ON the day they placed me under arrest,” Suu told an American journalist who visited her at home in 1995, “this garden was still quite beautiful. There were lots of Madonna lilies, fields and fields of them, and frangipani, and fragrant yellow jasmines, and gardenias, and a flower from South America that changes its color as it matures and is called ‘yesterday, today and tomorrow.’”1
But after she was detained Suu did not want to look out on flowers any more, and she did not want their scent in her nostrils.
On July 21, 1989, a SLORC spokesman announced that Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo, the NLD chairman, were to be confined to their homes for a minimum of one year “because they have violated the law by committing acts designed to put the country in a perilous state.” They had been detained under the new rules enacted earlier in the year permitting summary justice by the military without recourse to the courts.
That was bad enough. But all Suu’s closest comrades, the forty-odd men and women, including her friend and companion Ma Thanegi, who had spent Martyrs’ Day at her home together as the army once again clamped the capital in an iron grip, had been taken off to Insein Jail. Only she and Tin Oo had been left on the outside.
Suu demanded to be taken to join them in prison. When the regime refused, she went on hunger strike. She would eat nothing, she said, unless they agreed to her demand and put her in jail with the rest. In the meantime she would take only water and fruit juice.
Alex, now sixteen, and Kim, eleven, were with her at home—Michael had sent them on ahead while he attended to essential business following his father’s death—but now they found themselves spectators to a battle of wills that had nothing to do with them, and that they must have struggled to comprehend.
When news reached Michael of his wife’s detention, he set out to join his family as quickly as he could. Fortunately he already had a valid Burmese visa in his passport, so he was able to leave almost at once, informing the authorities that he was on his way. But when he landed at Rangoon’s Mingaladon Airport on July 24th, he discovered that he had arrived in the thick of a major crisis.
“As the plane taxied to a halt,” he wrote, “I could see a lot of military activity on the tarmac. The plane was surrounded by troops . . .”2 Aris would not have been human if he had not been a little apprehensive: The assassination of Filipino opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr., shot dead on the tarmac of Manila’s airport as he returned from exile, was only six years in the past. But no violence was offered him. Aris was escorted away by an army officer, forbidden to make contact with the British Embassy, and told that he could join Suu and the boys if he agreed to abide by the same terms of detention as Suu. He consented promptly and was driven from the airport to University Avenue, where he found the house surrounded by troops. He wrote later:
The gates were opened and we drove in. I had no idea what to expect.
I arrived to find Suu in the third day of a hunger strike. Her single demand was that she should be allowed to go to prison with all her young supporters who had been taken away from her compound when the authorities arrested her. She believed her presence with them in prison would afford them some protection from maltreatment. She took her last meal on the evening of July 20th, the day of her arrest, and for the following twelve days until almost noon on August 1st, she accepted only water.3
It was another Danubyu, another stand-off, in the series of confrontations that have punctuated Suu’s political career, but for the first and only time her husband found himself thrust into the role of go-between. It was clear that the authorities had no intention of agreeing to her demand. So either the family could sit there and watch their wife and mother waste away and die, or they would have to find a compromise.
Dying, he insisted to her, would do no good to the imprisoned students or anybody else. So under her husband’s persuasion, Suu agreed to moderate her conditions: She would agree to stay where she was and break her fast on condition that she was given the regime’s solemn word that the NLD members who had been locked up would not be maltreated in prison.
Meanwhile Suu was dwindling away. Already back in February she had been “fragile and light as a papier-mâché doll,” according to Ma Thanegi’s diary. Throughout the self-imposed ordeal Suu was “very calm,” Aris wrote, “and the boys too. She had spent the days of her fast resting quietly, reading and talking to us.” But Aris himself was at his wits’ end. “I was less calm,” he confessed, “though I tried to pretend to be.” Finally the agony of waiting was broken and he was summoned to a full-dress meeting of senior army officers at Rangoon City Hall to present Suu’s demands, recorded by the military’s video cameras for posterity. And on August 1st, a week after his arrival and twelve days after the start of her fast, the tension was broken.
“A military officer came to give her his personal assurance, on behalf of the authorities, that her young people would not be tortured and that the cases against them would be heard by due process of law,” he wrote. “She accepted this compromise, and the doctors who had been deputed to attend her, whose treatment she had hitherto refused, put her on an intravenous drip with her consent. She had lost twelve pounds in weight. I still do not know if the authorities kept their promise.”4
She had lost one set of boys—the NLD’s student members—and now she was about to lose the other ones: her family. They had a full month together after the beginning of her house arrest. Michael’s visa was about to expire but the authorities agreed to extend it so he and his sons could return to Britain together. “Suu recovered her weight and strength in the days ahead,” he wrote. “The boys learned martial arts from the guards. We put the house in order.”5 Then, September 2nd rolled around, school beckoned, and the three of them departed—never to be reunited as a family again.
Suu has always been very reluctant to say much about the personal, emotional costs of her choices, and about the ill effect of those choices on her children she has said next to nothing. “As a mother,” she told Alan Clements, “the greater sacrifice was giving up my sons”—but then added immediately what is always the corollary: “I was always aware of the fact that others had sacrificed more than me.”6 Coaxed by Clements to say a little more, she added, “When I first entered politics, my family happened to be here with me tending to my mother. So it was not a case of my suddenly leaving them, or they leaving me. It was a more gradual transition which gave us an opportunity to adjust.”
There will be readers to whom those words may seem unacceptably hard-hearted. But Suu was weighing them carefully. In her long war of wills with the regime, all of this was ammunition. The last thing she wanted to do was give her jailors the idea that she or her family were suffering intolerably, that the slow torture of separation was working.
As has been mentioned earlier in this book, the unique aspect of Suu Kyi’s long ordeal—one which marks it off sharply from the otherwise comparable experiences of people like Soviet dissident Sakharov or Nelson Mandela—was that, as the regime made amply clear to her, she could have brought it to an end by agreeing to leave the country for ever.
One of the things that made it psychologically bearable to remain cooped up alone while her family was on the other side of the world was the thought of them coming out to see her in the school holidays. But the regime was canny and cruel enough to see that, and to sever that heartstring now. Soon after Michael and the boys got back to Oxford, they learned that this would be their last trip to see Suu—or at least the last one they could bank on. The Burmese Embassy informed Michael drily that the boys’ Burmese passports were now invalid because they were no longer entitled—on what grounds was not explained—to Burmese citizenship. “Very obviously,” Aris wrote, “the plan was to break Suu’s spirit by separating her from her children in the hope she would accept permanent exile.” Until 1988, the longest time Suu and her children had been separated was a month. Now it was to be more than two years before they would see each other again.
*
In the flower-scented tranquility of University Avenue, Michael, Alexander and Kim had watched Suu shrink and dwindle and fade, then, once agreement with the authorities was reached, return to her normal state. But meanwhile outside in the city’s streets the State Law and Order Restoration Council set about killing off the democracy movement once and for all.
Suu’s apprehensions about the treatment of her party comrades, the motivation for her hunger strike, were not in the least fanciful. In the year since the crackdown of September 18, 1988, three thousand alleged activists had been jailed; that number doubled in the four months between Suu’s detention and November 1989, and included many of her colleagues in the party. They were summarily tried by the newly empowered military tribunals, but they were also frequently tortured: One month after Suu’s detention began—three weeks after the end of her fast—a declassified American Embassy cable revealed that the torture of political prisoners included burns to the flesh by cigarettes, electric shocks to the genitals and beatings so severe that they caused permanent damage to eyes and ears and sometimes death.7 Hundreds more such prisoners were also punished in a way that was to become routine as the small but brutal civil wars on the frontier dragged on. They were forced to work for the army fighting Shan insurgents in northern Shan State, either lugging the army’s equipment as porters or forced to walk ahead of the troops as human mine-detectors: If they were not blown up, it was safe for the soldiers to follow.
The mobilization of millions of Burmese against the military regime in the past year and a half now elicited a terrible retribution. Suu has always insisted that simply being confined to her home she had far less to complain about than colleagues who lacked the protection of her name and fame, and she is right. “The military regime seeks not only to break down the identity of former political prisoners,” said a report by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, reviewing thousands of cases of abuse since 1988, “but to make them walking advertisements for the consequences of speaking out against the regime. Many former political prisoners repeatedly explain that once they are a political prisoner they are always a political prisoner.”
Some of Suu’s most senior colleagues were silenced more or less permanently. Win Tin, the veteran dissident journalist on the NLD’s Central Executive Committee, was sentenced to three years’ hard labor on October 3rd, but his term was repeatedly extended until he was finally set free in 2008, after nineteen years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement. And two days after Win Tin was sent down, the man who had become one of Suu’s first political mentors when she returned to Rangoon to nurse her mother, the writer and war hero Maung Thaw Ka, was given a twenty-year sentence which, given his frail condition, was in effect a sentence of death.
Maung Thaw Ka, his name almost unknown outside Burma, is a good symbol of the awakening that had occurred since the spring of 1988, and of how ruthlessly and vindictively it was now being trampled. It was he, the fifty-one-year-old naval officer-turned-writer, who had given Suu a tour of the places in Rangoon where troops had killed students in the early months of the revolt, long before she decided to offer her involvement; it was he, with his big ears and wedge of a nose and a paunch showing through his striped shirt, who shared the little podium with her when she gave her maiden political speech at Rangoon General Hospital.
Like Tin Oo, the former defense minister, his career spanned the heyday of Aung San as well as that of his daughter. He was serving in the Burmese Navy during the war when the British forces handed the ship on which he was serving, the May Yu, over to Aung San’s command. It was he who led the guard of honor when Suu’s father was piped aboard.
He went into the navy as an ordinary seaman, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. In 1956 the ship he was serving on was wrecked, and he and twenty-six shipmates took to two life rafts. One of them sank, with the loss of all on board; seven of the men on the second raft also died but he and the others survived for twelve days on boiled sweets and rainwater before being rescued. The book he wrote about the ordeal, Patrol Boat 103, made him famous. When he retired from the navy in 1969 he quickly became one of Burma’s best-loved writers: Unlike Win Tin, whose refusal to compromise in his journalism led to him being effectively silenced for many years before 1988, Maung Thaw Ka was editor in chief of a state-sponsored magazine under the socialist regime, and wrote witty and gently satirical pieces that were immensely popular. As a retired sailor he was expert at sailing close to the political wind without being capsized.
The Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner, who knew him as a friend, said, “He was a lovely man. Before 1988 he would travel around the country and give lectures on literature. Agents from Military Intelligence always occupied the front row of seats in the hall, but he was a war hero so it was very difficult to punish him.”8 He also wrote poetry, and translated much English poetry into Burmese, including Shakespeare sonnets and poems by Donne, Herrick, Shelley and Cowper. His English was fluent. Through the years of Burma’s enforced seclusion he was one of the few who insisted on throwing open windows to the world.
With the uprising of 1988 he saw a chance of real change coming to Burma and seized it, befriending Suu and helping her to understand in detail how the movement was developing, cosigning a letter to the authorities in August 1988 protesting the brutal suppression of demonstrations, and joining the Central Executive Committee of the NLD when it was formed. But he went further than that: He also wrote an open letter to the Burmese Navy, exhorting the service to stand by the people in opposing the military junta.
He was fearless in defying the authorities. He ran a little photocopy shop in downtown Rangoon, and when Outrage was published, Bertil Lintner’s blow-by-blow documentary account of the 1988 events, he obtained a copy and kept it in the shop, allowing customers he trusted to make Xeroxes but not to take it away.
But he was suffering from a muscle-wasting disease, and when SLORC came to get him he was already a sick man. He was sentenced to twenty years’ jail for trying to foment an insurrection in the armed forces. “At the time he entered Insein Jail he was already suffering from a chronic disease that was laying his muscles to waste,” Suu wrote later. “His movements were stiff and jerky, and everyday matters, such as bathing, dressing or eating, involved a series of maneuvers that could barely be completed without assistance.”9 Like Win Tin, he was locked up quite alone. For a man with an advanced degenerative disease, that was a way to torture him to death without the trouble of laying hands on him.
“He was thrown on a concrete floor,” Lintner told me. “They didn’t give him any medical treatment. It was punishment—because he was the one who dragged Suu Kyi onto the public stage.” He subsequently died in hospital. Until then he kept writing in the cell. He had nothing, he wrote in one of his last poems, “Just One Matchstick.” But one matchstick could change the world.
When a little spark turns into a big flame, it will burn away
all the dirt that exists in this world,
together with the worthless, unprincipled people.
In twenty years the ashes produced by the fire started from Maung Thaw Ka’s one matchstick
will build a historical cenotaph for the future.10
He died in June 1991, aged sixty-five.
*
As the arrests, tortures and deaths mounted up—by November 1989 a hundred activists had been sentenced to death by the new tribunals—everyone who had ever waved a placard or shouted a slogan lived in fear that their turn could be next. Suu had spent more than half her life in Britain, in a society where people might fear poverty or crime or old age, but where fear—mortal fear—was rarely employed as an instrument of government policy. In Burma she discovered it was the fundamental agent of coercion. As she saw it, the fear with which Burma was saturated explained why its development was so stunted.
“It is not power that corrupts but fear,” she wrote in the months before her detention, in an essay entitled “Freedom from Fear” that was published around the world in 1990. “Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
Fear, bhaya in Burmese, “destroys all sense of right and wrong,” she went on, which is why it is at the root of corruption. “With so close a relationship between fear and corruption it is little wonder that in any society where fear is rife corruption in all forms becomes deeply entrenched.”
It was not only economic distress that ignited the revolt of 1988, she wrote, but the disgust of young people at the way their lives were poisoned and deformed by fear. In Burma, the only relationship to authority that was permitted was one of complete passivity, where the people were no more self-assertive than “water in the cupped hands” of the rulers. “Law and order,” a relatively neutral phrase in English, translates into Burmese as nyein-wut-pi-pyar; literally, “silent-crouched-crushed-flattened.”11 That was the attitude SLORC required of the Burmese, and that was what they rose up against.
The insurrectionists proposed a different model:
Emerald cool we may be
As water in cupped hands,
Suu wrote in that essay,
But oh that we might be
As splinters of glass
In cupped hands.
“Glass splinters,” Suu wrote, “the smallest with its sharp, glinting power to defend itself against hands that try to crush, could be seen as a vivid symbol of the spark of courage that is an essential attribute of those who would free themselves from the grip of oppression.”12
But where and how to find courage, when the rulers have become accustomed to drinking up their people like water, and the people have grown used to being swallowed? International gestures such as the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights were fine and important, as were the efforts by people like her old boss U Thant and his successors to give the UN a role in policing the behavior of states that flouted it. But so far such powers were painfully limited: The fact that Sadako Ogata was in the country and investigating human rights’ abuses for the UN Human Rights Commission on the day that U Maung Ko, General Secretary of the Dockworkers’ Union, became the first NLD activist to die in jail said plenty about the UN’s impotence.
So courage, that glass splinter quality, was essential. Suu feared her foreign readers would not grasp the immensity of what she was proposing, because it is hard for anyone brought up in a free society to put themselves in the shoes of the Burmese. “The effort necessary to remain uncorrupted in an environment where fear is an integral part of everyday existence,” she wrote, “is not immediately apparent to those fortunate enough to live in states governed by the rule of law.”13 But if Burma was to be transformed—and that was the task she and her colleagues had taken on—then a major effort would be required. Not an effort directed merely at changing policies and institutions or raising living standards; parroting about freedom, democracy and human rights would not in itself make the difference. What was needed for society to change was first for the people to change.
This might be difficult, but it was not inconceivable: After all, as she wrote, “It is his capacity for self-improvement and self-redemption which most distinguishes man from the mere brute.” And self-improvement, self-redemption, was needed now. “The quintessential revolution,” she wrote “is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation’s development . . . Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative.”14
These are fine words that resonate down the years and have become her clarion call. But they beg the question: In the face of the systematic brutality employed by SLORC, where was this “intellectual conviction” going to come from? And would it be sufficient to do the job? Suu was still at an early stage of her self-interrogation on these questions. “Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying,” she wrote, “so free men are the oppressed who go on trying.” And it was Michael, either prompted by her or on his own initiative, who provided one of the tools she needed in the quest.
While her sons were now barred from Burma indefinitely, her husband was allowed one more visit—presumably in the hope that he would find the words to persuade his wife to go home with him when he left. But if that was the hope, the regime was badly mistaken: “I had not even thought of doing this,” he wrote.15 Instead they enjoyed what he insisted, despite the unpromising circumstances, was an idyllic break: They were fully united and agreed in their understanding of what she was doing and why.
He flew into Rangoon on December 16, 1989—exactly four years after the family had been united in Japan, on the occasion when Noriko Ohtsu took them to visit the temple with the Burmese Buddha. “The days I spent alone with her that last time, completely isolated from the world, are among my happiest memories of our many years of marriage,” he wrote. “It was wonderfully peaceful. Suu had established a strict regime of exercise, study and piano which I managed to disrupt. She was memorizing a number of Buddhist sutras. I produced Christmas presents I had brought one by one to spread them out over several days. We had all the time in the world to talk about many things. I did not suspect that this would be the last time we would be together for the foreseeable future.” Like those of their sons, several of Michael’s future visa applications would be turned down: Having failed to persuade his wife to leave, he guessed that the regime “realized that I was no longer useful to their purpose.”
Part of Suu’s “strict regime” that he disrupted involved meditation: Once her detention began she took to rising at 4:30 AM and starting the day with an hour of vipassana sitting meditation. But it was not easy. “I did not have a teacher,” she wrote some years later, “and my early attempts were more than a little frustrating. There were days when I found my failure to discipline my mind . . . so infuriating I felt I was doing myself more harm than good.”16 But one of the Christmas parcels Michael brought contained a useful surprise: a paperback with on the cover a thorny tree, a rocky peak and an expanse of blue sky into which the morning sun is about to burst. The title was In This Very Life: The Liberation Teachings of the Buddha, by a Rangoon-based monk, Sayadaw U Pandita. The book was to open her mind, and provide her with a practical guide to sitting quietly, doing nothing.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s generosity of spirit had been remarked on by her Oxford friend Ann Pasternak Slater. “It is Suu’s kindness that is most sharply present to me now,” she wrote. “One early morning I came to see my [elderly, ailing] 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.”
Now Suu was to learn, or to relearn, that in her native religion, “much value is attached to liberality or generosity,” as she later wrote: It was regarded as the most important of the “Ten Perfections of the Buddha” and the “Ten Duties of Kings.”17 But this should not be misunderstood, she warned: It was not to exalt “alms-giving based on canny calculation of possible benefits in the way of worldly prestige or other-worldly rewards.” Rather, “it is a recognition of the crucial importance of the liberal, generous spirit as an effective antidote to greed as well as a fount of virtues which engender happiness and harmony.” Suu already knew, instinctively, that for her morality was inseparable from politics. Now, thanks to Michael’s gift, she was beginning to learn how to go deeper.
*
Their idyllic, surreal holiday came to an end. Michael went away. And finally she was almost alone.
Not entirely alone, of course. In the Orient, only the hermit monk in his mountain cave is ever really alone, and perhaps not even he.
There were the soldiers outside the gate of her compound and the others inside, fifteen of them, all armed, day and night. There were her faithful companions-cum-housekeepers Daw Khin Khin Win and her daughter Mee Ma Ma, and her maid Maria, all three sharing the terms of her detention. In the smaller house in the compound lived her aunt Daw Khin Gyi, where she had always lived, and free to come and go.
But that was all. She was more alone than she had ever been since the birth of Alexander, sixteen years before. From being the center of attention for months and months, the center of the Burmese universe and of interest and concern far beyond Burma, now it was as if she had vanished from the world. What was most striking was the contrast: the hubbub then and the silence now.
Eighteen months earlier the old family home had become her mother’s sickbay when Suu brought Khin Kyi home from hospital. Silence reigned. Then, after Ne Win announced his resignation, it became almost overnight a teeming political laboratory. Twice during the following year troops had arrived in strength and put the house under siege. The second time, on July 20, 1989, the day after Martyrs’ Day, all her party comrades were bundled into army lorries and driven off to prison. She was left there with her two sons and her three companions, guarded by a dozen soldiers, in a bizarre parody of normal home life. Michael flew in to join them in their solitude and the parody was complete.
But now her family had gone, too, back to school, back to work, back to the West. Leaving her—“This ruler of our kingdom, a pretty thing, a pretty little thing,” as the Kachin grandmother had cooed to her babies—the queen of what exactly? The mistress of all she surveyed? Hardly: With fifteen armed soldiers watching her every move there was nothing she could command.
The queen of herself then, if nothing else. The way Daw Khin Kyi had taught her.
*
She had lost. That was the point. She had challenged the Old Man, Number One, General Ne Win, to a duel, cheered on by millions—but he had the gun and she had only flowers to throw and now she had lost the duel and they had locked her up and thrown away the key.
If we look at Aung San Suu Kyi’s life as a conventional political narrative that is how it goes—very unsatisfactorily. The sudden challenge, the mass acclaim, the tireless campaigning, the nationwide crescendo of support—then nothing: the nothing of outright defeat. An election landslide win the following year, contemptuously ignored by the men with the guns. Fifteen years of solitary nothing, interspersed with a few years of trying to climb back on the bandwagon before being locked away again; finally released in 2010 because at last the generals have hit on a way to pen her up permanently in the margins, to confine her to a public space as niggardly and narrow as that of her home, thanks to the fake election and the fake parliament.
That, in an ugly nutshell, is how this second phase of Suu’s political life looks. Even before her release in November 2010 some correspondents were speculating on her perhaps imminent retirement—she was sixty-five, after all, well into bus pass territory.18 A reader’s letter published by the Financial Times in 201119 wondered sadly if she was now no more than “Burma’s Queen Mum,” a rather pointless ornament to a regime that, to quote Burma authority Robert Taylor, could now be “on the cusp of normality.”20 Tragic is the word that springs to these writers’ lips, tragic waste, tragic destiny; a story without the remotest hope of a happy end.
But to read Suu’s political career in this register is to overlook the way her thinking developed during the years of house arrest, especially during the very harsh period with which her detention began, and the way this new thinking linked up with a movement that had very quietly been gathering force in Burma for fifty years, though largely unknown to the outside world. It is also to overlook the fact that, despite the failure to capitalize on the early success and change the system, and despite her many years of enforced absence from society, she still enjoys the allegiance of the great mass of Burmese people.
These two facts—her quiet emergence as a symbol and talisman of the underground movement, and her continuing mass support—are closely connected. They explain why, for example, the mass monks’ revolt of September 2007, the so-called “Saffron Revolution,” culminated in one deputation of monks making their way through the military road blocks to her gate. They explain why the generals continue even now to regard her as the number one domestic menace to their continued rule, despite the fact that they have systematically dismantled the national cult surrounding her father and have done everything they can think of to marginalize and demonize her.
*
It is necessary to chart the development of her thinking after she was detained.
For Suu, steeped in the literature of Britain and India as well as Burma, the challenge for Burma was not to ape the political forms of the West, nor to find the right balance of tyranny and license to allow the capitalists to storm in and take over as they had done in Bangkok. The deformation Burma had suffered under Ne Win was an offense and an insult, a prolonged abuse to the nation’s soul. The challenge was to find a way out of the trap Ne Win had constructed, the bunker he had turned the country into. Democracy was part of that, to be sure, but the true challenge was a far greater one than swapping one political system for another. And it was during her house arrest that she identified the chink of light that she dared to hope could lead her and her country out of the trap, the bunker, the labyrinth.
In the long essay Suu researched and wrote during her year in Shimla in 1986, she celebrated what India had achieved thanks to Gandhi, the “Great Soul,” and his contemporaries and forbears in the Indian Renaissance. “In India,” she wrote, “political and intellectual leadership had often coincided. Moreover, there had been an uninterrupted stream of able leaders from the last years of the nineteenth century until independence. This provided a cohesive framework within which social and political movements could experiment and mature.”21 Such a framework was conspicuously absent in Burma—but that did not mean it could never exist: All it meant was that Burma’s modern experience had been far too compressed for such an evolution to occur. She quoted a British scholar, J.S. Furnivall, founder of the Burma Research Society, who she felt was on the right track. He wrote in 1916:
For the Burma that we hope to assist in building is like some old pagoda recently unearthed and in course of restoration . . . [It is necessary] to clear away cartloads of rubbish. We have carefully to set in order the foundations and the whole building brick by brick, but I for one firmly believe that if the Burma of the future is to be a lasting fabric, it must be built up on the old foundations.22
Suu commented, “In such views can be seen the seeds of a renaissance: The urge to create a vital link between the past, the present and the future, the wish to clear away ‘cartloads of rubbish’ so that old foundations might become fit to hold up a new and lasting fabric. But it was a renaissance that did not really come to fruition.”
Written shortly before her return to Burma in 1988, with her encounters with Burmese students in Japan and their hopes for her so fresh in her mind, it is clear that the essay was more than the dissection of some dusty old intellectual movements. Whether consciously or unconsciously or somewhere between the two, Suu was limning her own task and her challenge: what someone with her parentage, education and knowledge of the world might dream of achieving. It had culminated in the High Noon of Martyrs’ Day, in calamitous defeat, detention, humiliation, dispersion. But beyond those awful experiences, and in a strange way through and thanks to those awful experiences, she glimpsed a way out. And it all began with meditation.
*
That intellectual and spiritual journey is a large part of the story of the past twenty years: how and why she remained relevant and inspiring to her people—and to millions more beyond Burma’s borders—despite everything its rulers could do to render her irrelevant, alien and extraneous. In the process she has at least made a start on creating a new Burma “built on the old foundations” as Furnivall put it—one built on the truths of Buddhism, but not in the old, mechanical, reductive version for which Burma became notorious—“acquiring merit” to assure a more auspicious reincarnation—but living the religion’s values in one’s everyday life. “When people have been stripped of all their material supports,” she wrote during her first years of detention, “there only remain to sustain them the values of their cultural and spiritual inheritance.”23 The generals had stripped “all their material supports” from the best and brightest in Burma, and reduced Suu herself to a walking shadow. Now the only way forward was back.