Soft Ruins

'Soft Ruins' is a chapter within the long-term ongoing project "When Spring Never Comes", an expansive exploration of memory, identity and displacement in the aftermath of exile within contemporary global politics. It reflects on how the journey as an asylum seeker in Europe mirrors the instability and threats of life under dictatorship, amidst rising right-wing movements and shifting power dynamics, where both certainty and identity are redefined

- Min Ma Naing

"YOU never had those yellow slippers," my mother insists, her certainty making the memory feel like a betrayal. Yet, I see them so clearly the yellow soles, the black braided straps-left behind on the day we moved. I was four, and that image has stayed with me ever since, or so my memory dictates. But did I ever own those yellow slippers? Could my mother's memory be wrong, or is mine warped and twisted by time? This memory clings uneasily to me even after all these years, leaving me to question which version of the past truly belongs to me. This seemingly trivial memory mirrors the greater dissonance and fragmentation I would face year later when I was forced to flee Myanmar.