Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

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  Literary tea shops where writers gather for performances and readings have sprung up all over Yangon and Mandalay. “There’s a short-story tea shop just over there,” one local told me as we strolled through Yangon. “Detective writers and mystery writers go to the one next to the stop at the Macon Building. The poets go to Thirty-Seventh Street, and the novelists go to one on Thirty-Third Street.” Such events would have been impossible five years ago. Censorship under the junta was applied most rigorously to politics, religion, and nudity. According to Tin Win Win (who goes by the pen name Ju), depictions of poverty were also prohibited, since they were thought to show the country in a bad light. You had to secure a license to publish a book, which first had to pass a prepublication review. In 2012, the head of the censorship department announced on national television, “If it is going to be a true democracy, we have to abolish censorship.” These days, as Ma Thanegi noted, “Any news of any unfairness anywhere, it’s in the papers. We have never before seen such a situation. Even if nothing is done, at least we know.” Journalists long precluded from criticizing the government now do little else.

  Thant Thaw Kaung, a leading publisher and foreign-book distributor, sold an English-language encyclopedia in 2007. A friend pointed out a paragraph-long entry for “human rights.” Thant withdrew the whole encyclopedia, collecting all copies that had been delivered to stores, lest someone higher up notice and send him to jail. He now distributes his books in English more widely and has set up traveling libraries to bus books in Burmese into villages.

  The government department overseeing book publication, previously called the Press Scrutiny and Registration Department, has been rechristened the Copyright and Registration Department. Although books are no longer censored line by line before publication, the department reviews them after publication, and those that are too broadly critical of the government or military are taken out of circulation. A bestselling author in Myanmar may sell up to a hundred thousand copies of a title, but few foreign books are translated into Burmese. Most writers concentrate on short-form prose and poetry for magazines. Blogging is achieving some reach. But Ma Thida suggested that writers had internalized the spirit of censorship, and that it would take a generation before anyone would write with authentic freedom. She has started a magazine and a newspaper and has exhorted younger writers to expand their scope, arguing that freedom withers if it is not exercised. Her publications touch on long-standing hot-button issues such as ethnic conflicts, and fresher terrain such as women’s, gay, and disability rights.

  Nay Phone Latt decided in 2007 to inform expatriates about what was happening in Myanmar by starting a blog, a platform then subject to neither censors nor editors. Because Myanmar had no functioning Internet, he did his blogging from Singapore. He never criticized the government directly; he wrote short stories and poems full of metaphor. One told of a tiger that came to a village, entered a pagoda, and decided to stay. The villagers believed that wild animals belonged in the forest, and some wanted to kill the tiger. The daughter of the village chief said that the problem was not the tiger, but the place where it had installed itself. But no one could get it out of the pagoda, so they lived in constant fear. “Magazines published these stories because the censors didn’t know what I meant,” Nay Phone Latt explained.

  When he returned from Singapore just before the Saffron Revolution, he organized the Myanmar Blogging Society so journalists could learn how to file dispatches from Yangon that might reach the outside world. He believes that reporting from inside the country was key to the reforms that came in subsequent years. The government arrested Nay Phone Latt after someone found cartoons disrespectful of the regime in his e-mail in-box. He explained that anyone could send anything to his in-box without his approval, but his inquisitors did not believe him. He was interrogated for ten days, during which he was not allowed to sleep, was often beaten, was sometimes tied up, and was taken from place to place blindfolded, so that he didn’t know where he was or who the people questioning him were. “In a military regime, inside the prison and outside the prison are not so different because the whole country is like a prison,” he said.

  Sentenced to more than twenty years’ incarceration, he was first sent to Yangon’s notorious Insein Prison, where Ma Thida had also done time. Once he was transferred to a lower-security prison in Rakhine, he was allowed to write letters to his family. Again he resorted to metaphor to describe what he saw. “It’s a very, very good place to concentrate,” he said. “We had the right to read. And my parents came to me every month and brought books. I was never sad. My narrow cell was just like a little library.” He invited other inmates to his cell and taught them English or read to them; he taught them about computers, though there was no computer there. He dictated new stories to his parents, who published them under a pseudonym. After the 2012 general amnesty, he published his Prison Letters.

  Nay Phone Latt said none of the political prisoners he knew had been afraid during their confinement. “Imprisonment made us stronger and more educated; prison is our university. There I learned never to focus on the long future. I learned to focus on the present.” Even now, he maintains, the government controls freedom of expression by law. “Not by pressure, by law. We can write, but sometimes they try to sue the journal, the editor, and the writer.” He pointed out that the Electronic Transition Act, under which he had been sentenced, remains on the books, though it has been amended to mandate shorter prison terms. The decision of which rules to enforce rests with the military. “We are not so safe,” he said. The chilling effect on journalists is strong.

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  Censorship empowers artists by implying that free expression is both immensely potent and profoundly dangerous. Censorship is a gesture of fear, and fear invests its objects with authority. Htein Lin was among the leaders of the 1988 movement when he was in law school. During the crackdown, he fled to a refugee camp in India. In 1992, India normalized relations with the military government of Myanmar. Though India still claimed to support democracy in Myanmar, members of the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front soon fled India to camps in the Myanmar jungle near the Chinese border. A grim clash worthy of Lord of the Flies ensued between the new arrivals and those already ensconced in the camps. Htein Lin and about eighty others were accused of being informers, tortured, and then locked up by their comrades. Ten died from infections after their fingers were chopped off. Fifteen were executed by their former student comrades. “You cannot get out of the jungle,” Htein Lin said. “You get wet and you will never be dry again. You are sinking into the ground every step you take. Where is the food? You cannot get the malaria out from your body. Then the leeches. When you are sleeping, they get into your softest spot and you wake up to feel them sucking blood from your eye.”

  He eventually escaped the jungle and finished law school. Then in 1998, his name appeared on a secret list of people planning a demonstration, and all of them were sent to jail. Htein Lin was sentenced to seven years. Compared with the jungle, prison was easy. He had learned to draw in India, and in prison he befriended one of his guards, a man who had never heard of paintings. Htein Lin volunteered to make one for him, so the guard returned with some house paint. Htein Lin extracted the wick from a cigarette lighter and used it as a brush. The prison had no toilet paper, and inmates used strips torn from discarded prison uniforms to clean themselves. Htein Lin saved half of his allotment, and on those banners of abraded white cotton, he painted some of the most haunting images ever to come out of war. Htein Lin used a bottle cap, a piece of glass, a carved bar of soap, and an old fishing net to create monotypes. A syringe from the prison hospital was adapted to draw fine lines.

  One guard mistook Htein Lin’s abstract painting for a map of the prison, intended to facilitate escape, so all his art was destroyed; he began again. He would produce some three hundred paintings during his seven years of confinement. Over time, Htein Lin’s guard brought several other sentries into
his confidence, explaining that their charge was a great artist. When all the insiders were on duty at the same time, the paintings were spirited away and smuggled to his family. A friend approached the British ambassador, Vicky Bowman, and asked her to look after the collection. She agreed to do so and fell in love with Htein Lin through his art; soon after his release, they were married. He exhibited his paintings in Yangon in 2005. He invited the guard who had obtained art supplies for him to view the work, and they drank a toast to their collaboration. Htein Lin talked to me about the role of art in formulating a new ideology. “In prison, I met many politicians and lawyers,” he said. “They all became poets and songwriters there.”

  When I met Htein Lin, he was assembling an installation called A Show of Hand. He had tried to contact as many as possible of Myanmar’s three thousand former political prisoners (that official tally is believed by many to be too low) so he could make plaster casts of their hands. By the time I visited his studio, he had accumulated about two hundred. Plaster is used to fix what is broken as well as to constrain it, and that duality held great metaphoric strength for him. Ma Thanegi said he could cast her hand as long as she could choose the position in which she posed it—and held up her middle finger to the authorities who had put her behind bars. Htein Lin said, “No wonder you are not dead.”

  Other artists relate to politics more circuitously. Wah Nu told me that her family used to produce handicrafts to sell to tourists. Among their most popular items were carved busts of Aung San. After 1988, they ceased to produce them and hid those they had already made. When Wah Nu and her husband, Tun Win Aung, started to exhibit after 2012, they set up a gallery in which Aung San’s last speech, which the socialist government had broadcast endlessly as propaganda, played on a loop in a room with dozens of the Aung San busts, no longer illegal. The installation was both nostalgic and ironic, at once reverent of Aung San and mocking of the cultish way his name is used to signify everything good about Myanmar—much as Chinese artists have played with the image of Mao. Of course, every reference to Aung San is also a reference to his daughter. “Aung San Suu Kyi cannot change us,” Tun Win Aung said. “I hope she will be elected, I will be very happy, but I don’t expect her to change me. We are corrupted by having lived under this government, and now we must learn how to be honest and innocent.”

  When I met Maung Tin Thit in Mandalay, he seemed weary. Another of the 1988 activists, he had managed not to get arrested until 1998, when police searched his apartment, found a private notebook of poems, and were particularly incensed by this one:

  The street in front of the house needs the illumination of the shining moon.

  I don’t own the street.

  But if I don’t go on this street or road, I cannot reach my home.

  To purify my mind, I may need to clean up the street.

  For those few lines, he served over seven years. He has been working on a book about the oil and gas pipeline that runs from Rakhine to China, just the sort of righteous-minded investigation that the regime still punishes. “Before I went to prison, I was given to excitement and anger, and my poems drew from those emotions,” he said. “But in prison, as I meditated, I came to understand that anger accomplishes nothing. This new work is not based in anger. And now I am not afraid to go back to the prison, because I learned how to live there.”

  Ma Thanegi has also written a book about her jail time, Nor Iron Bars a Cage. “I had no interest in politics at all,” she said. “But in ’88, it was young students out on the streets marching, and they were being shot down. I felt so guilty, so I joined in. Then Aung San Suu Kyi came out to speak, and a large group of us went to the middle of a muddy field to hear her; there were crickets and little frogs jumping all over. We took plastic bags to sit on, and we waited two hours for her to arrive. The sound system was so bad we couldn’t hear a thing. I’d seen Aung San Suu Kyi in my school when I was in the fifth grade, and she was in the second. So I mentioned that and we talked in English. On the spur of the moment I said, as others did, ‘Anything we can help you with, please tell us.’ The next day she had somebody call me. I knew immediately that I was going to be facing guns and going to jail. I had to be sure that I would not come apart at the seams; to be dignified is an Asian criterion of good breeding. So I thought about whether I could keep my dignity, and I said, ‘I’m ready.’ ”

  A few years later, Ma Thanegi publicly opposed the sanctions Suu Kyi supported, accurately predicting that they would enable the generals to establish monopolies and line their own pockets. She anticipated that the generals would rape forests of their hardwoods and deplete mines of their jade, leaving little for generations to come. “There is not one tree left,” she said. Suu Kyi denounced Ma Thanegi as a traitor, but Ma Thanegi went to jail regardless, because of their association. She maintains that her ties to her jail friends are deeper than blood. “This afternoon I was with one of our friends from jail, at one of our houses,” she told me. “All the young jailbirds and all of us, having lunch and just talking. Some I haven’t seen since then, but when we meet again after twenty-five years, it’s like it was yesterday.”

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  Misuu Borit, also known as Yin Myo Su, is one of Myanmar’s most successful businesswomen, progenitor of the country’s most charming hotels, and leader of its restaurant culture. She said she found meditation completely impossible: “I can’t go to a place where people tell me to do nothing but concentrate. I tried it when I was little, but your legs go completely numb, you can’t feel anything anymore, and you get bored. My grandmother’s way of meditation is cooking, and that’s my kind of meditation.”

  Borit’s parents had a small guesthouse near Inle Lake. When she was a child in the 1970s, her father would welcome the guests, her mother would cook for them, and Borit would perform as a dancing clown. In her high school in 1988, she began to attend political meetings but was afraid to tell her parents about them. One day, she came home late, and her father demanded to know where she had been. She had to answer a direct question. “He said, ‘Go take a shower and eat, and then we will go together back to the center where the students are meeting.’ He was not punishing me; instead, he was joining me. That’s how my father became a politician. And I ended up campaigning for my father, and I cast my first vote for him.” After he was elected in 1990, Borit obtained her first passport and went to study hotel management in Switzerland.

  In the post-’88 era, some 85 percent of previously elected officials went to prison, many for long terms; Borit’s father served only two years. He told the family not to inform Borit; he wanted her to finish her studies abroad. But a friend sent a letter that said, “Sorry about your dad.” Borit had one aunt in Yangon with a telephone, and when she called to ask what had happened to her father, her aunt hung up. So she knew it was serious and headed home. When she walked in the door, her mother screamed at her to go back, lest she worry her father more. “It was kind of cruel, but it was her way of protecting me,” Borit said, “and she was right, because in those days, the generals were scared of everything. Knowing someone had been abroad and come back was suspicious. Three nights I spent with my mom, and they came to look for me.” Her mother hid her, and the next day, on her nineteenth birthday, she fled to Thailand, where she nearly starved before making her way back to Europe, to a French hotel school where she worked for her room and board. Five years later, she finally returned home and saw her father. He was done with politics and had set up a twenty-five-room hotel, and she joined him there.

  Borit slowly expanded her family’s landholdings. She now has a small hotel in Mrauk-U; a guesthouse by Inle Lake up north; a forty-five-acre farm; and a school for hotel management, organic farming, and traditional arts. She employs more than two hundred full-time staff. She also founded the Inthar Heritage House, retraining local artisans in historical building techniques so they could help construct a museum of traditional crafts. She has filled it with her grandparents’ furniture and antiques accumulated as
her neighbors opted for new, factory-made items from China. Inthar Heritage House also encompasses a breeding center for Burmese cats—previously long vanished from Myanmar—and the best restaurant in the country, which serves delectable renditions of her grandmother’s recipes, including the national dish, lahpet, a salad of fermented tea leaves mixed with chilies, sesame oil, fried garlic, dried shrimp, peanuts, and ginger; it’s rather caffeinated and best not eaten near bedtime. Her guests sometimes marvel at how everything is homegrown and handmade, but she points out, “We were always farm-to-table because there wasn’t anyplace else to get anything for the table.”

  Inle is a gorgeous, shallow lake where the locals have for many years lived by fishing. They stand up in their boats and paddle with one leg to keep their hands free for their nets. It’s a spectacular sight: they stay tall and move with astonishing grace, in a kind of serpentine full-body undulation. You go by boat to visit the lake’s many shrines, numerous pagodas, picturesque villages, and an abandoned temple complex, now overgrown. There are a famous floating market and some less touristic markets along the shore where weavers produce cloth from the fibers of lotus roots.

  In 2011, Myanmar had two hundred thousand visitors; in 2012, 1 million; in 2013, nearly 2 million; in 2014, over 3 million. Above Inle’s eastern shore, a gash in the landscape marks the beginning of a construction project that will triple the number of hotel rooms around the lake. The area’s rickety infrastructure can in no way support such a deluge of visitors. The lake itself is silting up because of unsustainable farming practices, and the narrow waterways around it are already crowded. The beauty of the lake—indeed, the beauty of all Myanmar—is partly a consequence of its long-term inaccessibility. It is becoming accessible at such speed that there may soon be nothing to access.