Burmese Lessons (9 page)

Not only here, but everywhere I’ve been in Burma, faces turn to my face as I cross the street or sit in a tea shop or walk into a market. The eyes look at me so directly; their aliveness is shocking. In most Western cities, strangers avoid eye contact. Our glances are usually fleeting—it’s impolite to look too long. If you smile at a stranger or talk to a child you don’t know, many people will disapprove. Some will fear that you are mentally deranged.

People in the crowd smile at me; they smile at one another. More remarkable than the smiles are the stories the mouths can tell. I’ve heard some of them simply by going to tea shops and little biryani joints and sitting around for hours at a time. People don’t always want to talk, but sometimes they do. If we have time and enough common language to move past the preliminaries, I try to scratch below the surface.

How easily the gold flakes off the Golden Land. People want to tell the stories that are forced under the surface of daily life. Everyone knows these stories, yet they are treated as secrets. The father dead in prison, or at a work camp in the North. The husband, son, sister, brother in prison. The fear of prison and the fear of hunger: these are the twinned specters in my impromptu interviews with strangers. One afternoon, when the lunch rush was over, a tea-shop boss came to my table and sat down for a chat. “You ask me what Burmese people think about the government,” he said. “Now I have time to find an answer. You know what? A lot of them don’t think about the government. They think about eating. They think about their children, eating.”

Some ex–political prisoners are so weakened by malnutrition, torture, and disease that their physical bodies, to say nothing of their minds, are never the same again. One such man told me that food didn’t seem to make a difference. He still felt as if he was on prison rations.

Familial separation is another common fear. Burmese family ties are strong. The potent glue of the family holds an individual’s world together, further secures that world in the firmament. Yet many families here are broken, not by divorce but by imprisonment and exile.

Aung San Suu Kyi also lives this experience, separated as she has been for years from her husband
^*
and children, who remain in Britain, where she lived before returning to Burma in 1988. The SLORC has mostly denied them the right to come and visit her. Most of her first continuous six years of house arrest were passed in profound isolation; even letters didn’t reach her. This family tragedy—the mother lost to her children, the husband separated from his beloved wife—is the most well known of thousands of similar stories that make up recent Burmese history.

Suu Kyi’s famous, revered father, General Aung San, was the architect of Burmese independence from the British and later, during the Second World War, from the Japanese. He was a brilliant young statesman whose early assassination left Burma vulnerable to the military he’d helped create. His name has become the prefix for her own, to remind the ruling junta that people still remember her father as a heroic freedom fighter, and that she is following his path.

But people are not here just because of who her father was. She has become
a politician and a leader in her own right; years of house arrest have not been enough to erase her from people’s minds. The generals continue to publish slanderous, mocking articles about her in the state-run press, but the burgeoning crowd around me proves that government hate campaigns haven’t succeeded. She is joined to her people not only by the will to change a corrupt political system but by a common experience of loss and sacrifice.

Here they are, the people: expectant, patient, ordinary, remarkable. Their military leaders have failed them badly and with increasing violence over a period of fifty years. Behind closed doors, many would say that Burma is governed by murderers and liars. When the National League for Democracy, with Aung San Suu Kyi at its head, took over eighty percent of the country’s votes in the 1990 federal election, the generals had already placed Suu Kyi under house arrest, “for her own protection.” Instead of taking her rightful position as the leader of the country, she remained locked up in her childhood house on University Avenue, the old colonial-era building behind the blue gate.

When she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, her young sons, Alexander and Kim, accepted the award on her behalf. She was released from house arrest in 1995, and very soon after started to give weekend talks. When I asked San Aung about them, he told me, “Go to one. See for yourself. You’ll like it. Everyone likes it. Except for the army, of course. I don’t think they’ll let her speak publicly much longer. That’s why you should go. It will be different from the interview you had. More interesting.”

“But it
was
interesting to meet her.” I interviewed her during my first week in Burma, because Ma Thida, the young woman writer in prison, had worked with her on her election campaign in 1989. I also thought that Suu Kyi would have some insights into the prison experience, having spent so long in solitary confinement. But she refused to compare herself to the prisoners in prison, and she knew no more about Ma Thida’s situation than anyone else did. But, like Sayagyi Tin Moe, she cautioned me against trying to interview her family; they could be under surveillance by the MI.

“I think I interviewed her too early in my stay. I didn’t ask her the right questions, and I was nervous. Despite that, she was very gracious. But I didn’t know how to talk to her. She’s in this immense public position—national heroine, international Nobel laureate—but she’s one of the most private people I’ve ever met. That much was obvious just from her posture—she’s like a wall. A beautiful wall. I was afraid to ask her anything too personal, anything unexpected. I didn’t want to offend her or invade that privacy. So I asked boring questions. Or awkward, overly complicated ones. And I didn’t dare ask if I could take a portrait of her.”

“You know, every Western intellectual who drops into Rangoon tries to get an interview with her.”

“Exactly. I was just another Western intellectual. She must get sick of us.”

He laughed. “You should have asked her about that, to see what she would say.”

“Oh, I know what she would say. She’d say of course not, she appreciates the support of the international community. Boring answer. Correct.”

“Karen, she cannot be outrageous and incorrect! She’s a politician. But I know what you mean. Other foreigners say the same thing—she’s charming but stiff. Not a typical Burmese woman. And she’s not, is she? She has spent most of her life abroad, and a lot of that in Britain. I don’t mind the stiffness. But I wish she would agitate, like Gandhi. Tell people to go out and march on the streets again. He’s one of her heroes, but marching in the streets is not her style.”

The crowd is now so big that it spills out across the pavement and up onto the other side of the road. Cars drive carefully through the masses of people, the drivers blaring their horns—“to show support,” says the woman beside me. Another festive sound is the metallic clink-clink-clinking of vendors knocking cups against their metal water coolers. Sun, not rain, suddenly pours through the heavy clouds, and the water sellers begin to do a brisk business.

When a young couple rises together to change position, hoping to squeeze into the welcome shade of the tall trees lining the street, they carry their shoes in their hands and place their bare feet gingerly on the ground in front of sitting people. They smile and talk to strangers as they go. An old woman holds the shoulder of a young man as she lowers herself down. Young girls hold each other’s hands.

Here and now, outside the pale blue gates of 54 University Avenue, the familiarity is such that we might be attending an enormous family reunion. The Lady will speak, as she does every Saturday and Sunday, at 4
P.M
. We’re packed in tightly, faces and hands, feet and folded knees. People fan themselves with newspapers and pieces of cardboard. Sometime after three o’clock, a young man appears and tests the microphone. The crowd goes silent with expectation as his voice rings out into the avenue, but he goes away again and the people return to chatting.

A few minutes later, two groups of supporters come through the gate. A row of young women in traditional cotton jackets sit facing the crowd in a half circle, the first band of a human shield. The second band consists of white-shirted men who file out of the compound and face us with earnest expressions. The talkative people grow silent. Two men step up onto the unseen platform behind the gate, leaving a space between them. A wave of sound rises up and crests into the shockingly articulate syllables of her name: “Aung San Suu Kyi! Aung San Suu Kyi! Aung San Suu Kyi!” Despite the heat, goosebumps rise on my skin.

I’ve never heard, in Burma or in any free country, how quickly a thousand voices can join together. People shout this rallying cry at the tops of their lungs. I hear and I feel the words vibrating through my head, against the roof of my closed mouth. The force of it is almost frightening.

Suddenly she is up there, between the two men, in front of the microphone. Even after the photographs in newspapers and books, even after meeting her in person, it’s surprising to see how beautiful she is, how upright, and how small. A string of white jasmine flowers hangs from the knot of hair at the back of her neck. She dips her head for a moment, waiting
for the chant of her name to ebb. Then she greets the people, smiling, and begins to speak.

I
t doesn’t matter that I don’t understand. I hear something in her voice that I did not feel with her at all in person. Ease. Her public Burmese persona is not the woman I met in the front sitting room of the house in the compound. The authority and intelligence are the same: sharp, undeniable. But the small woman who stands on a table and smiles at the crowd as she speaks, and pauses to let them digest her words, and pauses again to look up from her notes and meet the eyes of her supporters—this woman is the myth incarnate, the beautiful, warmhearted heroine, the daughter of the hero father. She speaks without earnestness or anger. She is attractive, almost sensual in appearance. It’s a complete transformation from the rigid-backed person I met during my first week in Rangoon. Though she stands behind her gate—both fulfilling and pushing against the SLORC dictate that she must not speak outside of her own home and compound—she brings herself close to her audience. What astonishes me most is how funny she is.

And how the crowd laughs! She makes her witty remarks and her jokes and laughs with them, throwing her head back and opening her mouth wide. That’s the essence of the alteration: she is open. She unlocks her heart for a thousand people. They unlock their hearts for her. Their faces shine as they listen, their eyes follow her, reverent and focused. I must be the only shifter and fidgeter in the crowd. Unlike everyone else, I am unable to ignore my pins-and-needles legs and numb feet.

When she begins to speak with the crisp, hard consonants of British English, the private, cool woman returns. She speaks English politely, giving the few foreigners in the crowd a brief summary of her talk, which will “concern the struggle in South Africa to end the rule of apartheid.” She explains that she has recently read and been inspired by Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. But we are not her real audience. Rightly, she doesn’t
waste much time with us. She opens her mouth again and becomes Burmese once more by speaking it.

A moment later, she must offer another joke or a play on words, for a big swell of laughter washes over the people around me. An answering smile animates Aung San Suu Kyi’s face. With one hand, she grapples with her notes and the unwieldy microphone. The other hand she stretches out toward her listeners. At first I think the gesture is meant to quiet them, as a teacher hushes an unruly classroom. But she is reaching for them.

It makes me think of the words San Aung taught me the other day.
Let pwa-deh
, a verb: to open the hand, to give. To be generous.

I hear a knock
at my guesthouse door. “Telephone!” Myo Thant crisply announces. He waits for my acknowledgment, then thumps back down the stairs.

I suspect that San Aung is calling to tell me that he
does
have time for a last visit. But when I pick up the phone a woman’s voice surprises me. It’s Anita, the Swedish journalist I met my first night here. I ran into her at a coffee shop recently and we had a long chat. She’s been doing work in Burma and on the border for years.