The Lady and the Peacock (5 page)

In Burma, colonialism had been experienced as a zero-sum game: The further the foreigners intruded into Burmese life, it was felt, the more the Burmese lost touch with their own traditions, ending up deracinated, demoralized and cynical. But now Suu discovered that just over the Burmese border in Bengal, in the cradle of Britain's Indian empire, a creative renaissance had been set in motion, with the active participation of both Englishmen and Indians, which had resulted in a new synthesis, the forging of new tools to understand and even to mold the developing modern world. In an important essay she wrote many years later, comparing the intellectual life of Burma and India, she sketched what she felt Burma needed, and what it had so far entirely lacked.

“And what should they know of England who only England know?”
Kipling had asked rhetorically, and Aung San Suu Kyi came to feel the same way about her own homeland: Only by leaving it could you really see it, and now she saw its follies and limitations with the clarity of the self-exiled. In an essay written two decades later she quoted the caustic judgment of an early countryman who had traveled abroad, U May Oung, who joined the Young Men's Buddhist Association in 1908 after qualifying as a barrister in London. The modern Burman, May Oung wrote, was “a Burman to all outward appearances, but entirely out of harmony with his surroundings. He laughed at the old school of men . . . he thought there was nothing to be learned from them . . . he had adopted the luxuries but not the steadfastness and high-souled integrity of the European, the lavish display of wealth but not the business instincts of the Indian, the love of sensuous ease but not the frantic perseverance of the Chinaman.”
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Suu examined her countrymen from her new perspective and saw how right May Oung had been. And she compared the sad figure of the confused and superficial modernized Burmese with the sort of Indians who had emerged from early encounters with the British in Bengal. In particular she describes Rammohun Roy, the eighteenth-century Bengali scholar known as “the father of the Indian Renaissance.” She wrote:

Rammohun Roy set the tone for the Indian Renaissance, which was essentially a search for ways and means of revitalizing the classical heritage of India, so that it could face the onslaught of new and alien forces without losing its individual character or failing to fulfill the demands of a rapidly changing society . . . It was important that social, religious and political aspects of reform should move together . . . But . . . the underlying purpose tended to be the same: to bring India into harmonious step with modern developments without losing her identity.
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“To bring Burma into step with modern developments without losing her identity”: That could be the challenge of a lifetime. This quotation is taken from a long and subtle essay, first published in 1990, in which Suu compares the intellectual life of India and Burma; but in a sense it was a letter to herself, setting out the sort of mental and emotional, not to mention spiritual and political, development that Burma cried out for, and which, in the first, bruising century of its encounter with modernity, it had almost entirely lacked—and which (the essay implies rather than says it)
only someone like Suu herself, a child of Burma who was also steeped in the modern wisdom of India and points west, might be able to provide. These were some of the seminal ideas that an adolescence spent among the brilliant and highly articulate brains of New Delhi had planted and watered.

In New Delhi, and later at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, where she read Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE), Suu was developing her ideas of how Burma needed to change so that it could embrace democratic development in the way India had, without losing touch with its identity. But in the real world back home, following his coup d'état, General Ne Win had embarked on a reckless adventure in eccentric, home-grown socialism, nationalizing everything, closing down parliament, terminating the free press and jailing anyone who resisted. Anticipating Afghanistan's Taliban by a couple of decades, he closed down popular entertainments, including horse racing.
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Millions of ethnic Indians, many of whom had been in Burma for generations, were forcibly repatriated and Burma's other links with the outside world, such as the Ford Foundation and the British Council, were rapidly eliminated. The sort of ideologically driven economic disaster that overtook much of the socialist world in these years was now enacted in Burma, too, and the “rice bowl of Asia” became a net importer of food. The nation began a long descent through the world's rankings, ending in the ignominious position, twenty-five years after the coup d'état, of having to ask the United Nations to grant it “least-developed nation status,” in order to receive the handouts that go with it.

On the other side of the world, Suu graduated from Oxford and worked for three years at the United Nations in New York under the Burmese Secretary General U Thant. Returning to England she married Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar, and they settled down in Oxford with their two small sons. Amid the responsibilities of raising a family on a small academic income, any grand ideas Suu may have entertained about her possible role in Burma shrank in scale.

Yet, as Aris later wrote, Suu had never forgotten who she was and who her father was, had never renounced the idea that sometime, at some unimaginable future date, her country might need her. “From her earliest childhood,” he wrote in 1991, “Suu has been deeply preoccupied
with the question of what she might do to help her people. She never for a moment forgot that she was the daughter of Burma's national hero . . . She always used to say to me that if her people ever needed her, she would not fail them.”
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In the months before they married, she wrote to him over and over again, and in her loving letters the same anxious theme kept recurring. “Again and again she expressed her worry that her family and people might misinterpret our marriage and see it as a lessening of her devotion to them,” he writes. “She constantly reminded me that one day she would have to return to Burma, that she counted on my support at that time, not as her due, but as a favor.”
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And he quotes from some of these letters—almost unbearably painful to read now, nearly forty years on, more than ten years after Michael's death, and twenty years after she was first confined to her home.

In the end the destiny about which she had such a strong intuition did indeed call. As Michael Aris wrote, there is no indication that she saw it coming. But then suddenly it was there, standing before her, unarguably huge and fearful and compelling. And all she did, all she is still doing, is to answer its call.

T
HEY
were practically born on the move, but as the English winter slowly gave way to spring at the end of March 1988, the exotic family that lived at number 15 Park Town, a road of stately Victorian houses in north Oxford, seemed at last to have reached a sort of equilibrium.

After more than twenty years of struggle, Michael Aris was closing in on his ambitions. He had been a lonely pioneer in the madly difficult and obscure subject of Tibetan language and culture; and he had found within that rarified discipline an even more obscure and rarified niche of his own—the history and culture of the kingdom of Bhutan, an offshoot of Tibet high in the Indian Himalayas, the last Tibetan kingdom to open its doors to the modern world. But there is something to be said for obscure niches: For six years, until interrupted by the call of love, he had been able to pursue his studies in the heart of the kingdom itself, as private tutor to the sons of the king.

That night, as their sons Alexander and Kim slept upstairs, Michael was, as usual, deep in a book. If his attention strayed it was perhaps to the comfortable thought that things were looking up. After years of genteel poverty in an increasingly cramped and crowded apartment, they had managed to buy a decent house. His most cherished personal project, a foundation to promote the study of Tibetan, was still no more than a gleam in his eye, but his career was on a firmer footing now: With his doctorate behind him, he had recently obtained tenure at St. Antony's College.

Beside him on the sofa, equally engrossed in a book of her own, was the reason he was no longer in Bhutan, the reason he needed a decentsized house, the reason a country only very tenuously connected to Tibet called Burma had come to bulk almost as large in his life as Bhutan—the woman he had fallen in love with when he first ran into her in the home of a college friend in Chelsea.

Her name was Suu, pronounced “Sue.” One of her best Oxford friends, to distinguish her from other friends with the very common name of
Sue, called her “Suu Burmese.” For everyone who encountered her, Suu combined the familiar and the exotic in a way that was uniquely her own. As one who had spent most of her adolescent years in the diplomatic circles of New Delhi, she spoke English like an upper-class Indian—that is to say, with more clarity and precision than most English people have spoken it for about fifty years. And in Delhi she had had the sort of “finishing” normal for privileged young Indian ladies but which, in England, went out with the debutantes: sewing, embroidery, flower-arranging, piano, equitation.
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Yet there was nothing Indian about her appearance: Petite, with fine bones, pale skin, almond eyes and pronounced cheekbones, there was no doubting that she came from the other side of the line that divides the subcontinent from Southeast Asia. And despite the graces imparted by an old-fashioned education, she gave off no sense of entitlement, none of the languor common among those with nothing to wait for but a suitable man and a legacy. She was extraordinarily beautiful, and composed, and warm—and funny, too, with a streak of mischief that seemed to go with the unruly fringe that fell across her strong black eyebrows. But there was something else that people noticed when they got to know her a little better: a shadow that fell across her face when she was alone or when the conversation flagged, a grave look that came into her eyes that spoke of sadness and preoccupation beyond her years.

Michael soon learned, as his old-fashioned courtship of Suu proceeded, that she was heir not to an Asian fortune but to a complex and tragic family story. Her father Aung San, brilliant, mercurial and fiercely ambitious, was the father of modern Burma, assassinated with half his cabinet less than a year before he was due to hoist the new nation's flag.

Suu thus bore the most famous name in the country, a name that evoked pride and grief among her countrymen in equal proportions. And as the chaotic teething years of Burmese democracy were swept aside by a military dictatorship, Aung San increasingly became a symbol of Burma's lost opportunities and lost hopes.

Suu was one of three children, but although she was the only girl she was also the only one for whom the family name became an inspiration and a challenge. Her older brother never showed any sustained interest in answering its promptings; the younger one, who was two years older than her and to whom she had been very close, died tragically
when he was only five, drowning in a pond in the garden of the family's first house, a death which cast another dark shadow on her young life.

Michael was left in no doubt about how much it meant to Suu that she was her father's daughter, and how much her father's name meant to her countrymen. Their courtship might have been old-fashioned—Suu made no secret of the fact that she believed a woman should never sleep with a man until her wedding night—but it was quintessentially modern in the way that most of it was conducted over thousands of miles of separation. After graduating from St. Hugh's in Oxford, Suu had found work with the UN in New York; Michael, meanwhile, had returned to his job as royal tutor in Thimphu, Bhutan's toy capital. After they became engaged, they exchanged hundreds of letters. Practically all of them remain under lock and key in a private university archive, but telling snippets of some have been made public.

In one of them Suu wrote, “Sometimes I am beset by fears that circumstances might tear us apart just when we are so happy in each other that separation would be a torment . . .”

There was no doubt, although she had not lived in the country since she was fourteen, that Suu felt powerful ties to Burma. But the implication of those ties for her future life remained very hazy. She returned to Rangoon every year, to spend time with her aging mother, to introduce her sons to her homeland, and give them a flavor of its culture and religion. She gave the boys Burmese as well as English names, and on their most recent visit, to cement their second identity, had put them through
shinbyu
, the coming-of-age ceremony which all Burmese Buddhist boys undergo, in which their heads are shaved by a monk and they spend weeks or months in a monastery, learning the rudiments of the religious life.
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