The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  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.1

  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.2

  In these ways she remained in touch with her country—but in the meantime she was a hard-pressed north Oxford housewife. She might continue to wear aingyi, the flimsy Burmese cotton blouse with detachable buttons and htamein, the ankle-length woman’s longyi, she might continue to be a vivid, exotic splash among the grey and beige and drizzle of England—but where was she headed, as she wobbled back from the supermarket on her bicycle, laden with shopping?

  She was a mother with two school-age sons and a heroically impractical husband, his head high in the Bhutanese clouds, incapable of mending a puncture or changing a fuse—but she was also Aung San Suu Kyi, child of the father of a country under the boot of a military regime whose viciousness was only matched by its stupidity.

  One gets a sense, observing the choices Suu made in the late seventies and early eighties, of a woman struggling to understand her destiny, and coming up with a series of unsatisfactory answers. She applied for a second BA degree at Oxford but was rejected. She was commissioned to write slim travel books for children: Let’s Visit Burma, Let’s Visit Nepal, Let’s Visit Bhutan. She wrote an equally slim study of her father, Aung San, published by the University of Queensland.

  But these must have seemed timid, diffident steps in the direction she wanted to go, because now the restlessness that had taken her to New York after graduating from Oxford attacked her again: In 1985 she won a fellowship in Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, threw herself into studying Japanese, then went with her younger son, Kim, to Japan. She immersed herself in the Burma archives there, to try to understand better the relationship between her father and Japan’s militaristic wartime regime, which trained him to be a soldier and took him back to Burma to participate in their eviction of the British.

  She then spent several months with the family in Shimla, the north Indian hill station that had been the summer seat of the colonial administration during the British Raj, where she and Michael were Fellows at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. The result: much the most pregnant and interesting things she had written, two long papers comparing intellectual life in India and in Burma under colonialism, which tried to tease out why India, intellectually speaking at least, had flourished under the foreigner’s yoke, while her own country had only languished.

  Now, aged forty-two, she had finally begun to find her way home through the medium of scholarship. It was the natural approach for one who had already spent so many years immersed in the academic atmosphere of Oxford, married to a man with a passion for study. Like Michael with Bhutan she would devote herself to making sense of her country: For her own sake, for the outside world, and also for the generations of young Burmese intellectuals puzzled and frustrated by their nation’s failure to fulfill its potential. That seemed to be the contribution she could make, while remaining true and useful to her husband and children. As a next step she applied to London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London to take an
MPhil in modern Burmese literature, and was readily accepted.3 She had already drafted one chapter. Meetings with her supervisor would take her away from home, but not far and not for long: London was little more than an hour away by train.

  Meanwhile, like Michael with his center for Tibetan studies, she could dream her dreams. Hers were to launch a chain of public libraries across Burma, that institution taken for granted in England but absent from Burma except in Rangoon and Mandalay, and to set up a scheme to enable bright young Burmese to study abroad. These were the ideas she could brood on while doing the washing-up or sewing name tags on to her sons’ school shirts. Even if brought to fruition they would only be a pale shadow of what her father had achieved. But what more could a woman in her situation hope to do?

  Michael and Suu were about to turn in for the night—there was school in the morning, they would need to be up early—when the telephone rang.4 As a consequence of that call, all the plans and expectations of their lives were turned upside down. On the line from Rangoon was an old Anglo-Burmese friend known to everyone in Suu’s family as Uncle Leo. He rang with terrible news: Suu’s mother had suffered a major stroke and had been taken to Rangoon General Hospital in a critical condition.

  Suu went upstairs and packed a suitcase. Years later Michael Aris wrote of that evening, “I had a premonition that our lives would change for ever.”

  *

  The next morning Suu did what she had done so often before, alone or with Michael or the children, in the family’s life of frequent, far-flung journeys. She took the bus from north Oxford down to the town center, walked briskly to the station, then took the train down to London and another one on to Heathrow: a journey through the sedate and comfortable scenery of the city that had become her home and the gentle countryside of the Thames Valley, waking now from its winter sleep, with yellow forsythia bursting into life here and there in the gardens. In places like Oxford, England has the gift of appearing immune to change, as if it has always been like this: so quietly sure of its identity and its institutions that it is set for eternity. Of course it’s an illusion—nowhere escapes the Buddhist law of impermanence—but it’s a persuasive one. The landscape that had been her home for half her life now was not often sunny, not often blazing with joy, but it was solid and safe and decent. And it was the home of humanist values that had affected her profoundly. As she traveled down those familiar railway tracks with her freight of anxiety, there was no way she could know that this was the last sight she would have of semi-detached villas, privet hedges, red pillar boxes, the meandering Thames and the chalk Chiltern Hills for another twenty years and more; that it might be the last time she would ever see such sights in her life.

  Back in 1988 there were no direct flights from London to Rangoon; there are still none today. The normal procedure, then as now, is to fly to Bangkok, capital of a nation the Burmans had once, long ago, vanquished in war but whose liberalized, free-market economy now dwarfed its neighbor’s, and wait to take another short flight from there.

  The country she was going to had become one of the most peculiar in Asia, if not the world: as reclusive and little-known as Albania or North Korea, those hermits of the Cold War. “To the west Burma is still a virtual unknown,” Lonely Planet wrote in the 1988 edition of their backpackers’ guide to the country, “a slightly exotic eastern country that has been on some sort of total seclusion plus mad socialism binge since WWII . . .”

  The weirdness, the guide advises, begins at the airport, where an ingenious solution had been devised for the problem of how to equip oneself with the local currency, kyats, pronounced “chats,” at the good black market rate (about 35 kyats to the dollar) instead of the terrible official rate (6.6 kyats) without breaking the law. “From Bangkok it goes like this,” the book advised. “At the duty-free counter in Bangkok airport buy a carton of 555 cigarettes and a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label whisky. Total cost $15 . . . the first words you are going to hear from a non-government Burmese are, ‘Want to sell your whisky and cigarettes?’ You will hear this actually inside the airport terminal . . . You will very soon know what the going price is and will have disposed of both—all seemingly quite legal.”

  But in one respect the 1988 edition of the guide was already out of date. “In paper currency, K1, K5, K10, K25 and K75 bills are common . . .” the guide advised. But on September 5, 1987, the secretary of Burma’s State Council, Sein Lwin, signed an order demonetizing all the higher value notes without warning or compensation. In the first half of the 1980s, Burma’s command economy had plunged into a downward spiral, the national debt doubling and the value of exports halving. By abolishing the high value notes, the regime hoped to pull the rug from under the black marketeers whose undercutting of official prices had, they claimed, sabotaged the economy. But like many other measures taken by the incompetents at the state’s controls, the effects were quite different from what they had anticipated, and far more devastating. Ordinary Burmese had a deep and well-founded mistrust of banks and preferred to keep their savings under their mattresses, in cash. So the demonetization further pauperized a population that was already one of the poorest in Asia, wiping out 80 percent of the cash in circulation at a stroke, rendering the cash savings of millions worthless overnight.

  The demonetization announcement came as Rangoon’s students were preparing to pay their annual university fees: Overnight most of their cash became worthless. Their reaction was instantaneous: In a reflex of rage, hundreds of students from the elite Rangoon Institute of Technology poured out of their campus onto the streets, smashing traffic lights and burning government vehicles. Political trouble in Burma always began with the students. The next day, to prevent the unrest spreading, the government ordered schools and colleges all over the country to close, laying on buses to send up-country students back to their homes. The protests died out as rapidly as they had started.

  But that was not the end of the trouble. As many other socialist command economies were to learn over the next two years, unrest like that in Rangoon was more than a little local difficulty, to be crushed by a few cans of tear gas and some baton charges. All over the world, centrally planned economies on the Soviet model were suddenly finding it impossible to make ends meet. Within three years of those Rangoon students taking to the streets on September 5, 1987, the political map of the world would be entirely redrawn. And it was with Burma of all places—poor, obscure, out-of-the-way Burma, whose hermit regime had succeeded in insulating their country from the effects of the last geopolitical earthquake to hit the region, the Vietnam War—that it began.

  Burma’s tragedy is that, although it was the first, it is now the last: While corrupt and tyrannical regimes across the world collapsed, Burma’s clung on. It is still clinging on today.

  *

  After suffering her stroke, Suu’s mother, Daw Khin Kyi, had been taken to Rangoon General Hospital, the great red-brick Victorian institution where she had worked during the war as a nurse and where she first met her future husband. Suu found the staff desperately short of everything they needed to do their work. The stroke had left her mother partially paralyzed; her condition was stable but the doctors were discouraging about the possibilities of recovery. Meanwhile Suu and her relatives would be required to provide everything she needed, medicines included. “In Burma health care is ostensibly provided free of charge,” she later wrote. “But . . . now [state hospitals] provide merely services while patients have to provide almost everything else: medicines, cotton wool, surgical spirit, bandages and even equipment necessary for surgery.”5 Depleted by decades of economic decline and mismanagement, and systematically starved of funds, the Burmese health system depended on family members to keep their patients alive. Suu prepared for an indefinite period of camping out in her mother’s hospital room.

  Outside on the city streets, the mood was dark and growing darker.6 Prices of essentials were soaring, and the anger of ordinary Burmese was rising. The protests in September had been
quickly extinguished, but in March a town-versus-gown brawl in a tea shop near Rangoon University had sparked more unrest, which the army stifled by opening fire, killing a twenty-three-year-old Rangoon student called Maung Phone Maw—the first young martyr of 1988.

  These were the petty beginnings of the greatest uprising in Burma’s modern history, one that still resonates today. Emotions were further inflamed when it emerged in April that the regime had sought and obtained from the UN the humiliating status of “least-developed nation,” a fact they had been at pains to keep from the public—because, after all, a mere generation ago independent Burma had been expected to become the richest nation in Southeast Asia.7 Protests spread rapidly across the city and around the country. The regime replied with extreme violence: Hundreds of students died, shot dead on the street by troops; dozens were crammed into a van and taken to jail and forty of them suffocated to death on the way. Many of the dead were hauled away and cremated en masse to prevent a clear picture of the fatalities emerging. To stifle the protests the junta again closed the nation’s colleges.

  By the time Suu arrived in the capital and installed herself in her mother’s hospital room, Burma was in a state of suspended animation, quiet on the surface but with bitterness and fury festering underneath. Rumors swirled, as they always swirl there. The summer heated to boiling point, the air was thick with dust, the whole land desperate for rain. In April, New Year was celebrated as usual with the annual bacchanalia of the water festival, called Thingyan, when for several days the whole population sheds its inhibitions and arms itself with buckets and hoses to spray and splash everybody else. But when it ended, the hot and exhausting wait for rain—the wait for change—resumed.