When I first met Aung San Suu Kyi I had other friends called Sue. For myself, and later my family, she was quickly distinguished from them by a private nickname. ‘Who did you see yesterday?’ ‘Suu.’ ‘Which Suu?’ ‘Suu Burmese.’ It was a surname, a title, not a mere subordinate adjective. Not Burmese Suu, like Chicago Pete, but Suu Burmese, like Caius Martius Coriolanus, the title won from Corioli, the town he conquered. It was not a name I ever used to her face, but it has come to epitomize everything she represents. We got to know each other in Oxford, as freshwomen at St Hugh’s College in 1964. I have to admit that I first approached her simply because she was so beautiful and exotic. She was everything I was not. I came from an Oxford home and Oxford schooling. I was neither a hippy nor an active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. But I had spent the long summer between school and university in statutory fashion – hitching round Greece, picking grapes and maize in Israel, travelling deck-class across the Mediterranean with Anna Karenina for a pillow. Suu’s tight, trim lungi (the Burmese version of the sarong) and upright carriage, her firm moral convictions and inherited social grace contrasted sharply with the tatty dress and careless manners, vague liberalism and uncertain sexual morality of my English contemporaries.
St Hugh’s was one of Oxford’s five single-sex women’s colleges. It was popularly dismissed as ‘too far out’ – a full three minutes’ bike ride from Balliol or St John’s – with a demeaningly high reputation for hockey. As freshers we were housed in the heavy main building. Dark brown doors; long, dim corridors; bleak sculleries where the homelier students simmered hankies and bedtime cocoa. When we first arrived there was an active myth that news of the rare male visitor used to be tapped out on the central-heating pipes running from room to room. Only a decade or two previously, another rumour ran, when men came visiting, the women’s beds had to be moved out into the corridor until their guests had left. We certainly had to be in by 10 p.m., or sign a late pass releasing us until midnight at the latest. A warren of nervous adolescent virgins and a few sexually liberated sophisticates made for an atmosphere airless and prickly as a hot railway compartment. In this setting Suu was delightfully antithetical, an original who was at once laughably naïve, and genuinely innocent. All my memories of her at that time have certain recurring elements: cleanliness, determination, curiosity, a fierce purity. How do I see her? Eyebrows furrowed under a heavy fringe, shocked incredulity and disapproval: ‘But Ann! …’ We are in the basement laundry room, starching piles of lungis and little sleeveless blouses. She is teaching me to iron. She is teaching me to eat rice neatly by hand (like making shortcrust pastry, you roll it between your fingers, dibbling no deeper than the first joint). She is showing me how to carry off long dresses plausibly. Those were the days of ruffled gypsy skirts, swirls of Indian cottons, woven sweat bands, low, wide hems and flowing bits and bobs. Suu taught me to twist and tie a lungi round my inappropriately broad, unoriental waist; to sit on the floor, legs tucked away so that not even an ankle showed; to walk upstairs with only a slight furl of skirt twitched aside, not a great heaved armful in the English manner. Even with familiarity, much remained exotic – her proud parentage, above all. But no less evocative now is the tiny tuft of silky hair under her chin, the block of sandalwood she ground for face powder, the abundant scraps of sample silk collected for dress trimmings, the fresh flower worn daily in her high pony-tail. Others added to this collection of alien lore. Suu’s friends were mainly Indian and African. Together we chose tiny flowers from St Hugh’s wide rock garden, in those days still the college’s pride, and learned to push their tiny stiff stems through our pierced ears (a Ghanaian custom).
There were tea parties of interminable oriental decorum, whose wit and finesse were imperceptible to my coarse western ear. And then the long night gossip in other students’ rooms, where Suu’s assumptions seemed merely absurd. Everyone was on the hunt for boyfriends, many wanted affairs, sex being still a half-forbidden, half-won desideratum. Being laid back about being laid was de rigueur – except that most of us were neither laid back nor laid. There was excitement and anxiety about the unknown, an atmosphere of tense inexperience dominated and dragooned by the few vocal and confident sexual sophisticates. It was extremely difficult to preserve any kind of innocence in such a setting. To most of our English contemporaries, Suu’s startled disapproval seemed a comic aberration. One bold girl asked her, ‘But don’t you want to sleep with someone?’ Back came the indignant reply – ‘No! I’ll never go to bed with anyone except my husband. Now? I just go to bed hugging my pillow.’ It raised a storm of mostly derisive laughter.
By the popular morality of the time Suu was a pure oriental traditionalist. Even the way she held herself was instinctively strait-laced. At the same time she was curious to experience the European and the alien, pursuing knowledge with endearing, single-minded practicality. Climbing in, for instance. Social kudos came with climbing into college after a late date. One actress friend was a precociously blasé habitué of late-night scramblings: by her second year she spent full nights and days away from college; by the third she was breaking college rules by renting a pad shared by a variety of boyfriends. After two demure years in Oxford, Suu wanted to climb in too, and requested a respectable Indian friend to take her out to dinner, and then – as any gentleman should – hand her over the crumbling college garden wall. No infringement of university regulations could have been perpetrated with greater propriety.
Then there was cycling. Most students have bikes – it is a practical way of getting about, but tricky in a lungi. In the first summer term Suu bought a pair of white jeans and the latest smart white Moulton bike with minute wheels. One sunny evening spent on the sandy cycle-track running alongside the University Parks and that was mastered. Then there was punting – another essential qualification for an Oxford summer. A punt is a flat-bottomed, low-sided tray of a boat. Its weight, inertia and ungainliness defy description. It is like sailing a sideboard. It really is difficult learning to punt, especially on your own. The boat swings in dull circles that modulate to a maddening headstrong zigzag from bank to bank, until you learn to steer, like a gondolier, by hugging the pole tight against the punt as you push, and letting it swing like a rudder. Suu set out, a determined solitary figure in the early-morning haze, to return at dusk dripping and triumphant. She did learn to do that in her lungi, no western concessions required. And finally there was alcohol, alien and taboo to boot. Suu consistently refused it on social and religious grounds. But she was curious to know what it was like. At the very end of her final year, in great secrecy, she bought a miniature bottle – of what? sherry? wine? – and, with two rather more worldly Indians as accoucheuses and handmaids at this rite of passage, retired to the ladies’ lavatory in the Bodleian Library. There, among the sinks and the cubicles, in a setting deliberately chosen to mirror the distastefulness of the experience, she tried and rejected alcohol for ever.
With degrees safely behind us we went different ways, Suu to the United Nations in New York and then three years later to Bhutan, where she joined the man she married, an old friend from student days. Fragmentary memories of that period lie like fanned-out photographs – some of them, indeed, real snaps from her letters. Suu in London, head high in a green armchair, serious, sad, uncertain where to go, all determination and an unknown void to cross. Suu laughing by the side of a Mini Moke, with Michael and Puppy, their Himalayan terrier, the mountains of Bhutan behind them – the well-wishing adventurers setting forth, man, wife, dog and jeep bright and tiny in that vast landscape. Suu and Michael later in their nursery-white London flat, their new-born son Alexander propped up on a sofa, with astonishing upright back and steady head, his mother’s deportment at three weeks. Happy memories that now seem infinitely vulnerable.
By the mid-1970s we were all back in Oxford again. Michael had a junior fellowship at St John’s College. I had also married and was doing research. After a short spell in a pretty but impractical house outside Oxford, Suu, Michael and Alexander moved to a college flat near the centre of Oxford, which happened to be just round the corner from mine.
In retrospect, memories of that time are still sunlit but with a sense of strain. The flat provided by St John’s was on the ground floor of a pleasant North Oxford house, with high ceilings and tall windows. But its apparent spaciousness was deceptive. Apart from the large, south-facing living room, where all the family life took place, on the gloomier northern side was a tiny kitchen, one bedroom and a box-room doubling as a nursery and frequently occupied spare room. There were always guests – not only Suu’s much loved aunt, who regularly spent a portion of the year with them, but Burmese relatives, Bhutanese visitors and numerous acquaintances welcomed and uncomplainingly entertained for punishing periods. On my way to the library I often saw Suu laboriously pedalling back from town, laden with sagging plastic bags and panniers heavy with cheap fruit and vegetables. When I called in the afternoons with my own baby daughter, I would find her busy in the kitchen preparing economical Japanese fish dishes, or at her sewing machine, in an undulating savanna of yellow cotton, making curtains for the big bay windows, or quickly running up elegant, cut-price clothes for herself. Michael was working hard at his doctorate. Alexander had to be cared for without disturbing him. There were endless guests to be housed and fed. Still Suu maintained a house that was elegant and calm, the living room warm with sunny hangings of rich, dark Bhutanese rugs and Tibetan scroll paintings. But battened down at the back, hidden away among the kitchen’s stacked pots and pans, was anxiety, cramp and strain.
Life became even harder when their second son, Kim, was born, and to her intense distress Suu found she could not feed him. I doubt whether the anguish felt by her at this time can be understood by anyone who has not had the same experience. Characteristically, too, it was a suffering Suu instinctively imposed on herself, her pain the inevitable result of her rooted reluctance to accept defeat, or to allow herself the indulgence of a second-best way. Kim was kept happy, bottle-fed and healthy, but with dimmed lamp she nightly tried to nurse him, in vain.
That pertinacity persisted. Perhaps in unconscious recompense for what she had not been able to give the baby, she learned to massage him, back bent over him as he lay naked on the towelled floor on winter evenings, gently kneading him with warm oil. That, too, has come to rest as a soft image of the utter commitment none of her friends could emulate. A few years later it was Suu, of course, who gave the copy-book children’s parties with all the traditional party games – except that the rules were enforced with unyielding exactitude, and my astonished children, bending them ever so slightly, once found themselves forbidden the prize. To them Suu was kindly but grave, an uncomfortably absolute figure of justice in their malleable world.
Yet it is Suu’s kindness that is most sharply present to me now. She is kind by conviction as well as by nature. In her years at Oxford she acquired many friends who were written off as lame ducks by others, less genuinely charitable than herself. At college she took under her wing an elderly German artist, a friend of my mother’s, for whom we put on an exhibition in our last year. Miss Plachte had suffered from meningitis as an adolescent; in her late sixties there was something ineradicably childish about her still. She became increasingly difficult. In her latter years my husband, Suu and I went to one of her somewhat painful tea-parties. No one else turned up. Finally she offered us a plate of cucumber sandwiches, and completely lost her temper when my husband took two. (They were very small.) Of course we felt sorry for her. But it was Suu who maintained the friendship over two decades, inviting her to meals and visiting her with unwavering sweetness. She was one of the few, together with my mother, still caring for Miss Plachte in her mild last senility.
Suu is that rare thing, a true egalitarian. The college matron, her guardians’ housekeeper – all were cherished as warmly as her intimate friends and with greater generosity. It is not social rank but moral fibre that evokes her affection or reserve. She kept her powerful disapprobation for her closest family and friends. (She would have cut the above paragraph as uncharitable.) I often aroused her frank disapproval, but it was what made friendship with her so interesting. She was incapable of glossing over moral shortcomings: she could not help but be the moral litmus-paper for our wishy-washy ethics. At the same time she was neither pious nor self-important, simply instinctively expostulatory, wryly down-to-earth, humorously common-sensical.
As circumstances grew easier Suu’s interests widened. The family moved to a beautiful house in Park Town, a then shabby-genteel nineteenth-century crescent curving elaborately round a quiet central garden, and ringed by unfrequented overgrown back lanes. The house was tall and narrow, the top three of its five floors initially occupied by sitting tenants, and extensive work needed in the basement and ground floor. The extra space Suu and Michael gained was soon lost to a further succession of needy guests. Finances remained hard with expenditure on the house and school fees to be met. With greater time at her disposal, though, Suu was impatient for new challenges. As an undergraduate she had tried to change courses from Philosophy, Politics and Economics, to English Literature, or Forestry, and was twice refused. With her intellectual curiosity still unsatisfied, she re-applied to St Hugh’s to take a second undergraduate degree, in English. I can still remember two sample essays on Othello – her sharp, unsentimental response, the Austenesque irony with which she drily analysed the tragedy, even the characteristically firm, clear hand in which the essays were written. It was the college’s loss, more than hers, when they rejected Suu’s application. She taught herself Japanese instead and wrote a biography of her father. Suu took Kim with her for a year at Kyoto University, and spent a further year with all the family in India, where she and Michael held academic posts at Simla.
Life at this time speeded up impossibly. I had four children and a university job. Suu was busy writing, yet dissatisfied with a life that failed fully to engage her energies, her relentless determination, the inherited diplomatic and political skills she had just begun to feel burgeoning during her years at the United Nations. Occasionally, in the rush of our individual responsibilities, we would meet when I visited my mother, a neighbour of Suu’s. Walking meditatively round and round the crescent, Suu confided some of her anxieties and heard out my own with sympathetic firmness. Her moral standards and ethical convictions remained unshakable as ever.
But everything was getting older and life was no longer simple. My mother was ageing and ill. A brief period of delusion had left her painfully gaunt, her fragile skull bony to my hand when I stroked her hair. Like Lear, she seemed set on guard at the extremest verge of life – poor perdu, with this thin helm – watching with haunted clarity as death approached. Among the many friends who visited her, Suu was one of the few she welcomed, a serene presence at her side.
One early morning I came to see my mother, as I did every morning, and found Suu with her. She had discovered my mother wandering, half-dressed and confused, and brought her home. I will not forget the serious gentleness with which Suu talked to her, the grave concern with which she turned to me as she left. Within a week she was called to Burma, to her own mother’s bedside. The rest of her story is well known.
My mother died at the same time as Suu’s. I moved into our house in Park Town. In the mornings I might see Alexander, a tall sixteen-year old, cycling to school, or Kim in the dusty blue of his prep-school uniform, scuffing past with his skateboard under his arm. On early summer mornings and dusky autumnal evenings I met Michael walking an honourably aged, stiff-limbed Puppy down the grassy lane behind our houses.
In the fullness of time Puppy died. Michael is at Harvard, Alexander in London, Kim at boarding school. Suu is under house arrest. Every evening, as I put away my car in the garage behind her house, I think of her, and one line of Yeats comes repeatedly to mind. In an early poem addressed to Maud Gonne, a political reformer like Suu, but, unlike her, a militant advocate of armed rebellion, Yeats recalls
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false and true.
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.
Many, like myself, must first have been drawn to Suu by her beauty. Our perdurable love and admiration are for her pilgrim soul – for her courage, determination and abiding moral strength – gifts already glowing in her chrysalis period as a student and young mother.