BUDDHISM teaches that nothing is permanent, nothing is fixed, all is in flux. If Aung San Suu Kyi had metamorphosed within a year from an Oxford housewife into her nation’s longed-for leader but was now a prisoner in her family home, her earliest days were no less mercurial. Raised the child of the most honored family in the country, she had been born a fugitive.
A photograph in Suu’s short biography of Aung San shows her father as Minister for War in Japan’s puppet Burma government in 1943. Shaven bullet head, tunic tight on the Adam’s apple, lower lip thrust out, what one would have to call a fanatical gleam in his eye: a model servant of the God-Emperor.
Yet the picture is misleading: Like his colleagues in the Burma National Army, which he had founded, Aung San was already discovering that, as one of his followers put it, “If the British sucked our blood, the Japanese ground our bones.”1 “He became more and more disillusioned with the Japanese,” wrote William Slim, commander of the Allied Fourteenth Army. “Early in 1943 we got news . . . that Aung San’s feelings were changing. On August 1, 1944, [as the Japanese and the British were still fighting it out for control of central Burma] he was bold enough to speak publicly with contempt of the Japanese brand of independence, and it was clear that, if they did not soon liquidate him, he might prove useful to us.”2
“Liquidation” was a lively danger, even though Japanese resistance to the Allied counterattack was rapidly disintegrating. Then in March 1945 Aung San’s Burma National Army (BNA) defected to the Allied side, surprising and killing some Japanese officers, and Slim responded by providing Aung San with arms and supplies and bringing his small but useful force into the Allied scheme.
The collaboration seemed to be working when, on May 16, 1945, with the aplomb he showed all his life, Aung San presented himself to Slim in person. There followed an interview so extraordinary that Slim felt it worth recording verbatim in his memoirs. He wrote:
The arrival of Aung San, dressed in the near-Japanese uniform of a Major General, complete with sword, startled one or two of my staff. However, he behaved with the utmost courtesy, and so, I hope, did we. He was a short, well-built, active man in early middle age, neat and soldierly in appearance, with regular Burmese features in a face that could be an impassive mask or light up with intelligence and humor. I found he spoke good English . . .
At our first interview, Aung San began to take rather a high hand. He was, he said, the representative of the Provisional Government of Burma, which had been set up by the people of Burma through the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League . . . He was an Allied commander, who was prepared to cooperate with me, and demanded the status of an Allied and not subordinate commander.3
Slim’s eyes were surely widening in amazement. “I told him that I had no idea what the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League was or represented . . . I pointed out that he was in no position to take the line he had. I did not need his forces; I was destroying the Japanese quite nicely without their help, and could continue to do so . . .” He went on to remind Aung San that he was wanted on a civil murder charge, for which there were witnesses, and that Slim was being urged to put him on trial: During Aung San’s progress through southern Burma with the Japanese in 1942, it was alleged that he had personally executed a village headman he accused of betrayal. “Don’t you think you are taking considerable risks in coming here and taking this attitude?” he demanded with some heat.
“No,” Aung San replied.
*
While Aung San in newly liberated Rangoon was giving a textbook demonstration of chutzpah, dozens of miles to the west, taking refuge in the simple, huddled villages of the Irrawaddy Delta, his wife Ma Khin Kyi was heavily pregnant. Protected by five soldiers in Aung San’s Burma National Army, she, her sister and her two toddlers had fled Rangoon in March, all disguised as poor civilians, as her husband prepared to defect to the Allies: If any Japanese forces remaining in the city had identified her and her children, their revenge could have been terrible. There, on June 19, 1945, in the tiny village of Hmway Saung, Aung San Suu Kyi—her name, she explains, means “strange collection of bright victories”—was born.
Aung San’s improbable gambit with Slim succeeded: He won his trust, and even his affection. He had had the temerity to claim equality with the Allied army commander despite being a Japanese collaborator who was wanted for murder “because you are a British officer” as he put it, a reply that made Slim laugh. Aung San had a shrewd idea that the Allies would want to make use of his force; he also showed remarkable insight into British psychology. Slim wrote:
He went on to say that, at first, he had hoped the Japanese would give real independence to Burma. When he found they would not, but were tightening the bonds on his people, he had, relying on our promises, turned to us as a better hope. “Go on, Aung San,” I said. “You only come to us because you see we are winning!’
“It wouldn’t be much good coming to you if you weren’t, would it?” he replied, simply.
. . . I felt he had scored again, and I liked his honesty. In fact I was beginning to like Aung San.4
With the shattered and scattered remnant of the Japanese Army trying to flee east into Thailand, the Allied forces aided by the BIA had retaken Rangoon without a fight, entering the city in the first days of May. And now with charm, daring and exquisite timing, Aung San had established himself in the good books of Burma’s newly returned masters—after nearly four years fighting for the other side. Soon after Suu’s birth he had a note hand-delivered to his wife: All the Japanese were gone and the city was again at peace. The family was reunited in Rangoon.
The home in which Aung San Suu Kyi started life was 25 Tower Lane, a large but plainly decorated villa in its own grounds, built some fifteen or twenty years before for a Chinese or Indian merchant, located in the salubrious suburbs of the capital north of the commercial center and a mile from the Shwedagon pagoda. Here Suu learned to crawl, then to walk, then to read; she discovered the meaning of friendship and of physical courage and also—twice before the age of nine—the meaning of grief.
For many years it was possible to explore Suu’s first home, because after the family moved out, in 1953, it became the Bogyoke Aung San Museum. But the slow and surreptitious unhitching of the regime from the person of Aung San, described in the previous chapter and which began with the scandal of the “Aung San Suu Kyi” One Kyat Note, has now reached its apogee: The house is still standing, just, but when I visited in 2010 I was waved away by a man in the grounds; the family in residence took shelter indoors to avoid being filmed. The garden is overgrown and the house is in the last stages of disrepair. A man in the tea shop nearby told me it opens only once a year, on July 19th, Martyrs’ Day—the last remaining vestige of the national cult.
Suu came to consciousness in what must have been a warm, bustling, loving, stimulating home. Her brothers Aung San Oo, the eldest, and Aung San Lin, were aged two and one respectively when she was born. A second daughter, Aung San Chit, was born subsequently but died after only a few days.
Tower Lane was the first, proper, permanent home the family had enjoyed, following a series of temporary lodgings. Peace had come; independence was surely on the way, and Aung San, the undisputed leader of the nation, who soon resigned his commission in the army to concentrate on politics, would be a shoo-in for prime minister. Important visitors thronged in and out, debating the issues of the moment with Aung San in the big reception room downstairs. But Suu’s mother was no purdah wife, lurking deep indoors polishing the silver: Ma Khin Kyi was articulate, well-educated and strong-willed, heir to the Burmese tradition of robust, emancipated women. The domestic tasks were taken care of by Indian Christians, who continued to work for the family for decades.
Aung San must have been a fleeting presence in the family during these feverish days, the broadly smiling but distracted man who flew out to his chauffeured car in the mornings, laden with files and burst back into the house in the middle of the day for a high-speed family lunch; till late at night the children in their beds upstairs—the eldest, Aung San Oo, was only four when Aung San died—would have sniffed the cheroot smoke of his important guests and heard the urgent, impassioned murmuring of adult voices as the nation’s future was discussed and dissected downstairs by the Burmese men in whose hands it would shortly repose.
But none of that lodged in the memory of the small girl with the protruding ears and staring eyes, the baby of the family, who was just two years and one month old when her father went away one hot morning in the wet season and never came home again.
“My father died when I was too young to remember him,” she wrote in the Preface to her book on his life.5 That was honest of her, and honesty was the principle most fiercely inculcated by Ma Khin Kyi. Because the memories she did retain she no longer trusted. “I have a memory of him picking me up every time he came home from work,” she told Alan Clements. “I do seem to remember that whenever he would come back from work, my two brothers and I would come running down the stairs to meet him and he would pick me up.”6 But that memory, she decided, was unreliable. “I think this may be a memory that was reinforced by people repeating it to me all the time. In other words, I was not allowed to forget. So it may be a genuine memory or it may be something I imagined from what people kept telling me.”
Yet flashes of true memory emerged from time to time, perhaps at moments of exhaustion or great stress. In her diary of their journeys, Ma Thanegi records Suu telling her that one time she had refused to kiss her father, “because she had a cold,” she said—which was a fib. And once when he failed in his daily attentions, she remembered ordering him, “Please pick up the child!” and when he said, “Which child?” replying petulantly, “This child, this child!”
Not recalling him with any vividness, how badly did she miss him? Not at all, if her own account is to be believed. “I don’t remember my father’s death as such,” she told Clements. “I don’t think I was aware that he died.”7 But once again Suu’s tough and unsentimental honesty masks a more complex psychological reality.
On the one hand, his death was hardly a surprise: Ma Khin Kyi knew she had married a destiny as much as a man of flesh and blood. In February 1946, when Suu was eight months old, Aung San said to Britain’s Governor in Rangoon, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, “How long do national heroes last? Not long in this country; they have too many enemies. Three years is the most they can hope to survive. I do not give myself more than another eighteen months of life.”8 In his disarming and rather brutal way, with a shouted laugh, he must have said something very similar to his wife—and after her flight to the delta and the crazy vicissitudes of the war, she would have believed it.
On the other hand—what a loss for a family to sustain! This vividly physical, scintillating presence, bold enough to conceive and then strenuously set about building a future, not merely for himself and his loved ones but for his entire nation. It was a loss you would never get over. It is arguable that Suu never did.
*
Life went on, and in many ways it went on unchanged. Visitors continued to stream through the house, though they no longer stayed till late in the night, trying unsuccessfully to argue Aung San into the ground. Now they came with sorrowful looks and pitying glances for the tiny orphans: Aung San’s surviving political colleagues, including Nu, the first prime minister after independence, and the survivors among the Thirty Comrades, the first recruits to the independence army who had accompanied Aung San for training under the Japanese, and many others whose lives he had touched.
Despite the loss of paterfamilias and breadwinner, this was no sad nucleus of a family: Ma Khin Kyi’s father, a Christian convert, lived with them for the rest of his life, and Suu cites him as a tower of strength in her childhood. “I never felt the need for a dominant male figure,” she told Clements, “because my mother’s father, who lived with us, was the ideal grandfather. He was very indulgent and loving. During my childhood he was the most important male figure in my life.”9 There were also aunts and great-aunts and nieces and nephews and cousins—the large and shifting cast of characters of the typical extended Asian family.
At the heart of it were the three small children. As the eldest—the “Oo” part of his name means simply “first”—Aung San Oo was rather apart from the other two; he slept in a room of his own, and he is strangely absent from Suu’s story, except in recent years when he cast a malevolent shadow on her, suing her, allegedly at the behest of the regime, to try to stop her repairing the family home, which they own jointly. Aung San Lin—Ko Ko Lin, “big brother Lin” to Suu—shared a room with his baby sister, and they grew very close.
With her father gone, Ma Khin Kyi became the most important figure in Suu’s young life. She was well suited to the role. “She was such a dignified woman with a very distinctive voice,” remembered Patricia Herbert, one of the very few Westerners, besides the diplomats, who lived in Rangoon during the Ne Win years, and who became her close friend.
It was a very clear voice, very authoritative without being domineering: You paid attention to what she said, and I think in that sense she must have had a huge influence on her daughter.
Her face was a perfect oval, and her hair was always beautifully done, she often wound it around a gold comb. She wore very traditional aingyi, the Burmese cotton woman’s blouse, with detachable buttons which might have gold or diamonds in them, which picked up the color of the htamein, the woman’s longyi.
She was a wonderful hostess, the meals were always beautifully prepared by her cook, but above all I remember her as being motherly. Of course she wasn’t my mother, but in my memory that’s what it felt like. She had that ability to make everybody feel special.10
Suu credits the woman she became on the consistently high standards her mother set. “My mother was a very strong person,” she told Clements. “My mother’s relationship with me was quite formal. She never ran around and played with me when I was young . . . She tried very hard to give us the best education and the best life she could . . . She was very strict at times. When I was younger I felt that was a disadvantage, but now I think it was a good thing because it set me up well in life.”
“How was she strict?” Clements asked her.
“Highly disciplined, everything at the right time, in the right way,” she replied. “She was a perfectionist.”11
Any middle-class child of the 1950s remembers being told to sit up straight at meal times. Ma Khin Kyi took it that little bit further: Suu told Ma Thanegi that her mother would not allow the children’s backs to touch the back of the dining chairs. The medicine worked: Her perfectly erect carriage was a source of wonder at Oxford, that asylum of slovenliness. And she did her best to pass it on. Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary: “I used to slouch a lot when we were traveling together, and Ma Suu often said to me, ‘Don’t slouch, Ma Thanegi, how many times must I tell you?’” At home the children were required to walk round and round the garden lawn, to practice walking with straight backs.
Ma Khin Kyi had been brought up under the influence of both Christianity and Buddhism, but Aung San was a traditional Burmese Buddhist and Ma Khin Kyi made sure that the children were exposed to the rites and doctrines of the religion of the overwhelming majority of Burmese from early on. “There was a Buddhist shrine room at the top of the house,” said Tin Tin, one of Suu’s friends at her first school in Rangoon, “and she told me that her mother made them go up to that room and pray every night—she was laughing when she told me about it, but later on she became a very devout Buddhist.”12
There were other rules, too, designed to impress on the Bogyoke’s children the need to behave just so. “She told me that when she was young, her mother would not allow her to lick stamps,” Ma Thanegi recalled. “Instead they had to be moistened with a sponge.” Nor could they indulge in the custom (popular all over the Indian empire) of pouring hot tea into the saucer to cool it, or dunking biscuits in the tea. “Whenever she did any of those things,” said Ma Thanegi, “she would giggle and say ‘I can do it now, I’m grown up!’”
Suu suspected her mother of favoring her elder brother, a suspicion confirmed for her when Ma Khin Kyi gave Aung San Oo a ruby ring that Suu had coveted. But despite her severity as a parent, Suu claims she never resented her mother. “I asked her once if as a teenager she had problems or arguments in her relationship with her mother,” says Ma Thanegi, “because I did: I also have an elder brother, who was mother’s pet, so I sympathized. But she said, no, she never had any such problems.”
On the contrary, she remembered her mother being always available.
My mother was very good [at answering questions]. She never once told me not to ask questions. Every evening when she returned from work, she used to lie down on the bed because she was rather tired. And then I would walk round and round her bed, and every time I got to the foot of her bed, I would ask one question. You can imagine, it doesn’t take long to walk round a bed. And never once did she say, “I’m too tired, don’t go on asking me these questions.” Mind you, she couldn’t answer a lot of my questions. I remember asking her, “Why is water called water?” Now it’s very difficult to find an answer. But she would never say, “Don’t ask me such nonsensical questions.” She would try to answer or she would simply say, “I don’t know.” I respected her for that.13
She was not available when she was out at work, however. And if she had not been out at work, perhaps the second tragedy in Suu’s young life might have been avoided.
It has always been Suu’s proud boast—casting a baleful eye at the grossly corrupt generals who lord it over Burma today—that when Aung San resigned from the army to go into politics he did not claim an army pension, setting what he intended to be a good example to those who trod in his footsteps. When he died, however, that demonstration of rectitude posed a problem for his widow, who had no independent means of her own. The surviving kin of those wiped out in the July 19th massacre were all given a one-off condolence payment of 100,000 kyats, but that was no substitute for an income. To keep the family above the breadline Ma Khin Kyi made inquiries at her old employer, Rangoon General Hospital. But she was saved from a return to the bedpans by the personal intervention of U Nu, the prime minister. Better, more important work must be found for the widow of the Bogyoke, he decided. Ma Khin Kyi was therefore brought into the civil service, taking the role of director of the National Women and Children’s Welfare Board.
The small children were therefore left more and more to their own devices, supervised rather distantly by the domestics. Number 25 Tower Lane was a wonderful home for a small boy or girl. The small shrine room at the top of the house, which looked over to the Shwedagon, had a glass roof. Suu never forgot the day she summoned the courage to climb up to the roof.
It was Ko Ko Lin who led the way. Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary, “She told me how when they were children her brother would climb up to the ceiling and into the circular roofed pavilion with glass around its walls, built right in the center of the roof for natural light to enter. Aung San Oo did nothing of the kind, but Aung San Lin did. Once, he urged and helped her to do the same. She said she was terrified but she trusted him, and he told her what to do every step of the way, so she actually made it.”
Heights were not the only thing she was scared of, this child who was to grow up to become the Lioness of Danubyu. “When I was a child I was afraid of the dark,” she said, “whereas my brothers were not. I was really the cowardly one in the family. This is probably why I find it very strange when people think I am so brave . . .”
Brother and sister grew very close. “Ma Suu’s and Ko Ko Lin’s beds were next to each other and they would whisper to each other in the night,” Ma Thanegi said. “Aung San Oo had a separate bedroom. Ma Suu said Ko Ko Lin made her feel safe.
But when Lin was nine and Suu was eight, they were separated for ever. On January 16, 1953, in the middle of Burma’s best season, the two were playing in the garden of their home. Suu had gone inside for a while; Lin dropped his toy gun at the edge of the pond near the drive that led to the front door. He retrieved it but in the process got his sandal stuck in the mud at the pond’s edge. He ran to find his sister and tell her what had happened and give her the gun while he went back to fetch the sandal. Suu told Ma Thanegi that she remembered nothing at all after that. The next thing anyone knew he was discovered dead, floating face down in the pond.
Suu was too young to fully comprehend what had happened or to grieve like an adult, but Ko Ko Lin’s death was a source of profound sorrow which returned to her frequently in later years. “I was very close to him,” she said, “closer than anybody else. We shared the same room and played together all the time. His death was a tremendous loss to me . . . I felt enormous grief.” What upset her, she said, was “the fact that I would never see him again. That, I think, is how a child sees death: I won’t play with him again, I’ll never be able to be with him again.”14
The sense of loss was to remain with her, as if her own choices in life might have been less cruel, less weighty, with him at her side. She felt he had qualities that could have made him an exceptional man. “During campaign trips or when we were having problems with the military or with disagreements between NLD members,” Ma Thanegi recalled, “she often said, ‘Oh, how I wish Ko Ko Lin were here! He was so brave and clever, he would have made a great leader.’”
Two deaths within six years; two of the family’s five members taken—three if you include Suu’s little sister, dead within days of her birth. Yet Ma Khin Kyi and her remaining children found the strength to move forward. “It was not something that I couldn’t cope with,” Suu said of Lin’s death. “There must have been a tremendous sense of security surrounding me. I was able to cope—I didn’t suffer from depression or great emotional upheaval. I was not utterly devastated by it. I did not go to pieces.”15 And she could not understand why her mother now insisted that the family move house. But you did not have to be a very superstitious person to see Ma Khin Kyi’s point: Three deaths in the family at Tower Lane was three too many. Soon after Ko Ko Lin was cremated the family moved to the home with which both mother and daughter were to become intimately familiar: 54 University Avenue, overlooking Inya Lake, another gracious merchant’s villa, a gift of the government of Burma and one of the best addresses in Rangoon. For the Bogyoke’s family, only the best would do.
*
By now Suu was at school. First she went to a private Catholic girls’ primary school and then to the English Methodist High School opposite the British residency: the school of choice for Rangoon’s westernized intellectual and social elite.
As a growing child she was not, she insists, such a special person, and the recollections of her school friends confirm that impression. She kicked against the severity of her mother. “When I was young,” she said, “I was a normal, naughty child, doing things that I was told not to do, or not doing things that I was supposed to do. Like running away and hiding instead of doing my lessons. I didn’t like to work or study. I preferred to play all the time.”16 She contrasts her “normal” attitude to the extraordinary application of her father. “My father was one of those people who are born with a sense of responsibility, far greater and more developed than mine. From the very moment he started going to school he was a hard worker, very conscientious. I wasn’t like that.”
Ma Khin Kyi persisted in her efforts to turn Suu into a refined young lady. “My hands were never allowed to be idle,” she told Ma Thanegi. “I had to be doing something all the time, whether sewing or embroidery or practicing the piano.” But the impression she made on her first friends at the English Methodist High School was far from ladylike. With the two most important males plucked from her life, it seems that the growing girl sought unconsciously to compensate by turning into a boy.
“Ours was a mixed school,” her friend Tin Tin remembered, “but Suu was not interested in boys. In fact she looked very much like a boy herself. Our uniform was a maroon skirt with a white top, but under them she wore a boy’s shirt and vest instead of girl’s ones.”17 She had her hair in plaits and wore black lace-up shoes like a boy, her legs were stout and boyish and, according to Tin Tin, she even walked like a man.
She was also very tanned, Ma Thanegi (who was two years her junior at the Methodist High School) remembered, which was not the mark of an aspiring lady. “She told me it was because she was always playing in the sun.” But all these tomboy tendencies might be explained by the fact that she was a keen Girl Guide—her mother being the founder of the Burmese Guides. She has made little of this biographical fact, but her cheerful survival of thousands of miles of campaigning in conditions that would be an insult to the average pariah dog suggest close familiarity with the two-finger salute and the tireless quest for badges.
Her dead father already weighed heavily on her mind. According to Tin Tin, “Suu was always speaking about her father and always saying how she respected her father, and saying she has to follow her father’s line.” And in fact her first ambition was to follow in his footsteps quite literally. “When I was ten or eleven I wanted to enter the army,” she said. “Everyone referred to my father as Bogyoke, which means general, so I wanted to be a general, too, because I thought this was the best way to serve one’s country, just like my father had done.” At some point someone must have gently pointed out to her that the Burmese Army did not recruit girl soldiers.
Suu’s fame as the daughter of the Bogyoke brought her no special status or privileges at the Methodist school, where practically all her peers had something to boast about. “The children of three out of four of our presidents, of Prime Minister U Nu, of many branches of the royal family, of most politicians, of diplomats before there was an international school, and of old money Rangoon aristocracy—they all went to our school,” said Ma Thanegi. “Our school was the only co-ed mission school, and the best school in the country. Most conservative people did not want to send their children to co-ed schools so our parents were the most progressive, liberal-minded and westernized in Rangoon.”
The English Methodist High School was, in other words, living on borrowed time. Though founded only after the return of the British at the end of the war, it was a throwback to the days of Empire—days that were to last only until 1948. And when the English travel writer Norman Lewis visited Rangoon in 1950, when Suu was five, the signs of decline and fall were already hard to miss.
*
Like most cities of the Indian empire on which the Raj left a strong mark, Rangoon is divided into three distinct parts. Out of sight to the north, behind well-guarded walls and fences, is the Cantonment, the army base. Spreading across the hills further south, intersected by winding lanes and boulevards and luxuriantly planted with parks and gardens, are the leafy residential areas reserved for the administrators and the native middle class and their servants. It is these areas, damaged but by no means destroyed during the decades since independence, and with the Shwedagon’s dazzling stupa visible from all directions, that give modern Rangoon its delightfully tropical character, making it for Western visitors one of the most charming cities of modern Asia.
But it was the commercial heart of the city down by the river that monopolized Norman Lewis’s attention, both because its character was so strikingly at odds with the civilization in which it was set, and because it had so patently seen better days.
This tightly planned section of the city was “imperial and rectilinear,” he wrote in his vivid account of his journey through Burma, Golden Earth, “built by a people who refused to compromise with the East.” It “has wide, straight, shadeless streets, with much solid bank-architecture of vaguely Grecian inspiration . . . There is much façade and presence, little pretence at comfort, and no surrender to climate. This was the Victorian colonizer’s response to the unsubstantial glories of Mandalay.”18
But the Victorian glory days were also gone, Lewis found. “These massive columns now rise with shabby dignity from the tangle of scavenging dogs and sprawling, ragged bodies at their base.” The main streets
have acquired a squalid incrustation of stalls and barracks, and through these European arteries now courses pure oriental blood. Down by the port it is an Indian settlement. Over to the west the Chinese have moved in with their outdoor theatres and joss houses . . . Little has been done by the new authority to check the encroaching squalor. Side lanes are piled with stinking refuse which mounts up quicker than the dogs and crows can dispose of it . . . Half-starved Indians lie dying in the sunshine. Occasionally insurgents cut off the town’s water supply . . . Wherever there is a vacant space the authorities have allowed refugees to put up pestiferous shacks . . .
Amidst this fetor the Burmese masses live their festal and contemplative existences . . . They emerge into the sunshine immaculate and serene . . .19
For the privileged Burmese students of the Methodist High School, life did not however conform to the “festal and contemplative” cliché of folklore; their school was disciplined yet privileged and comfortable in a way that would have been perfectly recognizable in Putney or Georgetown. “The school was on Signal Pagoda Road in the middle of town, north of the pagoda,” said Tin Tin.20
Ordinary people in Rangoon went around by bicycle rickshaw, but we were taken to school by private car—ours was a Morris Oxford. People had all sorts of imported cars.
It was a very expensive private school with a tennis court and all the best modern amenities, run by American Methodist missionaries. At that time most of the elite could speak English: Our parents’ generation had grown up under British rule so their English was very good, and because we went to this private English school our English was much better than the students elsewhere. At school there was a rule that except in Burmese class we had to speak in English. Even in the playground and the canteen, the prefects would be monitoring us and they would pull us up if they caught us speaking Burmese.
On Wednesday we had to go to the church which was in the school grounds. But there were a lot of Muslims [Tin Tin’s family is Muslim] and Hindus in the school, and although we had to attend the church, nobody tried to convert us.
And because in those days Rangoon possessed no international school, pupils grew up with an easy familiarity with other races and tongues: Hindi, French and German were among the languages spoken by the pupils, as well as Burmese and English.
Having shed her ambition to be a general, Suu next decided she wanted to be a writer. This was again following in her father’s (intended) footsteps: He dreamed aloud, towards the end of his short, frenetic life, of getting out of politics and taking up writing full time. That was not as escapist an urge as it may sound: “. . . in Burma,” Suu pointed out, “politics has always been linked to literature and literary men have often been involved with politics, especially the politics of independence.”21
The urge to write was “the first serious ambition I had,” she said, and it went in tandem with a growing passion for literature. She graduated rapidly from Bugs Bunny to Sherlock Holmes, and from Holmes to Maigret and George Smiley. She remains a devotee of crime fiction, including P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, but by her early teens she was also gorging on the English classics: Jane Austen and George Eliot and Kipling, whose Kim provided her second son’s name and whose great poem of moral exhortation “If” was a source of strength in her first years of detention. “When I was about twelve or thirteen I started reading the classics,” she said. “By the time I was fourteen I was a real bookworm. For example, if I went shopping with my mother I would bring a book along . . . The moment the car stopped anywhere I would open my book and start reading, even if it was at a traffic light. Then I would have to shut it, and I couldn’t wait for the next stop.”22
She was open to whatever the world had to offer that might touch her mind or move her heart—but for her generation in Burma that was the natural state of affairs. Only now, looking back after a half century of isolation, the deliberate rejection by the Burmese regime of the rest of the world and all its works, its determination to keep its people as ignorant as possible, does it seem an aberration or a miracle.
“Before the coup Burma was the one country in Southeast Asia with a really good economy,” said Tin Tin’s sister Khin Myint. “People came to Burma from all over Southeast Asia to do shopping. Rangoon was the jewel of Southeast Asia: You could buy anything there.”23 And the culture of the West flowed in without impediment: From the English classics, which had for generations been the foundation of an upper-class Indian education, to the raucous new music born in the USA. “At the weekend we had jam sessions,” remembered Tin Tin, “with dancing, very modern, rock ’n’ roll, sometimes played live.”24
Tin Tin and Khin Myint, sisters who went to the same elite school in Rangoon as Suu and Ma Thanegi.
Did Suu dance too? There seems little doubt that she did. As Ma Thanegi recorded in her diary, Suu asked her to find music cassettes to while away the hours in the car, and sang along loudly to hits of the late-fifties and very early sixties which she remembered from her early teens.
When she suddenly emerged into Burma’s public life in 1988, Suu spoke Burmese as her co-nationals did, but she was not Burmese as they were. That was because, while the defining experience of Burma for the past fifty years has been political and cultural isolation, the defining fact of Suu’s life has been the opposite: continuous exposure to the world outside Burma in all its variety. Her father had learned to speak English fluently, had traveled to China and Japan, trained as a soldier in Japan, learned Japanese, then later traveled to London via India to parlay with the colonial oppressor-turned-liberator. His daughter had had the good fortune to grow up in Rangoon during the only years of its postwar history when it was an international town. Then she went abroad, and the exposure continued, and never stopped.
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Burma, however, was about to turn in the opposite direction: inwards. The diversity and openness of Rangoon as they knew it would prove to be very fragile commodities.
Their country had suffered more in the Second World War than anywhere else in Asia. It had been deliberately smashed to pieces twice over, first by the British, fleeing from the Japanese, then by the Japanese, as they died in huge numbers opposing the British return. While the Burmese huddled in the ruins of their towns and villages and looked on in shock, the two warring empires blasted the country’s ports, bridges, power stations, factories, mines, oil wells and government offices, and its cities, towns and villages to pieces. When it was all over there was little left of the calm, self-sufficient, increasingly prosperous colony of the prewar years. Then Aung San, the only man who might have succeeded in pulling it all together, was murdered; and then the end for which he had worked so strenuously, independence, was handed to his successor, U Nu, on a plate by the bankrupt Attlee government, divesting itself of its costly foreign commitments—or “scuttling” as the Tory opposition preferred to put it—as fast as they could manage.
Rarely has there been a truer case of being cursed by what you wish for. “The Burmese,” writes Michael Charney, “had achieved independence without a revolution, which prevented the emergence of internal solidarity or the squeezing out of rival groups and ideologies.”25 Burma was not merely prostrate economically and industrially, it was also bitterly divided. While he lived, Aung San had failed to win over the Karen, the large ethnic group concentrated around the Thai border and in the Irrawaddy Delta, to the cause of national unification: His Burman-dominated BIA, while still allied with the Japanese, had been accused of numerous anti-Karen atrocities, and the Karen held out for their own homeland, “Kawthoolei,” which literally means “Land Without Evil.”
Aung San’s Panglong Agreement of 1946 had won round other important “races” of Burma, including the Shan, the Chin and the Kachin to the national project. But after the war a more formidable enemy to national unity presented itself in the form of the Burmese communists. They split into two factions, the “White Flag” faction, the BCP, led by Aung San’s brother-in-law Than Tun, and the “Red Flag”—but both committed to overthrowing the democratic government in Rangoon. And where communist insurgency was not a problem, dacoits (bandits) and other armed and disaffected groups tore at the country’s integrity.
Norman Lewis experienced all this at first hand. “The last occasion when Burmese affairs had been strongly featured in the British press,” he wrote, “had been in 1948, when the Karen insurgents had taken Mandalay and seemed to be about to overthrow the Burmese government. Since then, interest had died down . . . In July 1949, the Prime Minister had announced that peace was attainable within one year. Having heard no more I assumed that it had been attained.”26
Lewis envisaged a leisurely tour of the whole country, preferably arriving in the northwest from Manipur in India and working his way down. His delusions did not last long. They “were stripped away . . . within thirty-six hours of my arrival. On the first morning I bought a newspaper and noted with slight surprise that a ferryboat crossing the river to a suburb of Rangoon had been held up by pirates and three members of the crew killed.”27 In a village twenty miles away, “the whole population had been carried off by insurgents. Serious fighting seemed to be going on, too, in various parts of the country . . . there were a few extremely vague reports about the government troops capturing towns . . .” The most perilous part of his severely foreshortened journey was when he insisted, against all advice, on traveling from Mandalay to Rangoon, Burma’s two principal cities, by train.
The Burmese government’s problems in combating communists and other insurgents were aggravated by the absence of Aung San. His successor, U Nu, was enormously popular with ordinary Burmese on account of his sweet face, his charming temperament and his Buddhist piety. But he had none of Aung San’s steel, and only a fraction of his political savvy. The party he had inherited from Aung San, the AFPFL, was less a coherent party, more a ragbag of rivals from different parts of the political spectrum, each with his entourage. And as the communist and ethnic insurgencies continued to rage and the country struggled to recoup the prosperity it had enjoyed before the war, the AFPFL began to come apart.
Confronted by a bitterly divided party after the general election of 1958, U Nu found himself obliged to invite the army to take over temporarily to restore order in the country. General Ne Win duly became temporary prime minister and the army went to work cleaning up the squalor Lewis had observed in the streets of Rangoon, which had got much worse over the years, and enforcing a degree of tranquility in the rest of the country. In 1960, true to his remit, Ne Win politely handed power back to U Nu, who, popular as ever despite his failings, won another large mandate in that year’s election.
General Ne Win, known as “the Old Man” or “Number One.”
But U Nu’s new government was never to complete its term. Ne Win had enjoyed his taste of power, and now he wanted some more. Heavily influenced by the chauvinistic, anti-Western Japanese during his years of training there with Aung San, bitterly prejudiced against Burma’s prosperous Indian community after an early business failure, and with a strong puritanical streak which sat oddly with his taste for the pleasures of the flesh, he saw much that he wanted to do with his country. And after returning to his barracks in 1960, he began plotting to take power, not at U Nu’s invitation but on his own initiative, and permanently.
It was a move that required careful preparation: He wanted the takeover to be peaceful, so potential rivals and enemies of army rule needed to be dealt with well in advance. One of these was Aung San’s widow. Aung San had always opposed the idea of army rule, which is why he resigned his commission before entering politics. His widow was close to the prime minister, who had not only found her a new home and turned the previous one into a museum but had also set her on a high-profile career in public service.
The appointment of Daw Khin Kyi as ambassador to Delhi in 1960, the first time a woman had been made a Burmese ambassador, would normally have been described as a great honor for the woman who was now chairman of the Social Planning Commission. So it was—but it was also an excellent way of removing a person of enormous symbolic importance from the scene; a figure who, even if she remained politically taciturn, could easily become a focus for enemies of army rule. In the old days, the first and crucial step for a newly crowned Burmese king was to dispose of potential pretenders. These days they did not roll them up in scarlet carpets and have them trampled by elephants; instead they sent them far away, on honorable state business.
Thus, in 1960 Aung San Suu Kyi and her mother boarded a plane for Delhi. Suu’s years of exile were about to begin.
