The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  The English Methodist High School was, in other words, living on borrowed time. Though founded only after the return of the British at the end of the war, it was a throwback to the days of Empire—days that were to last only until 1948. And when the English travel writer Norman Lewis visited Rangoon in 1950, when Suu was five, the signs of decline and fall were already hard to miss.

  *

  Like most cities of the Indian empire on which the Raj left a strong mark, Rangoon is divided into three distinct parts. Out of sight to the north, behind well-guarded walls and fences, is the Cantonment, the army base. Spreading across the hills further south, intersected by winding lanes and boulevards and luxuriantly planted with parks and gardens, are the leafy residential areas reserved for the administrators and the native middle class and their servants. It is these areas, damaged but by no means destroyed during the decades since independence, and with the Shwedagon’s dazzling stupa visible from all directions, that give modern Rangoon its delightfully tropical character, making it for Western visitors one of the most charming cities of modern Asia.

  But it was the commercial heart of the city down by the river that monopolized Norman Lewis’s attention, both because its character was so strikingly at odds with the civilization in which it was set, and because it had so patently seen better days.

  This tightly planned section of the city was “imperial and rectilinear,” he wrote in his vivid account of his journey through Burma, Golden Earth, “built by a people who refused to compromise with the East.” It “has wide, straight, shadeless streets, with much solid bank-architecture of vaguely Grecian inspiration . . . There is much façade and presence, little pretence at comfort, and no surrender to climate. This was the Victorian colonizer’s response to the unsubstantial glories of Mandalay.”18

  But the Victorian glory days were also gone, Lewis found. “These massive columns now rise with shabby dignity from the tangle of scavenging dogs and sprawling, ragged bodies at their base.” The main streets

  have acquired a squalid incrustation of stalls and barracks, and through these European arteries now courses pure oriental blood. Down by the port it is an Indian settlement. Over to the west the Chinese have moved in with their outdoor theatres and joss houses . . . Little has been done by the new authority to check the encroaching squalor. Side lanes are piled with stinking refuse which mounts up quicker than the dogs and crows can dispose of it . . . Half-starved Indians lie dying in the sunshine. Occasionally insurgents cut off the town’s water supply . . . Wherever there is a vacant space the authorities have allowed refugees to put up pestiferous shacks . . .

  Amidst this fetor the Burmese masses live their festal and contemplative existences . . . They emerge into the sunshine immaculate and serene . . .19

  For the privileged Burmese students of the Methodist High School, life did not however conform to the “festal and contemplative” cliché of folklore; their school was disciplined yet privileged and comfortable in a way that would have been perfectly recognizable in Putney or Georgetown. “The school was on Signal Pagoda Road in the middle of town, north of the pagoda,” said Tin Tin.20

  Ordinary people in Rangoon went around by bicycle rickshaw, but we were taken to school by private car—ours was a Morris Oxford. People had all sorts of imported cars.

  It was a very expensive private school with a tennis court and all the best modern amenities, run by American Methodist missionaries. At that time most of the elite could speak English: Our parents’ generation had grown up under British rule so their English was very good, and because we went to this private English school our English was much better than the students elsewhere. At school there was a rule that except in Burmese class we had to speak in English. Even in the playground and the canteen, the prefects would be monitoring us and they would pull us up if they caught us speaking Burmese.

  On Wednesday we had to go to the church which was in the school grounds. But there were a lot of Muslims [Tin Tin’s family is Muslim] and Hindus in the school, and although we had to attend the church, nobody tried to convert us.

  And because in those days Rangoon possessed no international school, pupils grew up with an easy familiarity with other races and tongues: Hindi, French and German were among the languages spoken by the pupils, as well as Burmese and English.

  Having shed her ambition to be a general, Suu next decided she wanted to be a writer. This was again following in her father’s (intended) footsteps: He dreamed aloud, towards the end of his short, frenetic life, of getting out of politics and taking up writing full time. That was not as escapist an urge as it may sound: “. . . in Burma,” Suu pointed out, “politics has always been linked to literature and literary men have often been involved with politics, especially the politics of independence.”21

  The urge to write was “the first serious ambition I had,” she said, and it went in tandem with a growing passion for literature. She graduated rapidly from Bugs Bunny to Sherlock Holmes, and from Holmes to Maigret and George Smiley. She remains a devotee of crime fiction, including P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, but by her early teens she was also gorging on the English classics: Jane Austen and George Eliot and Kipling, whose Kim provided her second son’s name and whose great poem of moral exhortation “If” was a source of strength in her first years of detention. “When I was about twelve or thirteen I started reading the classics,” she said. “By the time I was fourteen I was a real bookworm. For example, if I went shopping with my mother I would bring a book along . . . The moment the car stopped anywhere I would open my book and start reading, even if it was at a traffic light. Then I would have to shut it, and I couldn’t wait for the next stop.”22

  She was open to whatever the world had to offer that might touch her mind or move her heart—but for her generation in Burma that was the natural state of affairs. Only now, looking back after a half century of isolation, the deliberate rejection by the Burmese regime of the rest of the world and all its works, its determination to keep its people as ignorant as possible, does it seem an aberration or a miracle.

  “Before the coup Burma was the one country in Southeast Asia with a really good economy,” said Tin Tin’s sister Khin Myint. “People came to Burma from all over Southeast Asia to do shopping. Rangoon was the jewel of Southeast Asia: You could buy anything there.”23 And the culture of the West flowed in without impediment: From the English classics, which had for generations been the foundation of an upper-class Indian education, to the raucous new music born in the USA. “At the weekend we had jam sessions,” remembered Tin Tin, “with dancing, very modern, rock ’n’ roll, sometimes played live.”24

  Tin Tin and Khin Myint, sisters who went to the same elite school in Rangoon as Suu and Ma Thanegi.

  Did Suu dance too? There seems little doubt that she did. As Ma Thanegi recorded in her diary, Suu asked her to find music cassettes to while away the hours in the car, and sang along loudly to hits of the late-fifties and very early sixties which she remembered from her early teens.

  When she suddenly emerged into Burma’s public life in 1988, Suu spoke Burmese as her co-nationals did, but she was not Burmese as they were. That was because, while the defining experience of Burma for the past fifty years has been political and cultural isolation, the defining fact of Suu’s life has been the opposite: continuous exposure to the world outside Burma in all its variety. Her father had learned to speak English fluently, had traveled to China and Japan, trained as a soldier in Japan, learned Japanese, then later traveled to London via India to parlay with the colonial oppressor-turned-liberator. His daughter had had the good fortune to grow up in Rangoon during the only years of its postwar history when it was an international town. Then she went abroad, and the exposure continued, and never stopped.

  *

  Burma, however, was about to turn in the opposite direction: inwards. The diversity and openness of Rangoon as they knew it would prove to be very fragile commodities.

  Their country had suffered m
ore in the Second World War than anywhere else in Asia. It had been deliberately smashed to pieces twice over, first by the British, fleeing from the Japanese, then by the Japanese, as they died in huge numbers opposing the British return. While the Burmese huddled in the ruins of their towns and villages and looked on in shock, the two warring empires blasted the country’s ports, bridges, power stations, factories, mines, oil wells and government offices, and its cities, towns and villages to pieces. When it was all over there was little left of the calm, self-sufficient, increasingly prosperous colony of the prewar years. Then Aung San, the only man who might have succeeded in pulling it all together, was murdered; and then the end for which he had worked so strenuously, independence, was handed to his successor, U Nu, on a plate by the bankrupt Attlee government, divesting itself of its costly foreign commitments—or “scuttling” as the Tory opposition preferred to put it—as fast as they could manage.

  Rarely has there been a truer case of being cursed by what you wish for. “The Burmese,” writes Michael Charney, “had achieved independence without a revolution, which prevented the emergence of internal solidarity or the squeezing out of rival groups and ideologies.”25 Burma was not merely prostrate economically and industrially, it was also bitterly divided. While he lived, Aung San had failed to win over the Karen, the large ethnic group concentrated around the Thai border and in the Irrawaddy Delta, to the cause of national unification: His Burman-dominated BIA, while still allied with the Japanese, had been accused of numerous anti-Karen atrocities, and the Karen held out for their own homeland, “Kawthoolei,” which literally means “Land Without Evil.”

  Aung San’s Panglong Agreement of 1946 had won round other important “races” of Burma, including the Shan, the Chin and the Kachin to the national project. But after the war a more formidable enemy to national unity presented itself in the form of the Burmese communists. They split into two factions, the “White Flag” faction, the BCP, led by Aung San’s brother-in-law Than Tun, and the “Red Flag”—but both committed to overthrowing the democratic government in Rangoon. And where communist insurgency was not a problem, dacoits (bandits) and other armed and disaffected groups tore at the country’s integrity.

  Norman Lewis experienced all this at first hand. “The last occasion when Burmese affairs had been strongly featured in the British press,” he wrote, “had been in 1948, when the Karen insurgents had taken Mandalay and seemed to be about to overthrow the Burmese government. Since then, interest had died down . . . In July 1949, the Prime Minister had announced that peace was attainable within one year. Having heard no more I assumed that it had been attained.”26

  Lewis envisaged a leisurely tour of the whole country, preferably arriving in the northwest from Manipur in India and working his way down. His delusions did not last long. They “were stripped away . . . within thirty-six hours of my arrival. On the first morning I bought a newspaper and noted with slight surprise that a ferryboat crossing the river to a suburb of Rangoon had been held up by pirates and three members of the crew killed.”27 In a village twenty miles away, “the whole population had been carried off by insurgents. Serious fighting seemed to be going on, too, in various parts of the country . . . there were a few extremely vague reports about the government troops capturing towns . . .” The most perilous part of his severely foreshortened journey was when he insisted, against all advice, on traveling from Mandalay to Rangoon, Burma’s two principal cities, by train.

  The Burmese government’s problems in combating communists and other insurgents were aggravated by the absence of Aung San. His successor, U Nu, was enormously popular with ordinary Burmese on account of his sweet face, his charming temperament and his Buddhist piety. But he had none of Aung San’s steel, and only a fraction of his political savvy. The party he had inherited from Aung San, the AFPFL, was less a coherent party, more a ragbag of rivals from different parts of the political spectrum, each with his entourage. And as the communist and ethnic insurgencies continued to rage and the country struggled to recoup the prosperity it had enjoyed before the war, the AFPFL began to come apart.

  Confronted by a bitterly divided party after the general election of 1958, U Nu found himself obliged to invite the army to take over temporarily to restore order in the country. General Ne Win duly became temporary prime minister and the army went to work cleaning up the squalor Lewis had observed in the streets of Rangoon, which had got much worse over the years, and enforcing a degree of tranquility in the rest of the country. In 1960, true to his remit, Ne Win politely handed power back to U Nu, who, popular as ever despite his failings, won another large mandate in that year’s election.

  General Ne Win, known as “the Old Man” or “Number One.”

  But U Nu’s new government was never to complete its term. Ne Win had enjoyed his taste of power, and now he wanted some more. Heavily influenced by the chauvinistic, anti-Western Japanese during his years of training there with Aung San, bitterly prejudiced against Burma’s prosperous Indian community after an early business failure, and with a strong puritanical streak which sat oddly with his taste for the pleasures of the flesh, he saw much that he wanted to do with his country. And after returning to his barracks in 1960, he began plotting to take power, not at U Nu’s invitation but on his own initiative, and permanently.

  It was a move that required careful preparation: He wanted the takeover to be peaceful, so potential rivals and enemies of army rule needed to be dealt with well in advance. One of these was Aung San’s widow. Aung San had always opposed the idea of army rule, which is why he resigned his commission before entering politics. His widow was close to the prime minister, who had not only found her a new home and turned the previous one into a museum but had also set her on a high-profile career in public service.

  The appointment of Daw Khin Kyi as ambassador to Delhi in 1960, the first time a woman had been made a Burmese ambassador, would normally have been described as a great honor for the woman who was now chairman of the Social Planning Commission. So it was—but it was also an excellent way of removing a person of enormous symbolic importance from the scene; a figure who, even if she remained politically taciturn, could easily become a focus for enemies of army rule. In the old days, the first and crucial step for a newly crowned Burmese king was to dispose of potential pretenders. These days they did not roll them up in scarlet carpets and have them trampled by elephants; instead they sent them far away, on honorable state business.

  Thus, in 1960 Aung San Suu Kyi and her mother boarded a plane for Delhi. Suu’s years of exile were about to begin.

  2

  THE GANG OF FIVE

  THERE is a certain irony in the fact that the house where Daw Khin Kyi and her daughter set up home in Delhi is today the headquarters of the Indian National Congress party—and as such is plastered with smiling images of the woman who, thanks to her close family connection to the man who negotiated the nation’s independence, has for years been the most powerful person in India: Sonia Gandhi.

  Even in 1960 that elegant bungalow at 24 Akbar Road, in the gracious, leafy heart of Lutyens’s Delhi, was in the Nehru family’s gift. Jawaharlal Nehru had seen in Suu’s father Aung San a comrade and a fellow spirit; when they met in Delhi as Aung San was on his way for crucial negotiations on independence in London, he gave him sound advice and a new set of clothes. When his widow arrived nearly fifteen years later with her daughter to take up her appointment as Burma’s ambassador—her son, Suu’s surviving brother, Aung San Oo, was by now at boarding school in England and only visited in the holidays—he made sure she was set up in style. The bungalow was temporarily renamed Burma House.

  India and Burma were about to move in different directions, the army taking Burma down its lonely path to a peculiar form of single-party socialism while India remained committed to multiparty democracy and was still firmly in the grip of the party that had struggled for and won independence. But in 1960 the similarities between Rangoon and Delhi would have been far
more noticeable than the differences.

  Flying in from Rangoon, Suu would have noted the same fiery weather, and similar brilliant flowering trees lining the streets; the same broad boulevards, built by the former colonial power and ideal for military maneuvers if required, and a huge military cantonment within easy reach of the city center, just like Rangoon’s.

  Even the ethnic composition of the capital would not have been unfamiliar, for a majority of Rangoon’s population was of Indian descent until Ne Win began compulsory repatriation. A dozen years after both countries had gained independence, traveling from Rangoon to Delhi was like moving from the provinces to the center. English was the lingua franca of the elite, a language Suu was already quite at home with, thanks to the English Methodist High School; the privileges of the political and diplomatic caste she belonged to were quite as much taken for granted as the poverty of the masses; and in both cities modern Western culture seeped in, filtered but not entirely blocked by distance and Asian morality.

  Yet Delhi was a center as emphatically as Rangoon was a province, and Suu’s four years in the city gave her a perspective on the land of her birth; her discovery of Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and the other giants of India’s struggle for political and cultural emancipation were to prove a vital stage in her intellectual development, one which bore fruit twenty years after she left India for England.

  India and Burma both shook off British rule in the late-1940s, within five months of each other; but India had borne the colonial yoke for the best part of three centuries—with consequences for the nation’s development that Suu slowly came to appreciate as Burma grew steadily more oppressive and claustrophobic under army rule.