by Peter Popham
When I called in the afternoons with my own baby daughter, I would find her busy in the kitchen preparing economical Japanese fish dishes, or at her sewing machine, in an undulating savanna of yellow cotton, making curtains for the big bay windows, or quickly running up elegant, cut-price clothes for herself. Michael was working hard at his doctorate. Alexander had to be cared for without disturbing him. There were endless guests to be housed and fed. Still Suu maintained a house that was elegant and calm, the living room warm with sunny hangings of rich, dark Bhutanese rugs and Tibetan scroll paintings. But battened down at the back, hidden away among the kitchen’s stacked pots and pans, was anxiety, cramp and strain.17
“Michael and Suu complemented each other, it was a marriage made in heaven,” said Peter Carey, an Oxford don and a close friend. “Not because it was all roses, because it wasn’t, it was a very rocky road.”18 Robin Christopher has a memory of Suu ironing everything in sight, including Michael’s socks: “It was a role she performed with pride,” he said, “and with a certain defiance of her more feminist friends.”
Suu became close friends with another academic wife, a Japanese woman called Noriko Ohtsu whose husband was also on a research fellowship at the university.
“It was actually her husband Michael who I got to know first,” Noriko said. “I met him in 1974 when we were both students of Tibetan at the School of Oriental and African Studies [SOAS] in London. I liked him from the word go: No one could call him exactly handsome but there was a big-hearted gentleness about him that made people feel comfortable.”19 He told her about his years in Bhutan, and she found something comically appropriate about it: He reminded her of the Abominable Snowman. “With his unkempt hair and his great height he looked like a giant who had just emerged from the Himalayas. The first thing he said to me, with evident pride, was ‘My wife is Burmese.’”
As chance would have it, we all moved from London to Oxford in 1975: I and my Japanese husband Sadayoshi, an expert on the economy of the Soviet Union, and Suu and Michael and their toddler Alexander. As a result we all got to know each other much better. It helped that both Suu and I were from Asia, in a city where people from our part of the world were few and far between. There was an intimacy to our friendship that I found with none of my other Oxford friends.
My first sight of Suu when I met her in London was of this beautiful young girl pushing a pram, wearing Burmese dress, her hair in a pony tail with a fringe hanging down over her forehead. She looked like a teenager: I couldn’t believe she was twenty-nine, one year older than Michael, who looked old enough to be her father.
Suu was already interested in Japan because of her father’s deep involvement with the country before and during the war. And despite the many differences between their two nations, there was also much in common: instinctive courtesy and self-effacement, for example, and a habit of diligence and graceful attention to everyday tasks.
“We exchanged recipes and went shopping together in Oxford’s covered market,” Noriko remembered.
We went window-shopping for Liberty prints then snapped them up when the price came down in the sales and Suu would run the fabric up into longyi.
Michael was trying to make ends meet with his research about Tibet but their income was very small, and Suu would say to me, “Noriko, we’re down to our last £10! What on earth can I do?” But she was brilliant at making delicious meals out of cheap ingredients, and I helped out whenever I could by inviting the family round for a Japanese dinner.
The multiple challenges of running the family single-handedly—“Michael couldn’t cook properly,” Noriko recalled, “it was always Suu that cooked”—brought out a trait of puritanical perfectionism in Suu, Pasternak Slater recalled. “She could be very critical and very disapproving—to me and certainly to Michael,” she said.
I remember me driving her down to some rather tatty budget furniture shop and me saying, “Why on earth do you want to buy this sort of crap? Why don’t you buy an antique?” And she would say, “This is perfectly good, there’s no need to be spending money on antiques.” I was spending money on pine blanket boxes and the like while she was getting stuff from this cheap place and she probably thought I was a kind of cultural snob, I suppose. It was part of her practicality: There was no need to have something grandiose, it’s just children’s furniture, what the hell.20
On cut-price food, by contrast, she was unbending. “Her pride did not permit any compromise with fish and chips, burgers or other such fast-food solutions,” said Noriko. “She always tried to feed her family with freshly cooked home-made food.”
She was also becoming a stickler for traditions, including those not her own. She didn’t like Christmas pudding, and never ate it, but nonetheless she ritually made one six months in advance. When she visited Noriko in Japan, years later, she even took one with her as a present—even though neither of them liked the stuff. She showed no signs of converting to Christianity, but she is remembered by another Oxford friend as the first person to get her Christmas cards out every year. And she visited the Victorian severity of her mother on her own children and their friends. As her babies grew, Ann Pasternak Slater, who now had four children of her own, remembered, “It was Suu who gave the copy-book parties with all the traditional party games—except that the rules were enforced with unyielding exactitude, and my astonished children, bending them ever so slightly, once found themselves forbidden the prize. To them Suu was kindly but grave, an uncomfortably absolute figure of justice in their malleable world.”21
She was equally unbending about telling the truth, even at the risk of offending people, and was appalled and uncomprehending when Michael did otherwise. Noriko remembered one conversation in which the subject of British social hypocrisy came up.
She and Suu were in agreement about the abysmal quality of much British food. Suu said to her in Michael’s presence,
Noriko, as you well know, some British food is really awful. When we get invited out to eat and the food is bad, I don’t say it’s delicious: I’m a person who does not tell lies. But if they ask Michael, he always says, “Thanks for the delicious meal!” Staring at Michael she added, “Why does he always do that?”
Michael replied, “It’s a matter of courtesy, it’s a way of expressing my gratitude.” “There’s no need for it,” Suu retorted, “I wouldn’t do it.” She turned to me. “Michael was brought up eating bad British food in boarding school,” she said, “so he’s become insensitive to it.” Michael just rounded his eyes, looked up at the ceiling and shrugged.
That was Suu and Michael’s life encapsulated in one scene. Whatever you said to Michael he would just smile. Because he knew that as long as he and Suu were together he would get home-cooked food to eat.
He was a lucky man and he knew it. “For the first fifteen years of the marriage it was all Michael,” said Peter Carey, “the fellow of St. Antony’s, the fellow of St. John’s, the great scholar of Bhutan and Himalayan Buddhism. He was the breadwinner, the core of the marriage, and she was the helpmate, the north Oxford housewife. She was her father’s daughter, but she had transmogrified into this north Oxford inheritance.”22
With her closest friends, Suu expressed some of her frustration. In 1978 Michael completed his dissertation and obtained his doctorate, but Suu felt that subsequently he did not try hard enough to capitalize on that hard-won achievement.
“I think Suu thought that he could actually have pushed his way a bit more,” said Ann Pasternak Slater. “She felt that he was not proactive enough. She said I was very lucky to have a husband who was a bit more of a wheeler-dealer. It was partly him not being as go-getting and achieving as my husband was—I didn’t need to tell Craig what to do but she felt she had to be pushing Michael and she said she envied me a husband who didn’t need that.”23
Suu’s was the common lot of the modern mother who, despite her qualifications and professional experience, finds herself laboring away at menial tasks while her husband is absor
bed in the—painfully slow—construction of his glorious career. But in Suu’s case there was an extra twist: With both her sons she was unable to be as complete a mother as she felt was both her duty and her right. As Michael struggled with his Tibetan texts in their cramped flat, Suu struggled and failed to breastfeed her second child.
Pasternak Slater recalled:
She had been unable to breastfeed Alexander, too, and Kim was very, very difficult. Michael was understandably desperate to finish his thesis and this created a lot of friction because there was this baby who wouldn’t sleep and Suu trying to feed him and so it was very hard. She wasn’t able to in the end, she had to give up. I doubt whether the anguish she felt can be understood by anyone who has not had the same experience. Especially because at that time everyone was saying breast is best, it was very much the thing. So in the end Kim had to be taken into a pediatric unit to try and spend nights away from Suu so he didn’t scream all night long.
Both boys ended up being bottle-fed. It was a telling demonstration of how Suu’s indomitable willpower could sometimes backfire on the whole family. Her pain, said Pasternak Slater, was “the inevitable result of her rooted reluctance to accept defeat, or to allow herself the indulgence of a second-best way.”
*
By 1980, the family’s situation was beginning to improve. Michael’s doctorate had been rewarded with a full research fellowship provided by Wolfson College, which also came with a bit more money. They had moved from the tightness of the college flat to their first—and, as it turned out, only—proper family home, across the gated gardens from Ann Pasternak Slater and her family in Park Town. Alexander had started going to the Dragon School, a posh preparatory school in north Oxford; Kim would follow him there soon. And Suu was at last able to raise her eyes from the sink and the sewing machine and consider her options.
“She was very much casting around for a role for herself,” remembered Carey. “She said, is this my destiny to be a housewife, the partner of an Oxford don?”24 Ann Pasternak Slater said, “She was becoming more serious, more focused, more determined, more ambitious.”25
She started helping Michael in his work, and in a volume of essays dedicated to Hugh Richardson, who had died in 1979, she was named as co-editor.26 She found a part-time job in the Bodleian, Oxford’s famous library, working on its Burmese collection. She made another effort to go back to college, applying to take a BA in English, but her third-class first degree was held against her and she was turned down. “All those years spent as a full-time mother were most enjoyable,” Suu said in an interview many years later, “but the gap in professional and academic activity—although I did manage to study Tibetan and Japanese during that time—made me feel somewhat at a disadvantage compared to those who were never out of the field.”27
So instead she set about realizing one of her earliest childhood ambitions and turned herself, in a modest way, into a writer.
She wrote three short books for schoolchildren about the countries she knew best, Burma, Bhutan and Nepal, books she rightly dismissed later as potboilers. More significantly, she also wrote a slim biography of her father, Aung San of Burma, published by Australia’s University of Queensland Press in 1984. In his biography of Suu, Justin Wintle described it as “idealized.” It is certainly not iconoclastic, and it is too brief to stand as a major work of scholarship, but it is written in a clear, limpid style and is shot through with insight and affection.
Aung San, she wrote, “has left an unflattering description of himself as a sickly, unwashed, gluttonous, thoroughly unprepossessing child who was so late beginning to speak that his family feared he might be dumb . . . While his three brothers started their education early, he refused to go to school ‘unless mother went too’ . . .”28
In the last paragraph of the book’s concluding chapter, she described what it was about Aung San that had made him such a popular and successful leader. The words were an implicit denunciation of what, under Ne Win, leadership in Burma had come to mean; they would also become a sort of manifesto for herself. She wrote:
Aung San’s appeal was not so much to extremists as to the great majority of ordinary citizens who wished to pursue their own lives in peace and prosperity under a leader they could trust and respect. In him they saw that leader, a man who put the interests of the country before his own needs, who remained poor and unassuming at the height of his power, who accepted the responsibilities of leadership without hankering after the privileges, and who, for all his political acumen and powers of statecraft, retained at the core of his being a deep simplicity. For the people of Burma, Aung San was the man who had come in their hour of need to restore their national pride and honor. As his life is a source of inspiration for them, his memory remains the guardian of their political conscience.29
As her children grew, her thoughts were turning again restlessly to Burma. She had been going back most summers, alone or with the family, to keep her mother company and pay homage to her father on Martyrs’ Day. Later—one year before her mother’s devastating stroke—she took the boys back for shinbyu, the ceremony all Burmese Buddhist boys undergo between the ages of five and about twelve, when they re-enact the Buddha’s renunciation of his royal heritage and his decision to embrace the life of the spirit. Suu had not taught Alexander and Kim to speak Burmese but they both had Burmese as well as English names and passports. And now they also had the most important Burmese rite of passage behind them.
It was on one of these visits that she struck up a friendship that was to prove important to her later on. She visited Rangoon University to seek out copies of Burmese classics on behalf of the Bodleian and got talking to one of the senior librarians, whose name was Ko Myint Swe, a friend of her mother’s. “You must help our country,” he told her. “But how, uncle?” she replied.30 Myint Swe was not sure: But he was one of several voices in Rangoon reminding her who she was, and that she might yet have a role. When she took the plunge and entered politics in 1988, Myint Swe became one of her closest aides.
Both her boys were now at school, and Suu decided that the best way to re-engage with her country was as a scholar. Following in Michael’s footsteps, she applied to SOAS in London to do a PhD on Burmese political history, which would give her the opportunity to expand the slim biography of her father into a full-blown scholarly work. But again her cursed third in PPE came back to haunt her and she was rejected: Her assessors felt that her grasp of political theory would be insufficient to see her through.
Suu was livid at this new rejection, but then it was suggested that she might write a thesis on modern Burmese literature instead. She took a one-year course at SOAS in preparation, reading numerous works in Burmese, working one-on-one with her tutor Anna Allott, and finally sitting an exam.
“We read several novels together,” said Allott, “and I asked her to write essays about them and what she wrote was very illuminating because she wrote from a Burmese point of view.”31 The exam tested her command of the language and her knowledge of modern Burmese literature and she passed easily.
At SOAS she also learned about a research fellowship offered by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in Japan. Suu applied and was awarded a research scholarship for the academic year 1985–86, to study Burma’s independence movement. This would be her opportunity to delve into the Japanese archives and learn firsthand what experiences her father had undergone in Japan. Her plan to write the big biography of her father may have been shunted aside but it had not been derailed. With her customary determination she plastered the bathroom at Park Town with blown-up kanji, Japanese characters, and set about learning to read Japanese in world-record time.
The family was on the go again: Suu was to move temporarily to Japan, taking eight-year-old Kim with her—he would undergo a very challenging year in a Japanese primary school—and at the same time Michael went with Alexander to Shimla, high in the Indian Himalayas, where he had won a two-year fellowship at the Indian Institute
of Advanced Studies. The four of them would get together for the holidays.
*
She was back in Asia: She had not spent so long in an Asian country since leaving Delhi for Oxford eighteen years before. Japan was in the middle of the biggest economic boom in its history—a phenomenon that interested her as little as the hippies of London or the Velvet Underground in New York. But to be in the country which had offered so much to Burma, and delivered so little, and so ambiguously—that was interesting, and difficult. It was a brother nation to Burma, it had offered liberation from the white man and fellowship in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, but on closer acquaintance that had proved to be an even more onerous form of colonialism under a fancy name.
Suu loved Japanese food and appreciated Japanese diligence and culture, but she was critical, too. She found the people arrogant and obsessed with making money, and she couldn’t understand why, despite their great aesthetic sense, they built such hideous modern cities. Her father had been shocked to be offered a prostitute during his stay in Tokyo—and she was appalled at the way Japanese men bossed and bullied women, in a way that would not be tolerated in Burma.
She shuttled between Kyoto and Tokyo to interview war veterans who had known her father, and dug for raw material on Aung San in the libraries of the Self-Defense Forces, the National Library and elsewhere, plundering them for anything she could find on him.
Yet in the opinion of Noriko Ohtsu, her Japanese friend from Oxford who had returned to live in Kyoto, her hometown, the academic slog was in the long run less important than her own transformation. In an interview years later, Suu said, “When I was young I could never separate my country from my father, because I was very small when he died and I’d always thought of him in connection with the country. So even now it is difficult for me to separate the idea of my father from the concept of my country.”32 And those months of immersion in her father’s life and work were, in her friend’s opinion, crucial for Suu: a first kikkake, as she puts it, a turning-point, in the fitful, unplanned process of realigning her destiny with Burma’s.33