resonates with me from Why I Write. So, why did Orwell write 1984? “I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

My reason for writing has two parts. Like Orwell, much of my writing deals with exposing lies. The other is my love for my family. My family lives several hundred miles south of where Orwell was stationed in Burma. He was an assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in the remote town of Katha, on the Irrawaddy River. English racism was the basis of Orwell’s Burmese Days. The town is several hundred miles north of Taunggyi, where my family lives.

The other reason for writing this article is my family. Moh Moh, my tour guide on my first trip to Myanmar, had to stop at her home and give me my itinerary after I left the Inle Lake area. She mentioned that I could meet Ti Ti, her nine-year-old daughter, who was home on winter break. When we arrived at their home, we walked into their living room and were greeted by Ti Ti. “My name is Ti Ti, do you want to play some games?” Even though she beat me at Scrabble, meeting Ti Ti and her family radically changed my life and Weltanschauung. We became family.

What is even more intriguing is that those two reasons for my writing often overlap. As Orwell wrote, “I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” He said that nearly a century ago, but it echoes in my head. If Orwell was concerned about authoritarianism and despotism, it pales in comparison to what is happening in America.

I don’t sit around on a lawn chair in my driveway for hours watching the world go by. In a couple of months, I’ll be 83. During my journey down the yellow brick road of my life, I have led death twice on the dancefloor of my life...successfully. Those dances taught me something that most people are unaware of. Unless you have done the dance with death, you know you aren’t immortal...but it is at an intellectual level. I know that reality in my very being. More accurately, I feel it in my gut.

My clock is ticking louder and louder. I’m damn lucky that I am alive. My two dances both occurred in 2008. My subdural hematoma dance took me a number of months to recover from the surgery, allowing my brain to expand due to the bleeding. After recovering physically, it took a couple of years before I understood my transformation. I had been living a new life, but I hadn’t grasped the new reality. Essentially, I had to start over my life. I progressed and continued to live my life beyond where I had been prior to falling off a ladder and cracking my head against a retaining wall.

A friend of mine suggested that I talk to a friend of his about getting a teaching position in Chicago. I met his friend for dinner in Chicago. It was an informal interview. At the end of the dinner, he asked me whether I had ever heard of Randy Pausch. I hadn’t. He sent me a link to the video of The Last Lecture by Pausch. The lecture was 1:16:27 long. However, it was only several minutes into that lecture before I was stunned. Pausch was talking about me.

I realized what made me tic. Dancing with death isn’t something that anyone will enjoy. However, the change in one’s life due to the dance is the most important gift that anyone can receive, second only to life itself. It makes you come alive. You won’t waste the time you have remaining in your life diddling around and putting things off until tomorrow, as if you had tens of thousands of tomorrows.

I have also written about another transformative time in my life, moving to Mt. Lebanon, PA, from Pennsauken, NJ, just before junior high. Pennsauken was a nice middle-class community where I was an above-average student. My father didn’t go to college due to WWII; therefore, when he got a promotion in an insurance company, it meant that we had to move. My dad asked a real estate agent about the best school system in the Pittsburgh area. The realtor said Mt. Lebanon.

Mt. Lebanon was indeed the best school system in the Pittsburgh area. It was also the 19th-best school system in the entire country, along with being the wealthiest community in Western Pennsylvania. I learned two things while at Mt. Lebanon: I was dumb and poor in that golden ghetto.

That feeling of being less intellectually and financially motivated me to learn and to work harder. It was as negative an issue as dancing with death...initially. However, when I met Ti Ti, the parallels between us were similar. That motivated me.

The second time I went to visit my family, Ti Ti was around the age that I was when my family moved to Mt. Lebanon. We talked about Ti Ti going to a college prep school in Taunggyi. She was an above-average student in a nice middle-class community in Myanmar. The parallels were obvious. Ti Ti went to school during the day and had tutors in the evening. I helped my family financially, but who benefited? Obviously, she did, but so did I. It goes back to my mantra: It is in giving that we get. Reliving those days decades ago of feeling dumb and poor was on my mind all the time. Ti Ti and I have argued about who benefited the most.

I went back on my third trip when Ti Ti graduated from high school and attended an honors assembly where Ti Ti won the best in math for the entire State of Shan. Ti Ti was accepted at Gusto University.

Proud PaPa Al and Ti Ti

During that time, her family had tried to get diversity visas from the State Department. Each year, there is a lottery, and a certain number of families from various countries are drawn to come to America and live. When my family wasn’t selected in the drawing, I wrote to Moh Moh and her husband, Ko Ko, about Ti Ti coming to the States for her college education. In fact, she could attend the college where I taught. She could live with me until the rest of my family got diversity visas and came and lived in my home.

She applied at the US Embassy in Yangon for a student visa. When she went to the interview, a female did the interview. However, there was a man also there. During the interview, the man told the woman to turn off the recording of the interview. He talked to the interviewer, indicating that he didn’t want the staff member to grant her a student visa. The woman told Ti Ti that she couldn’t get a student visa, but she could try again.

Ti Ti tried again, but this time, it was the man and no one else. He interviewed Ti Ti and denied her a student visa for the second time. Then, flippantly said she could try again. Ti Ti did so, and the same man did another pro forma interview. And for the third time, he denied her request for a student visa.

I was furious. I wrote to the head of the US Embassy. The embassy hasn’t had an ambassador for at least a decade. It isn’t very high on the list of places people wish to be an ambassador. In my email, I enclosed all the details about all the interviews. Each time Ti Ti was rejected, I asked her to write down what was asked and how she responded. I sent all the data from each interview and my correspondence to the head of the embassy.

The head of the embassy was never given my email. However, she informed me that her assistant filled her in on all the relevant material. Do you believe what you just read? This is a copy of the email.

What the gatekeeper filled her in on was what the male interviewer and the gatekeeper wanted to disclose. I have all the documents, and the embassy records all the interviews.

When I received an email from the head of the embassy, I tried to contact the State Department. I emailed them and left messages when I called the State Department. Never did I get any response.

I went to my congressperson. Members of Congress can send emails on which there is some indication that the Member of Congress wanted the recipient to read the message, and the recipient of the email could reply to that Member of Congress.

That procedure was tried at least twice. Apparently, the gatekeeper didn’t forward my Congressman’s to the head of the embassy. Now, Ti Ti isn’t applying for another student visa. Trump has outlawed student visas from a dozen countries. Besides, she will be graduating from Gusto in a month in Yangon, Myanmar.

This is where Orwell comes into the picture. Read this one sentence again about why he writes a novel. “I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” Ti Ti is out of the picture for a student visa. However, other young students in Myanmar would like to attend college in another country that is less racist than our present government. Someone needs to let the State Department know that I would appreciate it if they looked into this matter. Someone is lying at the US Embassy in Yangon.

I am writing on behalf of an unknown student from Myanmar who would like to get a student visa in another country that is more open to non-white students than America is presently.

Watch Raoul Peck's documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5. This is a link to my essay, having just viewed the video.

Beyond that, I wrote to Ti Ti about visiting the States during Christmas. I wrote to her and said that I would make her a deal. If she came to Crown Point, I would promise her two things: I’d take her to my eye doctor for glasses and to my pharmacy and get a litany of shots for COVID, flu, Tdap vaccine for tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, zoster, pneumococcal vaccines, and RSV. Then we would go on a shopping spree. What 21-year-old young lady wouldn’t jump at that opportunity?

We were both ecstatic. I began to spruce up my home. I told her that I had remodeled my kitchen by putting wainscoting around my kitchen’s walls with flagstones. I was going to use bricks, but I decided on flagstones due to the various colors. I told her it took me days of working long hours before I was able to finish the task.

Well, the flagstones weren’t real. The flagstones were adhesive wallpaper that took several hours, but don’t tell Ti Ti.

However, people from Myanmar and a dozen other countries, who can’t get student visas, nor are they allowed to immigrate to America. They aren’t able to even get a visitor’s visa. This is Ti Ti’s video about not being able to come to America.

After I cried each time I watched Ti Ti’s video, I remember stopping one evening at your grandmother's home in Taunggyi. Ti Ti was between tutors, helping her get prepared for college. As the math professor left and before another tutor arrived, she showed me a math page filled with numbers and various signs and symbols. Looked at it and thought, I have no idea what that page meant. After listening to Ti Ti video about her plans for the future, I thought that her grasp of AI and her language skills were beyond the pale...of me. I also thought about the interviewer at the US Embassy telling Ti Ti that she didn’t qualify.

I love Ti Ti. She is my granddaughter and will remember me as a more recent George Orwell. “I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” Both Orwell and I are WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). And we are aware that some WASPs in India and Burma, along with some in America, see discrimination and are driven to work to change it.

If you, the reader, want to help, watch Orwell: 2+2=5. And help me with getting someone in the State Department to respond to my dealings with the US Embassy in Yangon. Then follow Orwell’s suggestion about demonstrating for equality. If we don’t fight for equality, the greatness of America will be lost forever.