The Lady and the Peacock (41 page)

In the last paragraph of the book's concluding chapter, she described what it was about Aung San that had made him such a popular and successful leader. The words were an implicit denunciation of what, under Ne Win, leadership in Burma had come to mean; they would also become a sort of manifesto for herself. She wrote:

Aung San's appeal was not so much to extremists as to the great majority of ordinary citizens who wished to pursue their own lives in peace and prosperity under a leader they could trust and respect. In him they saw that leader, a man who put the interests of the country before his own needs, who remained poor and unassuming at the height of his power, who accepted the responsibilities of leadership without hankering after the privileges, and who, for all his political acumen and powers of statecraft, retained at the core of his being a deep simplicity. For the people of Burma, Aung San was the man who had come in their hour of need to restore their national pride and honor. As his life is a source of inspiration for them, his memory remains the guardian of their political conscience.
²⁹

As her children grew, her thoughts were turning again restlessly to Burma. She had been going back most summers, alone or with the family, to keep her mother company and pay homage to her father on Martyrs' Day. Later—one year before her mother's devastating stroke—she took the boys back for
shinbyu
, the ceremony all Burmese Buddhist boys undergo between the ages of five and about twelve, when they re-enact the Buddha's renunciation of his royal heritage and his decision to embrace the life of the spirit. Suu had not taught Alexander and Kim to speak Burmese but they both had Burmese as well as English names and passports. And now they also had the most important Burmese rite of passage behind them.

It was on one of these visits that she struck up a friendship that was to prove important to her later on. She visited Rangoon University to seek out copies of Burmese classics on behalf of the Bodleian and got talking to one of the senior librarians, whose name was Ko Myint Swe, a friend of her mother's. “You must help our country,” he told her. “But how, uncle?” she replied.
³⁰
Myint Swe was not sure: But he was one of several voices in Rangoon reminding her who she was, and that she might yet have a role. When she took the plunge and entered politics in 1988, Myint Swe became one of her closest aides.

Both her boys were now at school, and Suu decided that the best way to re-engage with her country was as a scholar. Following in Michael's footsteps, she applied to SOAS in London to do a PhD on Burmese political history, which would give her the opportunity to expand the
slim biography of her father into a full-blown scholarly work. But again her cursed third in PPE came back to haunt her and she was rejected: Her assessors felt that her grasp of political theory would be insufficient to see her through.

Suu was livid at this new rejection, but then it was suggested that she might write a thesis on modern Burmese literature instead. She took a one-year course at SOAS in preparation, reading numerous works in Burmese, working one-on-one with her tutor Anna Allott, and finally sitting an exam.

“We read several novels together,” said Allott, “and I asked her to write essays about them and what she wrote was very illuminating because she wrote from a Burmese point of view.”
³¹
The exam tested her command of the language and her knowledge of modern Burmese literature and she passed easily.

At SOAS she also learned about a research fellowship offered by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in Japan. Suu applied and was awarded a research scholarship for the academic year 1985–86, to study Burma's independence movement. This would be her opportunity to delve into the Japanese archives and learn firsthand what experiences her father had undergone in Japan. Her plan to write the big biography of her father may have been shunted aside but it had not been derailed. With her customary determination she plastered the bathroom at Park Town with blown-up
kanji
, Japanese characters, and set about learning to read Japanese in world-record time.

The family was on the go again: Suu was to move temporarily to Japan, taking eight-year-old Kim with her—he would undergo a very challenging year in a Japanese primary school—and at the same time Michael went with Alexander to Shimla, high in the Indian Himalayas, where he had won a two-year fellowship at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies. The four of them would get together for the holidays.

*

She was back in Asia: She had not spent so long in an Asian country since leaving Delhi for Oxford eighteen years before. Japan was in the middle of the biggest economic boom in its history—a phenomenon that interested her as little as the hippies of London or the Velvet Underground in New
York. But to be in the country which had offered so much to Burma, and delivered so little, and so ambiguously—that was interesting, and difficult. It was a brother nation to Burma, it had offered liberation from the white man and fellowship in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, but on closer acquaintance that had proved to be an even more onerous form of colonialism under a fancy name.

Suu loved Japanese food and appreciated Japanese diligence and culture, but she was critical, too. She found the people arrogant and obsessed with making money, and she couldn't understand why, despite their great aesthetic sense, they built such hideous modern cities. Her father had been shocked to be offered a prostitute during his stay in Tokyo—and she was appalled at the way Japanese men bossed and bullied women, in a way that would not be tolerated in Burma.

She shuttled between Kyoto and Tokyo to interview war veterans who had known her father, and dug for raw material on Aung San in the libraries of the Self-Defense Forces, the National Library and elsewhere, plundering them for anything she could find on him.

Yet in the opinion of Noriko Ohtsu, her Japanese friend from Oxford who had returned to live in Kyoto, her hometown, the academic slog was in the long run less important than her own transformation. In an interview years later, Suu said, “When I was young I could never separate my country from my father, because I was very small when he died and I'd always thought of him in connection with the country. So even now it is difficult for me to separate the idea of my father from the concept of my country.”
³²
And those months of immersion in her father's life and work were, in her friend's opinion, crucial for Suu: a first
kikkake
, as she puts it, a turning-point, in the fitful, unplanned process of realigning her destiny with Burma's.
³³

At the weekends, Suu and Kim sometimes visited Noriko and Sadayoshi at their place in the countryside overlooking Lake Biwa, and during the months in Japan Noriko witnessed a transformation come over her friend. At the university she encountered Burmese exchange students who treated her with a mixture of deference and vague yet intense expectation that was quite novel to her.

“She and Kim were staying in International House, Kyoto University's residence for scholars,” Noriko said, “and there were young Burmese
scholars staying there, too, nice, clever boys. Their attitude towards Suu was totally different from other people, because of the respect in which they held her father.”

Yoshikazu Mikami, Suu's first biographer, noted a similar effect. “In Japan she had her first encounter with Burmese students,” she wrote, “and they were all talking about the country in the same way—nostalgia, nationalism, respect for her father . . . She came to Japan to follow her father's shadow—but then the image became clearer and became imbued with reality. And her sense of mission began to grow.”
³⁴

Noriko remembered one student in particular: In Japan he was nicknamed Koe-chan. “Koe-chan was one of the boys who respected her. Then he went home to Rangoon and at the airport he was surrounded by soldiers and they took a pistol out of his bag and he was sentenced to seven years in Insein Jail.

“He had a weapon illegally: That was the reason they gave.” But for Noriko and Suu it was ridiculous, unbelievable, scary. “Koe-chan was a serious student, he was studying classical Japanese literature. Firearms are totally banned in Japan—even we Japanese cannot obtain a pistol or any such thing in Japan, it's totally illegal. So maybe a soldier put a pistol in his bag, to incriminate him.” The dark suspicion she and Suu shared was that the students at International House were being spied on by one of their number, and Koe-chan was punished for being friendly with Suu.

In Britain, Burma would always feel like a faraway, exotic country, its problems and realities having little bearing on everyday British life. But in Japan, the country which had maintained the closest diplomatic and commercial ties with Burma since independence, and which had been Ne Win's most consistent sponsor, she was back in the same parish. There were Burmese spies here; more to the point, there were Burmese students who knew exactly who she was and why it mattered.

Noriko said,

She became aware of the mixture of respect and expectation with which they regarded her. Koe-chan was one of them. He was such a clever, promising boy. It's quite difficult to get a PhD at Kyoto University. I think she felt some responsibility or guilt when she heard what happened to him. And her thinking about her life and her potential role began to change.

That is one of the reasons why she went into politics. It's a very interesting coincidence: Aung San stayed in Japan, and Suu stayed in Japan, and both father and daughter went on to have the same experience, both had a revolution to fight. It's a coincidence, isn't it. But I really felt that that is what Suu was feeling.

At Christmas Michael and Alexander flew out to join Suu and Kim in Kyoto. Christmas is a non-event in Japan, but New Year is the biggest festival in the calendar, and on New Year's Eve the whole family went out into the country to see their friends from Oxford.

“We took them to a nearby Buddhist temple where they all rang the big temple bell in the Japanese tradition called
joya no kane
,” Noriko remembered. “The next day I had a vivid insight into how much Suu missed Burma. I had heard of a temple not far away with a Burmese Buddha on the altar; I mentioned it to Suu and she asked if we could visit it. The gate was locked because of the holiday so I went round the back and asked for advice.”

A caretaker opened up the temple for them.

There on the altar was the Burmese Buddha with a gentle and delightful smile. Suu said “Ooooh!” then fell silent. Although she had always been very careful with money, she offered the priest 5,000 yen to say a prayer service, then prostrated herself on the earthen floor in front of the Buddha and went up and down any number of times, her hands together, chanting in Burmese.

It dawned on me that Suu and I had only known each other in England and Japan, never in Burma: I had only known her as a foreigner, with all that involves. Now, in a rustic village in Japan, coming face to face with a Burmese Buddha, suddenly she revealed her Burmese heart.

I had an intuitive feeling that she could only really fulfill herself in Burma. Would it be better for Suu to spend her whole life in comfortable Britain? Whatever the dangers and difficulties, would she not be happier immersing herself in her own country again?

Michael and Alex flew off, Kim went back to school and Suu resumed her research, but a seed had been planted. “One day towards the end of her stay in Japan she came to see me again, bringing some of our favorite
manju
cakes to eat with green tea,” Noriko recalled. Noriko was in the habit of speaking bluntly with her friend:

Over the tea I said to her, “Suu, if I were you, I would go back to Burma. Your country needs you. There are lots of things you could do there—your English ability alone would be very valuable. Michael could get a research job at some Indian university so you would not be far apart, you could put the children into boarding school . . . don't you agree?”

Normally Suu was lightning quick with her replies, but now she merely stared down and said nothing. But I knew the answer.

Eventually Suu looked up. “Noriko, you're right,” she said.

Two years later, for reasons that had nothing to do with politics, she found herself back there. And the rest of her life began to unfold.

O
N
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.