Aung San Suu Kyi (19 page)

This did not mean that Suu Kyi was without feelings. She spent much time with the Indian students, and at the beginning of her studies she fell in love with one of them. But her interest was not returned and their contact never developed into a relationship. “One did catch a glimpse of her persistency in that case,” says Pasternak Slater. “It was clear from the start that he wasn't interested in the same way as she was, but she refused to give up. She held on to it for much longer than anyone else would have done.”

When she applied to St Hugh's she had chosen to study philosophy, politics, and economics, which was a common combination of subjects among the Indian students at the university. But Suu Kyi really longed for something else, and after her first year she applied to change her course and study to be a forest warden instead. She considered that a practical subject would make it easier for her to return to Burma and do something for her country. But Oxford did not appreciate students' changing their minds about their academic direction, and they rejected her application. When she had
passed her examination, she made a new attempt and applied to an English course, but she was not accepted there either.

Many of Suu Kyi's student comrades were politically involved. It was an era when radical internationalism was about to establish itself in Europe and the United States. The world had opened up, the colonial systems were about to be dismantled, and TV had brought the world into people's living rooms. The students who could afford it and who had the time traveled abroad to learn more in places where “reality” seemed to come a little closer than in the chilly lecture halls of Oxford University. One was not in tune with the times if he or she had not picked fruit on some Israeli kibbutz or walked among the poor in India. And one was not truly radical if he or she had not gotten involved in the nuclear disarmament movement or protested against the apartheid system in South Africa.

Through her background and family contacts, Suu Kyi was of course more well traveled and familiar with the ways of society than most of her contemporaries, but she kept away from all openly political activities. “As a student I was caught up in the concern about apartheid, contributing my tiny bit of support by refusing to buy products from South Africa,” Suu Kyi has written in an article published in the Thai newspaper
The Nation
. As the leader of the democratic movement she has often used South Africa as an example of how economy and politics are bound up with each other and of how sanctions can in certain situations be a functional recipe for creating political change.

One explanation for the fact that she was not more explicitly political was her mother's position, during the time she was an ambassador as well as later after she had returned to Burma. Khin Kyi could have been landed with great problems if it had emerged that her daughter was active in human rights politics along with a crowd of young British radicals. “I don't believe that she went and listened to debates or was involved in any kind of activism,” says Pasternak Slater. “On the other hand she was perpetually aware of what was going on in the world and we often talked about her background in Burma, the culture and traditions there. And she often expressed her irritation over her older brother. She did not consider that he upheld the family traditions.”

During summer vacations, Aung San Suu Kyi traveled most often to see her mother in India, but one summer she visited Ma Than É in Algeria. At that
time Ma Than É had just left her post in New Delhi in order to build up the United Nations information offices in the Algerian capital, Algiers. The trip gave Suu Kyi the opportunity to experience some of that “adventurousness” that her middle-class friends at Oxford had told her about in connection with their summer travels.

Algeria had just dragged itself out from under the claws of French colonial power and was slowly recovering from the eight-year-long civil war, a situation not entirely unlike that of Burma after the Second World War. The cities were shabby and demolished, and there were only a few hotels that were able to receive guests. Suu Kyi arrived there a few weeks after Algeria's counterpart to Aung San, Ahmed Ben Bella, had been overthrown by his former colleague, the more moderate Houari Boumediene.

Suu Kyi was invited to plenty of social events and parties, but she chose mostly to go out onto the streets in order to meet ordinary Algerians. After a few days she made contact with a man who ran an organization to help the widows of men who had been killed in the war of liberation. He explained that he was busy organizing a project to build homes for these women and he needed volunteers who could help him. For several weeks Suu Kyi worked and lived on the building site. Among her workmates were Russians, British, Lebanese, Dutch, Germans, and Algerians, all of whom were given free lodging and food but no wages. Her Algerian friends took her with them to a wedding in the Kabylian mountains. She saw the Sahara desert and made a short trip to Morocco and the Strait of Gibraltar. Then she returned to Oxford.

On one occasion, just before her finals, Suu Kyi was invited to visit Ne Win. The Burmese dictator had confiscated the passports of millions of Burmese and done everything he could to close the borders; yet he himself made trips to Europe every year, sometimes to Austria where he stayed at a spa and visited doctors, and sometimes to Wimbledon where he rented a spacious villa for himself and his party consisting of women and officers. When Suu Kyi was invited to visit him, her mother had just left her position as ambassador and resigned from all her public undertakings. Suu Kyi had therefore no problem in distancing herself from the regime in her home country, in her own way. She declined the invitation and excused herself on account of having no time: she was studying for her finals.

During the term, Suu Kyi usually lived at St Hugh's, but on the weekends she did the little more than one-hour journey to London by train and stayed at the home of Sir Paul Gore-Booth and his wife, Patricia, in Chelsea. The Gore-Booth couple had come to know Suu Kyi's family when Paul was the British ambassador in Burma from 1953 until 1956. After Rangoon he had been transferred to a post as high commissioner at the British Embassy in India, and there the friendship between the families deepened. When it was time for Suu Kyi to apply to Oxford, Khin Kyi wanted to find somebody who could help her daughter find her way in her new environment and the choice fell naturally on the Gore-Booths, who at that time had returned to London. During the next few years Suu Kyi became almost like a child to the family. “Like an extra daughter,” Patricia Gore-Booth has said. Suu Kyi sat at the table when Paul's colleagues were there to dine and she gained insight into the English diplomatic corps' way of reasoning. She often took part in the discussions since the visitors were interested in the situation in Burma and in her mother's work in India.

The Gore-Booths' twin sons were a few years older and among their friends was yet another pair of twins, Anthony and Michael Aris. The Aris brothers had in several ways the same variegated international background as Suu Kyi. They were born on March 27, 1946, in Havanna, Cuba, where their father was working for the British Council, with the task of spreading English culture and the English language in the world. Their mother was the daughter of a French-Canadian diplomat. The family moved from Cuba to Peru and finally landed in England.

In the mid-1960s, both Michael and Anthony were studying to become orientalists at the University of Durham in northern England. There they came to know Christopher Gore-Booth, and since the Gore-Booth family's house in Chelsea seems to have acted as a gathering place for the circle of friends and acquaintances of the whole family, it sometimes happened that the Aris brothers accompanied him up to London. Anthony was the one who first noticed Suu Kyi. “You must see this astonishing Burmese woman from St Hugh's,” he said to his brother.

Michael fell head-over-heels as soon as he met her, but Suu Kyi's approach was considerably more wait-and-see. She had not the remotest intention of having a relationship with, let alone marrying, a man who was a Westerner.
Many of her friends and relations at home would have strong objections to such a marriage. It is also possible she already realized that it might turn out to be a problem if she were at any time to play a public role in her home country. But still, she fell in love and started quietly spending time with the lanky, rather Bohemian, yet conservatively brought-up and proper student from Durham.

After her finals Suu Kyi stayed for a longer period of time at the Gore-Booths' home in London. She was given a room in the attic in the large stone house, with her own entrance and her own kitchen. She was able to choose how much time she wanted to spend in the company of the English family. In order to earn a little extra money, she worked as a private tutor to children of the upper class in Chelsea. She also worked for a time as an assistant to the Southeast Asia expert Hugh Tinker at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Tinker had published the book
Burma: The Struggle for Independence 1944–48
, and it was a great advantage to have an assistant who was personally a part of the history he had chosen to research.

While Suu Kyi was taking her first steps in her professional life after her studies, Michael Aris had already left the country. During his undergraduate education in Durham he had specialized in Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal, and in the course of his work he had come into contact with the researcher and author Marco Pallis, who was the last Westerner to leave Lhasa after the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Pallis had introduced Aris to the court in Bhutan, who had given Aris an offer that no student with his specialization could afford to say no to: he became adviser to the royal family in Bhutan. As a twenty-year-old he thus had a unique opportunity to learn more about the Himalayas and the local history and religion while actually living there. He would have preferred to study Tibet, but in 1967 the vast mountain state was totally closed to foreigners. China had taken a stranglehold and was in the process of destroying the country's unique traditions. Bhutan was therefore the best possible starting point for Aris. He quickly learned to speak the local language, Dzongkha, and even became reasonably skilled in Tibetan. There, among the green mountains of the Himalayas at the end of the 1960s, he discovered his mission in life and his identity as a researcher. He was going to become an expert on the culture and religion of the Himalayan mountain states.

At the same time Suu Kyi decided to move to the United States. She wanted to continue her studies in order to earn a master's degree. Once again she was able to take advantage of the family's extensive international network. In 1969 she was accepted to New York University with Frank Trager as her adviser. Trager was a professor of international relations who had been working for several years on an American aid project in Burma. His book
Burma: From Kingdom to Republic
had just been published, and he was looking forward to helping Suu Kyi with her studies.

For Aris and Suu Kyi it was clearly not any easier to maintain their relationship when they were now not able to meet at all. But on another plane it suited her perfectly. She wanted to put time and distance between herself and Michael in order to test her own feelings and at the same time assure herself that he was serious. If what they felt for each other was still there after that time, then she was aiming to follow her feelings and not bother about the conventions.

In New York she stayed with Ma Than É, who had moved there after her sojourn in Algeria. They shared a small apartment with two rooms and a kitchen a few blocks from the United Nations' skyscraper on the corner of Forty-ninth Street and First Avenue. They read, talked, and cooked Burmese food together whenever they got hold of the right spices, which was not that often.

As with all other people who arrive in New York for the first time, Suu Kyi was overwhelmed by the size of the city and the lights, the skyscrapers, the throngs of people, and the sheer number of different cultures and individual expressions. But she did not at all like the bus journeys between the apartment and the university near Washington Square. This was a long time before Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's “zero tolerance” against crime, and Suu Kyi often felt nervous when she had to walk alone in the early mornings and late evenings between her home, the bus, and the university. Therefore she did not hesitate when she was offered the opportunity to work at the United Nations, only a six minutes' walk from her apartment. “After applications, recommendations, interviews, and the usual delays and difficulties, Suu was in,” wrote Ma Than É in her essay in
Freedom from Fear
.

The secretary general of the United Nations was at that time U Thant, politically the most successful Burmese of all and in several ways a symbol
for what Burma might have been without the civil war, the military coup, and the xenophobic isolation from the rest of the world. U Thant grew up in a small village in the Irrawaddy Delta. His father worked in education and was one of the founders of the
Sun
, a newspaper that in the 1920s and 1930s supported the idea that Burma should be given a greater degree of independence but should remain within the British Empire. But his father died when U Thant was only fourteen years old, and the family landed in great economic difficulty. Despite this, U Thant succeeded in gaining an education as a teacher, and when he was only twenty-five years old he became the headmaster of one of the schools in his hometown. Alongside this job he wrote a great number of articles and essays, in which he argued for increased independence, just like his father. During his time at university he had come to know Aung San, U Nu, and others in the young nationalist movement. U Nu had worked as a teacher at the school in Pantanaw, and when he became prime minister in 1948, he asked U Thant to come to Rangoon. For a number of years in the 1950s U Thant was the speechwriter, personal secretary, and political factotum to the prime minister.