SOME people know exactly where they are going in life, and go there; for others, life is more of a puzzle. Suu’s elder brother, Aung San Oo, who was studying electrical engineering at Imperial College in London while Suu was at Oxford—“he has all the angles of his father and none of the charm of his sister” was the tough verdict of a London acquaintance—was one of the former: He proceeded to a career and marriage (to a Burmese woman) in the United States with speed and dispatch, renouncing his Burmese citizenship in favor of American along the way.
Suu’s estranged elder brother Aung San Oo at the Martyrs’ Memorial, Rangoon, with his wife Lei Lei Nwe Thein in July 2007.
Aung San Suu Kyi however was one of the latter. Her puzzlement and difficulty can be sensed in photographs taken of her in those years. In one taken in her Delhi home in 1965 she stands beneath a photograph of her father in uniform. She is elegant in longyi and aingyi and already wears a flower in her hair, but her expression is quite blank; she is merely standing there, as requested. Five years later she attends a party at the home of the daughter of UN Secretary General U Thant in New York. It is quite a grand affair and Suu looks spectacular in a starched white aingyi with baggy sleeves; but while her hostess, Aye Aye Thant, beams at the camera with an animated expression, Suu’s gaze, pensive under powerful eyebrows and the famous fringe, is elsewhere, the expression on her full lips almost sulky. She was raised in privileged circumstances, at home in diplomatic enclaves and grand apartments, and she had spent three years in one of the world’s great universities. But this world, her blank expression seems to convey, is not my destiny. She was passing through, picking up clues as she went, but well aware that she was miles from her destination.
Her Oxford friend Ann Pasternak Slater worried for her. “Fragmentary memories of that period lie like fanned-out photographs—some of them, indeed, real snaps from her letters,” she wrote. “Suu in London, head high in a green armchair, serious, sad, uncertain where to go, all determination and an unknown void to cross . . .”1
She left Oxford and took her disappointing degree down to her guardians’ place in London, which had been her surrogate home since arriving in England. Lord and Lady Gore-Booth, as they now were, lived in a handsome Georgian house, 29 The Vale, off the King’s Road in Chelsea, in one of the most elegant and fashionable corners of London. Suu had a cozy self-contained flat there under the rafters, and was treated like one of the family.
She found part-time work as a tutor, and for a spell also worked as an assistant to Hugh Tinker, a Burma scholar who happened to be a friend of the Gore-Booths. It was a useful connection and one that kept her in touch with events at home. But from the perspective of a career it was a way of treading water, no more.
Pat Gore-Booth, now an elderly lady but still, at the time this book was being researched, deeply engaged in Burmese affairs, regards Suu almost as a daughter. “She called me Di Di,” she remembered in an interview with me at her home in London—the affectionate Indian term for “aunty.” “She was a great adapter, and became a full member of the family. She was always the first to offer to wash up, she was very interested in cooking . . . She was a very dutiful honorary daughter, she respected Paul very much for his supposed wisdom, his mixture of Irish whimsy and Yorkshire grit. She bore her third-class degree very well—at home she supervised the kids’ homework, did the crossword . . . She still retained all the traditional graces of her race and yet she was full of charm and fun and very intelligent.”2
The traditional good manners so essential in Burma can sometimes convey an impression of servility when translated to the West, and the way some of her English acquaintances describe her, Suu runs the risk of coming across as too good to be true. Yet as Ann Pasternak Slater and her other Oxford friends found out, she had a tongue in her head when required, and no inhibitions about using it. When Suu’s brother visited her at her guardians’ home, the froideur between the siblings was palpable. “Why were her relations with her brother so bad?” Pat Gore-Booth mused. “Perhaps he was envious of her charm. His English was not nearly as good as hers. They were polite with each other but no more than that.”
It was in this period that Suu quietly burned whatever bridges may have remained between her and Burma’s military regime. In addition to being a murderous tyrant, Ne Win was also a hypocrite. He imposed a joyless regime on his people yet at the same time he continued to indulge in the pleasures he had forbidden at home on his frequent trips abroad. He married three times, salted away a considerable fortune in Swiss banks, relaxed in Austrian and German spas, went to the races at Ascot and owned several fine homes abroad, including one in Wimbledon.
Yet for all his wealth and power, he would not be able to count the daughter of Aung San among his flatterers: When he summoned both the hero’s children to an audience at his Wimbledon home in the spring of 1967, Suu declined the invitation, on the grounds that she was busy preparing for her finals. Pat Gore-Booth, with a lifetime as a diplomatic wife and mother behind her, is in no doubt that this was a faux pas, and that she should have pointed out the fact to Suu at the time. “From a diplomatic point of view, we should have said ‘Go,’” she said. “But at the same time we were proud of her independence.”3
*
Lord and Lady Gore-Booth had twins two years older than Suu called David and Christopher. David Gore-Booth studied at Oxford, then, after graduating, followed his father Paul into the Foreign Office, and crowned his diplomatic career with the post of High Commissioner to Delhi—where in 1997, during the Queen’s visit to the subcontinent, he collided spectacularly with Labor Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. Christopher by contrast, who went on to become a croupier, was studying at Durham University, where he became friendly with one of another pair of twins. And on one occasion when Christopher brought this friend down to his parents’ home in Chelsea, Suu happened to be present as well, and Christopher introduced them.
A tall, rumpled, gentle, amiable man, Michael Aris was one year younger than Suu though he looked considerably older, and concealed a vast and unusual ambition beneath his air of easy-going geniality. He and his identical twin brother, Anthony, were born in Havana, the sons of an English father, John Aris, and a French-Canadian beauty, Josette Vaillancourt, whom he fell in love with and married while working as ADC to the Governor General of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir (better known as the thriller writer John Buchan).4 The twins and their older sister, Lucinda, had a peripatetic childhood between the Italian Alps, Geneva and Peru before settling in London. The twins were sent to a Catholic boarding school, Worth School, where they were taught by Benedictine monks.
Michael Aris (left) with his identical twin brother, Anthony.
After leaving school, Michael went to Durham University to study Modern History. His choice of subject is puzzling because by this time he had become intrigued by a subject well off the track of the curriculum: the culture, language, religion and history of Tibet.
This arcane interest had been accidentally implanted by his father when he brought a Tibetan prayer-wheel back from a trip to India. Michael became fascinated, less by the function of the device—one of the many ways invented by Tibetans to express their devotions—than by the mysterious letters inscribed on a piece of paper he found inside it. As it happened, one of their teachers at Worth School, Andrew Bertie, knew some Tibetan, and helped Michael to decipher it. A lifelong fascination was born.
When Suu came down from Oxford, we know that her unhappy love affair with her fellow student Tariq Hyder was still on her mind, and continued to weigh on it for another year. There was to be at least one other candidate for her love, and Pat Gore-Booth recalled how she got to learn of it. “Paul and I were on a tour of South America,” she said, “when we got a message from Suu saying I would like to marry so-and-so, a Burmese man. As a very dutiful honorary daughter, she was not asking permission, just running it past us.” But like the Hyder affair this one, too, came to nothing—and just as well, it would seem: Though notionally, like Suu, from the faction opposed to Ne Win, “he proved to be a turncoat,” Pat Gore-Booth remembered, “and later became a minister in the regime.”
Yet somewhere between these failed liaisons, an interest in the lanky, tousle-haired Aris boy took root and began to grow. And for Michael, it seems, there was never any doubt: This delicate young Burmese lady with an Oxford degree and a flower in her hair was the most enchanting thing he had ever seen. “He was smitten from the word go,” said his brother Anthony.5
Like many East and Southeast Asians, the Burmese are hostile to foreign liaisons, particularly if they involve the recently departed imperial oppressor. Suu’s mother Daw Khin Kyi, however sophisticated and experienced in the ways of the world, was no different from the rest of her race in feeling this way. But for Suu it was all rather different. She had come of age in the sixties, where in the West prejudices of every sort were being discarded. For years she had been moving in cosmopolitan circles, where interracial relationships were common. Her Indian friends were in this respect more hidebound: The pressures and expectations of caste still tended very largely to dictate their choice of partner. In Burma, where caste in the Indian sense does not exist, the chief obstacle to overcome was xenophobia pure and simple—plus the view that, as Norman Lewis put it, “through failure to spend a token period as a novice in a Buddhist monastery, the foreigner has never quite qualified as a human being.”6
By falling in love with Tariq Hyder, she had already shown her willingness to consider a mate who would have caused all sorts of difficulties back home in Rangoon. There is, after all, no arguing with the human heart. The candidates who were on the face of it more promising had problems of their own: The Burmese youth, dismissed by Suu’s friend Tin Tin as an “idiot”; the other Burmese fellow who became a turncoat.
And then there was this Aris boy she was getting to know, and who was already in love with her. The qualities he was to bring to their marriage must have been already apparent: He was considerate, thoughtful, patient. If he was not an alpha male like Tariq Hyder or David Gore-Booth, not exactly ambassadorial material, if he was a touch on the dreamy side, then perhaps that was no bad thing: When she herself was so uncertain about the way ahead, another seeker was perhaps what she needed for her partner, rather than someone like her brother who knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it. With someone like Michael, a woman would stand a chance of building a life on equal terms, rather than merely tagging along.
There was her mother to be brought round: She was firm in her view that Suu should marry someone Burmese. But Suu had lived apart from her mother for three years now, and had learned to stand on her own feet. She had discovered the strength of mind to turn down flat the invitation of the most powerful man in Burma; she would find a way to win her mother over. And in this respect Michael Aris’s fascination with Tibet, which would have seemed eccentric to many, was an important asset. Most people Suu knew at Oxford had only the vaguest notion about the religion in which she had been raised. Michael Aris already knew more about it than any Englishman she had ever met.
*
They began their romance, in fine modern style, by flying off in opposite directions. They were to be united only very briefly over the next three years. The Internet did not exist, international phone calls were prohibitively expensive and reserved for emergencies, so Suu and Michael Aris carried on their love affair by airmail. That they were still together at the end of this period testifies to the strength of their feelings for one another.
It is sometimes an advantage to be fascinated by something that fascinates only a very few other people. Though his degree was in Modern History, Michael employed his spare time at Durham learning as much as he could about Tibet’s history, culture, religion and language. “While he was still at Durham he formed a friendship with Hugh Richardson, a great authority on Tibet who had been the last British Resident”—or official representative—“in Lhasa before the Second World War,” recalled Michael’s brother Anthony, and Hugh “became his mentor.”7 He also came in contact with another outstanding figure in Tibetan studies, Marco Pallis. Now that he had graduated, Michael wanted more than anything to get to the country he knew so much about and become a real expert. But Tibet, never easy to enter, had been totally barred to foreigners since the Chinese communist takeover in 1951.
There were however several “little Tibets” on the fringes of the Tibetan plateau, high in the Himalayas, which preserved the ancient culture and language of the country and which were more readily accessible: Ladakh, for example, now a part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir; Sikkim, at the time a protectorate of India; and Bhutan, an independent Buddhist monarchy, closed to tourists and very little known to the outside world.
With one of those strokes of luck by which careers are made, Marco Pallis learned that the royal house of Thimphu, the Bhutanese capital, was looking for a tutor for the royal children. In Michael Aris he had a young man he regarded as the ideal candidate: already with a considerable knowledge of Tibetan, but with a high level of general education as well. Aris seized his opportunity and set off. He was to remain in Bhutan for six years.
Suu meanwhile flew off the other way, to New York. There was never a more exciting time to be in the Big Apple than the late 1960s, with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, Robert Rauschenberg and the Abstract Expressionists, the Buddhist Beats and the Last Poets and the Black Panthers all competing for attention. But none of this held any appeal for Suu: What induced her to cross the Atlantic was her dear Burmese friend Ma Than É, the famous former singer, who had returned from Algiers and was now working at the headquarters of the United Nations. She invited Suu to share her tiny flat in midtown Manhattan.
There was good reason for the move from the point of view of Suu’s career: Despite her poor degree, Ma Than É had persuaded Frank Trager, professor of International Affairs at New York University and an expert on Southeast Asia, to take on Suu as a postgraduate student. She could live down that third, get a postgraduate degree, enjoy a taste of the New World, prove beyond doubt her independence and self-sufficiency—and at the same time relax in the company of her cosmopolitan, worldly wise Burmese friend.
Yet there was a flaw in the strategy, and it is the same flaw that dogged Suu throughout her on-again, off-again academic career. What did she want to study and why? What was the end in view? Her mother had browbeaten her into taking a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, which failed to engage her fully. The university had prevented her from changing to a more congenial subject. And now she had found what appeared to be the perfect way to recoup; but instead she hit the buffers.
Suu began commuting from Ma Than É’s apartment uptown in Beckman Place, round the corner from the UN at First Avenue and East 49th Street, to NYU, which was centered around Washington Square in Greenwich Village. But after a few weeks it seemed that it was not working out.
“Getting to and from New York University meant a long bus ride,” Ma Than É wrote in an essay about her friend, “. . . and it was a trial for Suu, who was given to giddiness on bus rides. There were also the hazards from toughs who frequented her route from the bus stop across the park to Washington Square and the classes she had to attend.”8 So she simply gave up.
But knowing what we do of Suu’s story since 1988, the explanation fails to convince. “I see myself as a trier,” Suu told Alan Clements.9 “I don’t give up.” And for a trier there would have been ways of sticking to that commitment. Never mind the giddiness-inducing bus: From Ma Than É’s flat on Beckman Place it was a five-minute walk to the Lexington and 53rd Street subway stop, then eight stops downtown on the E train to West 4th Street, and a couple of minutes’ walk to class from there. New York was rougher in 1968 than it is now, to be sure, and there were many parts where it was unwise for a young female to go alone—but Beckman Place and the NYU campus were not among them. Professor Trager’s offer of a postgraduate place would have been like gold dust for an ambitious student. If the commute (it takes less than twenty-five minutes each way) was such a problem, a really motivated student would have found a room of her own close to the campus, and paid the rent by waiting on tables. Ma Than É’s account is a kind attempt to save her friend’s face, but the true explanation must be that, once again, Suu’s heart was not in it.
A more compelling explanation is that, within those few weeks, Suu discovered that Professor Trager was on friendly terms with high officials in the Ne Win regime.10 She was learning that attentions from the other side of the political fence, such as apparently innocuous invitations to Wimbledon, were to be handled with great care.
But meanwhile the man who was without doubt the greatest Burmese statesman on the international stage since the death of her father was at large and in control just a couple of blocks from her New York home: U Thant, who had been Secretary General of the United Nations since 1961. If the university didn’t work out, for reasons of giddiness or something else, perhaps there was a far more promising prospect on the doorstep. “The UN was about six minutes’ walk from where we lived,” Ma Than É recalled. “Why shouldn’t she try for a job there and do her studies later? After applications, recommendations, interviews and the usual delays and difficulties, Suu was in.”
*
U Thant is little remembered today, but for anyone growing up in the 1960s he was a figure of enormous fame and stature, his curious name and smooth, sensitive, rather worried-looking features as familiar as those of any national statesman. These were the days, with the cataclysm of world war less than two decades away and the Cold War raging, when earnest intellectuals still dreamed that the United Nations could usher in a new era of World Government, when all conflicts would be resolved without resort to arms. U Thant, who held the closest job ever invented to President of the World, seemed the ideal person to bring it about.
He held the post from 1961 to 1971, thrown in at the deep end when the first holder of the office, Dag Hammerskjöld of Sweden, died in an air crash in the middle of the Cuban nuclear missile crisis—the closest the world has ever come to all-out nuclear war. U Thant’s sharp wits and cool, low-profile negotiating skills helped pull Kennedy and Khrushchev back from the brink. He went on to play a key role in ending the war in the Congo, and had a crucial part in resolving many other international conflicts. U Thant was also centrally involved in launching the UN’s humanitarian, environmental and development missions. In 1965 he was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for international understanding. While in office he successfully spiked the Soviet Union’s proposal that there should be three Secretary Generals, one representing each of the major power blocs, a recipe for permanent impasse. Perhaps the greatest testimony to his charm and suppleness is the fact that at the end of his term, already gravely ill, he was still on speaking terms with the leaders of both Russia and the United States.
The UN’s gain was Burma’s loss: If democracy had survived in Burma it is hard to imagine that U Thant would not have been at the center of it. Norman Lewis, who met him in Rangoon a decade before his dramatic elevation, was impressed: As Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Information in 1949, he advised the English writer on his prospective journey around the country. U Thant “saw no reason why I should not go wherever I wished,” Lewis wrote. “Later I found that . . . this was his first experience of a request to travel about the country . . . any doubts were veiled beneath more than even the normal measure of Burmese charm.”11
Even at this early stage of his career, U Thant had mastered the art of spinning awkward news: “U Thant said that the railway service from Rangoon to Mandalay was working. It was perhaps a little inconvenient because of a break in the line. Proper arrangements were made to carry passengers across the gap . . . either in lorries or bullock carts, and if they were sometimes held up it was only to extract a kind of toll. That was to say, no violence was ever done . . .”12
As his record at the UN—and his rapidly deteriorating relations with the United States, as the Vietnam War span out of control—proved, U Thant was profoundly hostile to colonialism and neo-colonialism, and as Secretary General he did everything he could to make the newly independent ex-colonies feel at home in the UN. But he was not an embittered nationalist fanatic like Ne Win, not bent on tearing down the good that the colonialists had done along with the bad, and Ne Win’s hostility to him is further proof of his small-mindedness. U Thant represented that cadre of civil servants, so important in the creation of independent India and so badly missed, because so few in number, in Burma, who were able to carry on, administratively speaking, where the British left off. “Thant’s dream,” wrote his grandson, Thant Myint-U, “had been to become a civil servant in the British Burma administration.”13 Instead he became right hand man to prime minister U Nu, his friend since university, secretary of the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, and a founding father of the Non-Aligned Movement which the conference inspired.
For most of the 1950s he was U Nu’s secretary, his closest confidant and adviser, keeping his often wayward and capricious friend to the diplomatic script. Then in 1957, in the waning days of U Nu’s last government, U Nu asked him to go to New York to be Burma’s permanent representative. Whether or not Ne Win—who the following year took over control of the country, in his dry run for military rule—was behind the proposal, its effect was to remove the prime minister’s most capable adviser from national politics for good. Four years later U Thant was catapulted into what was then regarded as the most powerful job in the world.
*
This was the man whom Suu now found herself working for, in a humble and very junior capacity, as part of the staff supporting something called the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions—“in real life no less dreadful than it sounds,” according to Thant Myint-U, who himself later became a UN diplomat.14 She also got a taste of the real New York by volunteering, many hours every week, at Belleview Hospital, a short bus ride from home, where she read or chatted to or otherwise helped out some of the many prostitutes, derelicts and incurable patients that the enormous hospital housed.
If she ever got seriously homesick, she was now within easy traveling distance of the most influential and civilized colony of Burmese anywhere in the world outside Rangoon—U Thant’s gracious home overlooking the Hudson river, which was also home to his children and grandchildren and where Suu and Ma Than É were sometimes invited for Sunday lunch or family birthdays. The Secretary General’s official residence was “a rambling seven-bedroom red-brick house, partly covered in ivy and set on a grassy six-acre hillside along the Hudson River,” wrote Thant Myint-U, who grew up there.15
On the map it was part of Riverdale, but in most other ways it was a small slice of Burma . . . There was always an assortment of Burmese houseguests, who stayed anywhere from an evening to many months, and a domestic staff (all Burmese as well) of nannies and maids, cooks and gardeners, as one might expect in any Rangoon pukka home. Burmese dancers and musicians sometimes performed at parties on the lawn. A Buddhist shrine with fresh-cut flowers graced a special area on the first floor, and a constant smell of curries drifted out of the always-busy black-and-white tiled kitchen.
“U Thant and his family would be warmly welcoming,” Ma Than É remembered—but even when the parties to which they were invited were intimate, the Secretary General declined to be drawn on the political issues of the day.16 Not for nothing had he succeeded in climbing to the top of diplomacy’s greasy pole.
As the most powerful Burmese diplomat in the world, though with no official ties to Rangoon, U Thant was duty bound to keep in the good books of all the different Burmese factions on his doorstep, including the Ne Win appointees at the embassy. Doubtless they and the fiercely anti-regime émigrés among his guests—people such as Ma Than É and Aung San Suu Kyi—eyed each other venomously over the fish curry: Factionalism, as Aung San had noted many years before, was the besetting vice of the Burmese, and the polarizing policies of Ne Win made it very much worse.
The permanent Burmese representative at the UN in those days, U Soe Tin, was in this respect unusual in that, although umbilically tied to the regime, he maintained friendly relations with those on the other side, and Suu and Ma Than É were often invited to his own, less imposing home in Riverdale for Burmese functions. “We liked him and his wife and children,” wrote Ma Than É. “He was a liberal type who did not divide us into sheep and goats . . . At his house it was possible to discuss, debate and argue, sometimes heatedly but in the main with much good nature.”17 But Soe Tin was on Ne Win’s payroll and orders were orders—hence one particular, very uncomfortable lunch party the pair of them had to sit through. It was Suu’s introduction to the ugly menaces which were the general’s political stock-in-trade.
It seemed to Ma Than É like just another run-of-the-mill lunch invitation to Riverdale, arriving during a session of the UN General Assembly. “Some members of the [Burmese] delegation had said they would like to meet us,” she wrote.18 They arrived at Soe Tin’s home to find “a whole battery of Burmese ambassadors attending the current General Assembly,” all of them seated on chairs and sofas which had been ranged against the walls. Suu was put at one end of the room, seated between two of these worthies, her friend far away. “We made some slight inconsequential remarks,” she wrote. “U Soe Tin was smiling politely but looked uneasy. It became clear to me that the company was preparing to sit in judgment on Suu. But for what?”
The chief of the Burmese delegation to the General Assembly took the floor.
How was it that Suu was working for the UN? What passport was she using? Since her mother was no longer ambassador, Suu should have given up her diplomatic passport. Was it true that she had not done so? She must be aware that she was holding her diplomatic passport unlawfully. It was most irregular and should be put right as soon as possible. The whole company listened to this tirade with a sort of sycophantic deference, turning their eyes on Suu and murmuring agreement.
Ma Than É recorded Suu’s reply—a very modest dry run, though no one could have guessed it at the time, for her speech before a million people at the Shwedagon more than fifteen years later. She wrote:
Suu’s calm and composure were for me very reassuring. She replied with great dignity and in very quiet tones. She had long ago applied for a new passport to the embassy in London but had not received a reply up to now. She could not say what could be the reason for this extraordinary delay. She had come to New York to study and therefore had used her old passport . . .
The ambassador from London then stood up to confirm that Suu had indeed applied months ago for a new passport . . . All of us in that room knew, of course, of the bureaucratic confusion and incompetence in Burma which had created similar delays . . .19
The genteel court-martial ended with the chief delegate, comprehensively humiliated, promising to sort out the confusion when he returned to Rangoon. Suu had learned a useful lesson: Despite her youth and her sex, she was not obliged to kowtow to fools in office.
It is debatable, however, whether she fully appreciated that this was a special dispensation that applied to her and her alone, because of who she was, and not to any disaffected Burmese with the nerve to rock the boat. Ma Than É remembers a friend in the permanent delegation at the UN, one with whom they were in the custom of having knockabout political debates, saying to Suu teasingly one time when he felt she had gone over the top in her critical remarks, “You not only have the courage of your convictions—you have the courage of your connections!” It was the courage that was to carry her all the way from the Shwedagon to house arrest.
*
Buddhism is a curious religion. All the different schools acknowledge the same founding teacher, Gautama, the Seer of the Shakyas, the Enlightened One, and the same teaching, the same Fourfold Noble Truths, the same moral precepts. Most of them have sitting meditation as a central component of the religious practice. But they have been separated from each other for many centuries, since the destruction of the great monasteries and universities of Buddhism in northern India and the disappearance of Buddhism from the Indian mainland. And despite all they hold in common they have had very little to do with each other since. As is the way with all creeds, there is a tendency for adherents of each particular school to believe that they are the ones on the right track, but mutual indifference is the best way to characterise these non-relationships. There is no persecution, as Islam’s Sunnis persecute the Shiites and vice versa, no accusations of heresy or efforts to convert—but neither are there ecumenical efforts to build bridges or make compromises.
The most celebrated of those few efforts that there have been is the exception that proves the rule: When the American Buddhist convert Colonel Henry Olcott, who was also the cofounder with Madame Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society, tried to make all the Buddhist branches into one church. He succeeded, in Sri Lanka, in writing a Buddhist Liturgy, accepted by the Buddhist authorities on the island, and he designed the beautiful Buddhist flag, composed of oblong strips, red, pink, white, indigo, saffron, comprising the colors of the Buddhist robes of the different Asian countries, which is vastly popular in Burma even today. But of his efforts to bring all these groups together, little remains. What, they would probably have asked him, is the need?
So although Michael Aris, in faraway Bhutan, was becoming more and more familiar with the Bhutanese variant of Tibetan Buddhism, that didn’t in itself bring him materially closer to a young woman steeped in the related but distinct and very different traditions of Theravada Buddhism. Yet something convinced her—perhaps we can just say “love” and leave it at that—that Michael was the man for her.
The two of them had kept in touch by letter since their early meetings in London. What those letters say remains a closely guarded secret. What we do know is that in the summer of 1970, when Aris came home to Britain from Bhutan on holiday, he also visited New York, where he and Suu became formally engaged. The following spring Suu kept a promise she had made and visited him in Thimphu, the Bhutanese capital, where he had now been working for three years and where they planned to live once they were married. The trip went well: Soon afterwards she was writing to thank her brother-in-law-to-be, Anthony Aris, for giving his formal approval to their union—a requirement in the Burmese tradition—while lamenting, though without too much apparent anxiety, the fact that her mother and brother had yet to give theirs.20 She also expressed her happiness and pride at the prospect of becoming part of a family she was already fond of. “At the end of her third year of service in the UN Secretariat,” wrote Ma Than É, “Suu made a choice. She decided that a husband and children would be greatly preferable to a career in the UN, however brilliant it was promising to be.”21
With six months’ more hard slog in a city she had learned to dislike thoroughly before she could start her new life, Suu began writing to Michael with remarkable intensity.22 During the eight months between her visit to Thimphu and the wedding, she wrote to him more than once every two days: a total of 187 letters.
Some of them were tough letters to write, and tough to receive. If Michael had any doubt that he was marrying a person with very particular baggage, these letters would have removed it.
Given the indifference of one brother and the death of the other in childhood, Suu was the only one of her generation left to carry the family flame. What did that mean? She had no idea. She was not a soothsayer. But she felt the weight of her father’s legacy on her shoulders; and she had already discovered what sort of weight it carried in Burmese affairs, even today, more than twenty years after his death. Ne Win would ask her to tea, and whether she accepted or refused, her response mattered. She obtained a humble job in the United Nations, and the passport she carried became a diplomatic incident. This was a weight you could shrug off only by deciding that it didn’t matter what your father had said or done or believed: by doing like her brother, becoming a foreign citizen, settling elsewhere and turning your back on the whole thing. But even in the midst of her early adult doldrums, that was not a position Suu showed any sign of adopting.
Marrying an Englishman was not the obvious way to stay true to the legacy, it would not make it any easier to stay true to it—but she was in love and that was that. So the only thing to do was, by the force of her will, to ensure that she did stay true, regardless, and that her fiancé was well aware of that and fully accepted what it might mean, well in advance. Because otherwise this marriage was not going to happen. It was the mother of all pre-nups.
“Recently I read again the 187 letters she sent to me in Bhutan from New York,” Aris wrote twenty years later.23 Then he quoted from the letters: lines that, among Suu’s worldwide supporters and admirers, have become famous:
I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.
Would you mind very much should such a situation ever arise? How probable it is I do not know, but the possibility is there.
Michael Aris accepted these terms without demur. There could be no finer proof of his love. They married in London on January 1, 1972.
