Storyteller

by Zoe Daniel

  Our best moments were when I took leave to be a full-time mum. After Arkie was born, I would visit Ba and we would sit together and drink tea, read the papers and talk, while he gurgled on the floor or slept in a basket. We enjoy each other’s company but I doubt she’s ever quite accepted that, at times, my career has dominated my family’s choices, although I think she’s come around lately after seeing some of my stories.

  I know without question that she’s the glue holding the extended family together, and I’m desperately sad and disbelieving at the idea that one day soon she will be gone.

  I’m worried about the children, too. Pearl is a resilient child with a sunny disposition and a level of pragmatism beyond the tender age of three, although she hasn’t yet learnt tact. On the phone from Bangkok she asked, ‘Granny, when are you going to die?’ In the background I gasped and she stared at me wide-eyed, fighting back tears when she realised she’d made a mistake. Ba, of course, took it in her stride. For Pearl, she’s a distant creature, seen on holidays and sometimes heard at the end of a phone line. For Arkie, it’s different. He’s highly perturbed to see her on bottled oxygen, attached to tubes and wearing a face mask. She can’t walk with him and Katsy to the park, and she’s not even up and about at home like she used to be. He shrinks from her, which makes her sad and anxious too.

  But on Mother’s Day Ba is feeling well enough for an outing, so we take her for lunch at the Studley Park Boathouse, a beautiful old building on the banks of the Yarra River. The outing is a mission with four young children and Ba, but between Marina, Rowan and me, we manage to pull it off. It’s a typical Melbourne day: wet and bitterly cold, with bursts of sparkling sunshine. We sit on the enclosed verandah, sheltered and warm, our table set with white linen and silver. Ba enjoys it in spite of the wheelchair and the oxygen bottle.

  We’re in town only fleetingly, as Rowan and I have to get back to work. While he’s tying up some loose ends with his mum, I take the kids and our friend Beth for a daytrip down to our Wye River shack. I need to see the builder, who’s about to start remodelling the bathroom so we can have an indoor loo.

  It’s another drizzly Melbourne day as we strike out along the freeway. The sky turns patchy blue and the rain comes in squalls, splattering the windscreen and then clearing again. We listen to FM radio, Arkie and Pearl bopping away in the back as we reach Lorne. The sea is rough and grey, crashing on the empty beach. There are few tourists at this time of year. Past Lorne we hug the coast around the sheer cliffs and tight bends that make the Great Ocean Road so special. A series of bays nestle in the corners of the windswept coastline. Each little beach is a sweet surprise.

  As we round the curve to our shack, the weather closes in hard. The sky is black and the rain pelts down. The wipers are working double time, just enough to clear the windscreen so that I can see the turn-off and head up the hill to the old, broken blue house. I pull into the muddy driveway and Beth and I look at each other. ‘Great timing!’ we laugh. The kids wrinkle their noses, squinting into the rain. ‘Are we getting out in that?’ Arkie asks incredulously.

  I run to the shed, find a key hidden under the butt of an old candle and open the back door, which needs a hard hip and shoulder before it swings free. This is the first time I’ve been here since we settled on the property and it’s been emptied and swept out, a blank canvas waiting for our colour.

  Wandering around the lounge room, I remember our visit last summer with Ba. She sat on the edge of the coffee table, biting her lip anxiously as we debated the purchase, hoping we’d commit.

  We will come home eventually, but now I know we’ll be too late.

  Arkie and Pearl are running around the empty house, squealing and yelling and being generally over the top, when the builder arrives. We talk about the bathroom and various repairs, and then he extricates the kids from one of the bedrooms when the doorknob falls off. Beth laughs at the job ahead of us as she peers into the outdoor loo. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to keep that Beatles wallpaper?’ she asks. I grin.

  The rain thwacks against the windows while the wind whistles through the eaves. It’s so drizzly that I can’t see the sea, but I know it’s there. Even in the worst weather, the area is beautiful. I take one last look around.

  We drive the kids to the pub and eat fresh fish ’n’ chips, looking out at the blustery beach and its litter of seaweed and driftwood. Arkie and Pearl play a game of pinball at what will become our local watering hole. It’s wet and cold but I wish we were heading back up to the shack to light the wood stove and watch the football with a glass of Australian red. Instead, we get back in the car and head to Melbourne.

  That night Ba sits in her favourite lounge-room chair and hands out gifts. She gives me a jade necklace and opal earrings, bought for her by Rowan’s dad. I hold back tears.

  The next time we go to Australia, she’ll be gone.

  THIRTEEN

  It’s April and we’ve landed in Yangon a few days before the historic by-elections. The National League for Democracy headquarters is bedlam.

  The decrepit office has become a hub for journalists who are registering to be kept informed about press conferences and NLD events. Photographers and reporters mill around waiting to sign a sheet just inside the building, which is cooled only by rusty ceiling fans and the hot breeze through the garage-style front door. Elderly opposition stalwarts sit fanning themselves at higgledy-piggledy tables, while grey-haired Burmese sell mugs and posters of Aung San Suu Kyi to tourists who now visit as part of regular city tours.

  We’re surrounded by smiling NLD volunteers when we move up to sign the registration sheet. They’ve seen our last story on Burma and they thank us for showing our viewers their country. It’s a great novelty for them to see its beauty displayed on TV, and pirated DVDs have been passed around.

  I head upstairs to see the opposition office coordinator, U Win Htein, who has only recently been released after fourteen years in prison for political activity. The lights flash on and off while we’re talking, as the power ebbs and flows through the ancient wiring. Water drips from a single air-conditioning unit that wheezes with the power surges. Its lukewarm breeze ruffles the sun-scorched mountains of paper stacked high across a window ledge along one side of the room.

  ‘How is Evan Williams?’ Win Htein asks me as we sit and chat. Evan is a former ABC correspondent of great skill and reputation, who worked with David for years out of Bangkok. He now lives in London.

  ‘I don’t know Evan,’ I reply, ‘but I hear he is well.’

  ‘Ah,’ Win Htein replies with a twinkle in his eye, ‘it was helping him and the ABC that got me arrested. I spent fourteen years in jail after that.’

  I stutter. ‘Well, sorry about that!’ I respond artlessly.

  He roars a big belly laugh. ‘If you see Evan, tell him to come and see me.’

  ‘Will do,’ I reply, feeling sheepish.

  U Win Htein is one of many NLD staff and supporters who have spent years in jail for their political beliefs and of course it wasn’t only his involvement with the ABC that got him arrested. He’d already been jailed before and was Daw Suu’s critical lieutenant.

  As Evan Williams tells me much later: ‘Shortly after Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from her first six years of house arrest there was some degree of freedom being enjoyed by Daw Suu and the NLD officers. U Win Htein was her chief of staff and senior advisor. We filmed with him and it became obvious he was being followed. We discussed the dangers and he was keen to participate. There had been no re-arrests up to that point. Many thought it was a new space to operate but it ended up as a false dawn. About six months later and after we went on air, the military launched a widespread crackdown on the NLD, arresting and sentencing quite a few NLD officials, among them U Win Htein. At the time no one thought they would again re-arrest any NLD people – in the end they rounded up many key activists and again placed Suu Kyi under house arrest but this was some months later. The NLD and Daw Suu have always said they
all knew the risks at that time but none of this removes my feeling of guilt and responsibility for the way our story was used against him.’

  It’s likely Win Htein was arrested because of his position with the NLD and his former ties to the military, but his interactions with the media didn’t help. He was sentenced to two periods of seven years jail back to back for providing what the regime claimed was false information to the foreign press and commenting publicly on farmers’ rights.

  I hope this new Burmese glasnost doesn’t end the same way and is a move towards genuine democracy.

  For years the NLD has been more pro-democracy pressure group than political party, and most of its key leaders have been kept out of the fray. A lot is about to change and that won’t be easy for the organisation, which is set in its ways and made up mostly of elderly activists.

  But there is some new blood. We meet Phyu Phyu Thin, a young woman who I first made contact with when we visited Aung San Suu Kyi in secret last year. She’s the driving force behind a clinic we also visited covertly, which provides anti-retroviral drugs to HIV-positive patients and which has been repeatedly shut down by the government.

  She became a member of the opposition after she was jailed for running the clinic. ‘I was arrested and detained at Insein Prison for four months,’ she tells me in Burmese. ‘After I was released I became a full-time party participant, unlike part time as before. Then I started working full time for the NLD.’

  Phyu Phyu Thin has a strong sense of duty that has led her to run for a parliamentary seat. ‘The main thing is that parliament members have two main duties: to serve the people in their constituency and to serve the country.’

  She supports Aung San Suu Kyi’s more recent strategy of bringing change through negotiation, and of engaging with those who were previously meting out the punishment. It’s controversial: some argue that the opposition leader is going soft on those responsible for the brutal treatment of the Burmese people.

  ‘All the demands we are making are for the betterment of the people in the country,’ Phyu Phyu Thin says. ‘We will try to do this by co-operating with all the members who are already in the parliament.’

  Aung San Suu Kyi is in her sixties and her health has wavered in the lead up to the by-elections. At a press conference in her garden, where journalists sit under a green shadecloth on the lawn, she laughingly responds to concerns, telling the gathered media not to ask tough questions if they think she might faint. She then acknowledges the importance of the young in bringing about change. ‘We have been energised and encouraged greatly by the response of our people, by their eagerness and their preparedness to take part in the political process of their country. Everywhere we go, we find that not just older people, but even small children are involved in the political process and are very enthusiastic about what is going on.’

  One young candidate is the hip-hop artist Zayar Thaw, who’d just been released from prison when we met him last year. ‘Current issues of this country are marked as our cause. It’s our cause, that’s all,’ he sang to us then. Now he’s given up music for the sake of his other dream – democracy.

  He speaks to me at his parents’ flat in Yangon, where huge mounted election posters of Suu Kyi are propped against the wall. ‘Right now, Burma is changing. We admit it. But it hasn’t reached our goal yet.’ There is unquestionable progress however: a year after being released from prison, he’s about to enter the parliament.

  And while he’s doing that, the other young rappers and hip-hoppers of Burma are making the most of loosening control and censorship. When we hit the streets on the day before the by-elections, we encounter crowds of thousands, singing and dancing to pro-democracy music. Such open political expression is jaw-dropping. ‘Wake up, Myanmar, wake up,’ the rap artist Nay Zaw sings in Burmese from the back of a campaign truck, using the country’s official name. The music reverberates through the city streets and the people jump and sing and shout with joy at the potential of everything that might lie ahead. Children sit on their parents’ shoulders and bop along to the deafening beat.

  We drive out of Yangon to Aung San Suu Kyi’s seat of Kawhmu, across the river and through rice paddies where people are working in the wake of early rains. We pass opposition offices as we eat up the miles, big posters of Daw Suu everywhere. Almost everyone we speak to plans to vote for her. Her opposing candidate, an articulate doctor who has worked in the area for many years, speaks in a tiny house to a group of fewer than twenty women. It’s a far cry from the opposition leader’s massive rallies.

  As it gets dark after the meeting, we make our way back to the car, past house after wooden house, kids crying, pots clanging as people get dinner ready. They’re watching old TVs that flicker with images of the news ahead of the elections.

  It was never going to be a perfect process. There are allegations that candidates have been intimidated, and on election day a number of people say they’re not on voting rolls even though they registered. But overall, the process goes as smoothly as could be expected. We attend a couple of booths to watch the voting and stop at a small one late in the day to see the ballots being counted. The seat goes to the opposition. Very early on, it’s clear that the NLD will win most if not all of the seats contested.

  We file our material as we go, connecting to Sydney via the BGAN while we zigzag around Yangon, occasionally stopping to do a live cross into one program or another. We’ve become accustomed to pulling over, setting the BGAN up on the roof of the van and going live in front of gleaming golden temples or a slum showing the grittiness of Burmese life.

  That gritty life goes on around us as we work, out of place with our high-tech equipment. At times I’m speaking live to Australia in the middle of a busy market with chickens around my feet or in the throng outside a pagoda as monks weave past our camera. David is always surrounded by excited, jumping children who are trying to see through his lens. Jum and our fixer prevent people from walking through our shot or making funny faces behind me.

  It can be fraught. To hear the presenter’s questions, we establish a separate phone connection and I plug in an earpiece, but Burmese mobiles are far from stable. A cross to Lateline on a tight deadline almost falls over when the connection drops out. I have a complete, uncharacteristic meltdown trying to get them back. When we re-connect with seconds to spare, the presenter Emma Alberici, an old friend, is sympathetic. ‘Oh Zoe, you poor thing!’ I realise that although the phone dropped out, the satellite link didn’t. They’ve all been in the studio watching me do my nut and I shake my head ruefully, embarrassed.

  The sun is just dropping away and the locals are shopping at the market behind me, buying their fruit and veg now that the sting has gone out of the heat. Children play in the dirt, watching the motley collection of buses and cars pass by as people head home from work. Our van sits with hazard lights on and doors wide open, cables trailing to where I stand with David. The audience never has any idea of what’s gone on to bring them those three or four minutes of live TV.

  We head to NLD headquarters, where a crowd has gathered to watch the results flash up on a screen over the front door. Each time the numbers appear, a victorious cheer erupts. A sea of people with red flags grows around the front of the small office and spills along the road. People wave from buses and toot their car horns as traffic squeezes through a narrow gap. The office is now at the centre of a massive traffic jam, but everyone is in good spirits.

  Jum and I hold a ladder for David to film above heads. After a while we cross the road and scramble up a small hill to get a wide shot of the office and the crowd. There’s barely enough space to stand, let alone place the ladder, but the people make a hole for us and I climb up to do a piece to camera, balancing precariously. Two local men hold the base so I don’t topple down the hill.

  It’s hard not to get caught up in the sense of history in the making. Although the numbers are still unclear, we know that Aung San Suu Kyi will have a seat and so will many of her col
leagues. Even if they win every seat on offer, they’ll have only 10 per cent of a parliament with 25 per cent military members, but it’s a start.

  Aung San Suu Kyi doesn’t appear that night. Apparently exhausted and awaiting details of how many seats her party has won, she’s said to be resting at home.

  We return the next morning. Again, it’s awfully hot. Out the front of the NLD office, reporters are lolling around with a few supporters under spindly trees. A large generator belches diesel fumes over everyone. There’s a rumour that Aung San Suu Kyi won’t appear publicly today either, and a few reporters leave. I’m not quite so sure – winning forty-three out of forty-four seats is a huge victory. My feeling is that the leader will want to come out and talk to the public, so we stay.

  The media pack grows. Camera operators start staking out positions to get the all-important shot. Ladders are lined up on each side of the NLD gates to the street. Camera operators and photographers climb up at the back; journalists stand in front. It’s extremely hot and uncomfortable, but no one can move for fear of losing their spot. In fact, if one person moves, others fall over like dominoes. Aung San Suu Kyi and her cohort will have to walk through a space about half a metre wide and ten metres long between the street and the front door. Nevertheless, there’s a sense of order among the waiting journalists. Those with the best positions arrived early.

  The jostling and negotiating and sweating have been going on for hours in the boiling sun when NLD officials come out to deal with us. It appears that Aung San Suu Kyi will be coming, as the tone suddenly gets much more aggressive. Security guards appear and start shoving and whacking the waiting media backwards. There’s a strong backlash against this because we have nowhere to go. The journalists in the front row, myself among them, are trapped by the rows of ladders behind us.