The Lady and the Peacock (29 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”