by Zoe Daniel
The pair seem to be kindred spirits. Laughing and talking, and walking arm in arm, they’re almost colour coordinated: Clinton in blue, Aung San Suu Kyi in sea green, both with their hair pulled back into low buns. Daw Suu wears her signature flowers.
‘If we move forward together, I am confident there will be no turning back on the road to democracy,’ she tells the gathering of journalists. ‘We are not on that road yet, but we hope to get there as soon as possible with the help and understanding of our friends.’
David and I collect a few more interviews and then emerge from Burma on a high. We immediately re-apply for visas to make a Foreign Correspondent piece in the New Year, but we won’t be holding our breath.
Before our departure, I do a final piece to camera: ‘A number of international journalists have entered the country in the past week – for many of us who work in the region, for the first time with official permission. It’ll only be next time we apply for a visa to enter Burma that we’ll know if that was a one-off or if it represents a shift in policy.’
I slip back into Bangkok and my other life in time for the kids’ school Christmas show. Pearl is a shy green frog singing on a lily pad, her blonde curls springing out from her piggy tails. Arkie stars in a dance number set to ‘I Like to Move It’ from the film Madagascar. I’m so nervous for them and then so proud as they bravely walk on stage and perform. Most of all, I’m relieved not to have missed it.
I finish the last of the year’s work in a flurry and we welcome friends from Australia for a relaxed Christmas in our garden. To cover the long table, I pull out a linen cloth that we bought years ago in Mauritius. The coloured village scenes sewn into its borders remind me of the places I’ve been in Africa and Asia. On the table I put a deep-red glass water jug from Cambodia and crockery decorated with red dragonflies from Vietnam – and some imported Christmas crackers. Rowan cooks a hunk of local pork with perfect crackling and we have Thai fried chicken with sticky rice delivered for the kids. We open a few bottles of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. It’s a cool day for Bangkok, about twenty-nine degrees, and we feast under the green canopy until we’re full, then squeeze in homemade baked cheesecake for dessert.
After Christmas, Rowan and I pack the kids up and head off to Australia to Wye River, a Victorian town where we’ve rented a house for a fortnight that’s big enough to fit in friends and family. Coming from Bangkok, we find it a pristine paradise. It’s a place where eucalyptus trees meet the sea, koalas sleep in the garden and kookaburras, cockatoos and rosellas stop by looking for a snack. We spend long sunny days on the beach and then barbecue sausages on the deck in the evenings.
After only a few days ‘home’, Southeast Asia begins to feel like a parallel universe. I keep my phone on but there’s no internet, so I switch off to what’s happening in the world of news and start thinking beyond it.
Rowan and I have long dreamt of having a house by the beach, a dream cemented by a desire to escape the demands of the 24/7 world of news. Throughout the year, via the internet from Bangkok, I’ve been keeping an eye on a little house that’s for sale down the hill from where we’re staying. A bright-blue fibro surf shack, it was built back in the 1950s or 60s. It’s in ‘original condition’, which means it has holes in the walls, an outdoor dunny and a crooked front deck. The dunny is wallpapered with old Beatles posters. The back deck is rotten and the ancient stem of a Hills Hoist stands in the back garden, which slopes to a gully and then climbs steeply into the forest. There’s a partial view across Bass Strait towards Tassie, my childhood home.
It’s something like my own active, outdoorsy childhood that I’m looking for in this little shack, which Pearl has dubbed ‘that broken blue house’. We’re aware that buying it isn’t a smart financial decision, but this is about family, not finances. We’re keen to give Arkie and Pearl a place in Australia they can call their own. It also means we’ll have a bolthole that for me is a retreat from conflict and crisis, and for Rowan a haven away from Asia where he can hammer nails and plant trees – a place where we can all just breathe.
We take a few walks through the shack, which is reasonably solid despite being a bit of a mess and in need of a paint job. It has beautiful hardwood floors and some old-world charm with timber dado boards along the walls, a wood stove and a rough wooden kitchen bench. The front doors open to a big sunny deck overlooking the sea, which crashes onto a pristine beach a few hundred metres down the hill on the other side of the Great Ocean Road. Cyclists can be seen passing by as they round the bend, heading to Apollo Bay. The doors are buckled and don’t close properly, the deck has a big hole in it and the railings are bowed like boomerangs, but we see plenty of potential. I draw the line at an outdoor toilet after living for so long in Asia. If we buy the house, that will have to change.
Rowan’s mum is staying with us and we walk her down to the shack, where she perches on the coffee table and catches her breath. A lifelong non-smoker in her seventies, she’s been diagnosed with a degenerative illness, pulmonary fibrosis, and she’s struggling for air. Until recently she was a very active woman: riding horses, skiing and bushwalking, and travelling overseas. Now, a walk of a couple of hundred metres is a struggle, and her decline is a shock for her and all of us. She’s keen for us to make a commitment to being in Australia. To her, the idea of buying the shack is a statement about where we want to be eventually.
Our weeks in Wye River are idyllic. Each day we pass the shack as we head up and down the hill to the beach, its front deck bathed in sunshine, mauve agapanthus growing like weeds in the front yard. We imagine summers away from the pressure of work, just us and the kids with friends and family passing through.
Arkie and Pearl fall in love with the place, especially the open space and the birdlife. Arkie makes friends with a young kookaburra which waits each afternoon on the deck railing for scraps of raw meat. I remember the kookaburras that would fly down and take meat out of my own tiny hands on visits to my nan’s flat in outer Melbourne. I hold my breath, as my nan once did, while the kookaburra feeds on off cuts of steak with its dagger-like beak.
The day before the end of our trip, we’re on the beach when we get a call from the real estate agent. Waves are crashing on the rocks at the base of the hillside where the forest takes over, a sea of green with rooftops peeking through. The shack is ours if we want it. Rowan and I look at each other. ‘So?’
We sign the contract the next morning before we leave for the airport. I’ll be co-ordinating repairs by email.
Suitcases packed, we drive down the hill towards the sea. The kids wave as we pass the little house with the crooked deck and the cheerful colour scheme, bright blue against Australia’s endless blue sky.
‘Bye-bye shack,’ Arkie calls out the car window.
‘Bye-bye broken blue house,’ says Pearl.
‘Bye-bye kookaburra, see you soon.’
I catch Rowan’s eyes. We own a piece of bliss.
ELEVEN
February 2012
I land to a message from Jum: visas have been approved for her, David and me, and the three of us are heading straight to Burma.
The authorities have granted us the two weeks we asked for, but the visas are already running and we’ve lost a couple of days without knowing we had them. Each day we delay will be one less in the country. With no time to plan, we have to jump in and see what unfolds.
There’s another catch. This time we’ll be accompanied by a minder who we’ll have to pick up in Naypyidaw and take with us wherever we go.
We’ll be filming a documentary for Foreign Correspondent on the process of change in the lead up to a series of by-elections. Aung San Suu Kyi and a number of her party colleagues will be running, participating for the first time since they won the general election in 1990. Things are on the move.
David films me as we walk through the airport. We’re subtle because we’re still not sure if change is happening as fast as the conversation about it. A Burmese passenger notices our
camera and warns me quietly, ‘Be careful, they can be very harsh here.’ I nod in thanks. A few minutes later, one of the immigration staff chases me to the baggage carousel and requests a business card. I hand it over with a raised eyebrow, but he just says, ‘Welcome,’ and waves us on.
The swift loosening of control means that Yangon is suddenly a lot busier. David, Jum and I need to pack up and change hotels every day because accommodation is so tight. Finding a local journalist who can translate interviews is also tricky: they’re all busy writing and selling stories to the world. Interest is high.
We’re a bit hamstrung without our trusted fixer, Jimmy, who’s now working full time as a cameraman. The translator he finds for us is a tourist guide, not a journalist, and is understandably daunted by working with an international TV crew. There are still numerous political prisoners in Burma and many are journalists.
Our loose plan is to follow the political campaign while getting out and about in the countryside with the ordinary people. They remain by far the poorest in Southeast Asia and they’ve endured years of domination by the military junta.
David and I head to a small village where we spend the afternoon with a trishaw driver, Thant, his wife and their three small children. They live in a one-room bamboo hut and barely have enough money to feed themselves and pay the rent. On his trishaw Thant shows me around the area, where workers are breaking rocks by hand for a new road. David films us from the open door of the van. We cycle slowly past house after house with no electricity, sewerage or running water. People stare and smile and wave. Foreigners are a rarity.
‘There are around seven to eight hundred households here,’ Thant tells me as he rides. ‘Some people work in construction and some carry bags of cement for a living. Some ride trishaws.’
Thant and his neighbours are fairly typical Burmese. According to the World Bank, almost three-quarters of the population live outside the major cities. Only half of the country’s children finish five years of schooling, and unemployment is around 40 per cent. They know little about the changing political situation. Living is hand to mouth. The inability for them to even see the potential for change is depressing.
‘Tell me what’s changed – anything? Is anything better?’ I ask Thant’s wife.
‘I suppose it will become better. I don’t understand anything, what can I do? I am only concerned for my family’s survival.’
She stands on the crooked verandah of the little hut, holding the youngest child in her arms as he wriggles and plays with something shiny – a meat cleaver. He waves it gaily and then begins to suck on the blade, eyeing me. I reach out and gently take it away. The child bursts into tears and the others look up at me and giggle, then hide behind their mother’s skirt.
The sun is setting and it’s time we made a move. Village children are playing on the trishaw as if it’s a big toy, the rural scene bathed in the softness of dusk. David is just getting one last shot, as camera operators always are, when the mood is broken. A man walks into the shot. Later, as I view the pictures, I watch the children scurry away while the remonstrating begins in silhouette against the setting sun. It’s the village chief berating Thant for talking to us. Old habits die hard.
Previously proud and keen to show us his place, Thant shrinks in the face of the barrage. His poor wife and children cower in their hut. I don’t understand the village chief’s words, of course, but it’s clear we’ve overstepped and he isn’t happy to have us on his turf. Our translator is hiding behind the hut. I have no choice but to push him out to save poor Thant, who is being threatened with eviction.
David puts the camera down. I ask the translator to explain that we have journalist visas and we’re allowed to be here. We convince the village chief that if he walks back to our car with us, we can show him our passports. By the time we arrive, immigration department officials are already there. I roll my eyes. If this is what day one of shooting a thirty-minute documentary looks like, it’s going to be hard work.
The officials take our passports and sit around at an outdoor food stall, talking intensely and frowning. We keep a low profile near our car. Sometimes it’s best to wait and see what happens before entering an argument. One official asks me for a business card and I give him a handful. We’re then told that our passports are to be taken to the local immigration office to be copied and checked. We’re ordered not to move. Disappeared passports make me extremely nervous, but it seems best to comply. I wonder if we’ll be deported.
It’s starting to get dark by the time an official returns on a motorbike. He hands over our passports. Our visas check out. We’re free to go. We head back to Yangon, the driver navigating the bumpy rural roads as night falls like a blanket. I worry about the fallout for Thant and his family and in the car David and I talk about what we can do to make sure they don’t get punished.
The next day, David, Jum and I are up early and heading out of Yangon to follow Aung San Suu Kyi to a campaign rally. We’re caught in a convoy of National League for Democracy supporters who are getting to the rally any way they can. Buses queue end to end on the single-lane road, along with open trucks laden with people singing and chanting and waving flags. Motorbikes zip in and out, their riders wearing red and yellow bandanas and Daw Suu t-shirts.
After speaking her name in whispers for decades, the opposition leader’s supporters are now shouting it from the rooftops and wearing her face on their chests. There’s a new cottage industry in these t-shirts and I grab a couple for the kids. There are also clocks, earrings, key rings, posters, stickers, calendars and mugs bearing her face and sometimes that of her father.
‘Oh, we love Daw Suu so much! This time is our chance – very, very big chance to see her,’ a supporter tells me excitedly as he passes by.
In their colourful NLD garb, the supporters are well and truly out and proud, but our translator remains nervous. Yesterday’s incident has left him rattled and he’s paranoid about the ramifications of being seen with us at an opposition rally. His concern isn’t unfounded, as security officers are filming us and opposition supporters. I tell him half-jokingly to put a hat on. He disappears and comes back wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses. Even then he’s not keen to be seen with us. It’s pretty clear that we’re going to have to find another fixer.
The rally is happening around a makeshift stage in the middle of a field. A country music-style party theme song blasts from scratchy speakers. Some people are waiting for Aung San Suu Kyi at the stage, while others line a fence along the route her car will take. David and I talk our way to the foot of the stairs where she’ll mount the stage.
It’s a blisteringly hot, windy day. Like Thailand, Burma saw serious floods last year, and the churned-up mud has dried and turned to dust. It’s now being stirred into enormous clouds by the thousands crowded in to see the Lady, and it heralds her arrival. One of a convoy, her white 4WD crawls onto the field, barely visible in a brown cloud. The crowd rolls like a wave, security guards trying to hold it back with interlocked arms. Her car crawls on despite the closeness of the people, who are in danger of being crushed. The sunroof opens and she emerges, serene and cool amid the chaos, carrying a parasol and waving to her wild-eyed supporters as if everything is in perfect order.
David and I are almost squashed as the car comes up to the stairs. Security guards try to block me out, but I squeal like a pig that I must be with the camera and they let me through. I call out, ‘Daw Suu, Daw Suu, hello!’, and she looks at our camera. She smiles calmly, floating up the stairs as if in a trance.
From the stage she addresses the waving, hopeful people, all sweating under the beating sun. She speaks in Burmese. ‘There is a way open for us to build a country we want, in order to bring the army and the people closer. Let’s work together for the implementation of democracy. This is what I wish for.’
Although I can’t understand the speech, the crowd’s approving roar in between sentences is enough to indicate the mood. For a moment I feel trance-
like, too, floating among thousands of flag-waving, chanting Burmese in the heat and the dust of a February day, at a turning point in the history of a country.
Then, suddenly, the generator that’s powering the sound system dies. The woman everyone has come to hear waits on the stage, mute, while the crowd chants, ‘Daw Suu, Daw Suu, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi!’
She smiles, shakes her head ruefully and taps the microphone until it’s repaired. She picks up where she left off. It’s just a tiny challenge among many.
Aung San Suu Kyi departs the same way she came, through the surging crowd and the choking dust, waving and leaning down from the sunroof to clasp the hands of supporters as they clamber up the sides of the car. We’re left in the middle of an empty field, a worker picking up thousands of drained plastic water bottles and putting them in a sack. We’re black with dust.
Jum hands me tissues in the car and I clean the grime off my arms and hands before we head to an interview. ‘You might want to check in the mirror,’ she laughs. I have black nostrils and eye sockets like a panda. I rummage in my bag and pull out an old packet of baby wipes, decorated with Winnie the Pooh, to finish the job.
We hit the road to Naypyidaw up the same bumpy highway that we took last time. Jum has found us a new fixer so we wave goodbye to the reluctant translator in Yangon. We understand his fear of getting on the wrong side of the authorities, especially because we’ve heard that Thant has been harassed and threatened since we visited. We ask a friend to try to sort it out, with a few dollars in his pocket, and get word back that the problem is solved. Such is life still in Burma, where the government’s senior members claim that change is well underway.
‘Now Myanmar is genuinely changing to a new era,’ the presidential spokesman, Ko Ko Hlaing, tells me enthusiastically in an interview.
‘It’s just so hard to believe,’ I respond.