Aung San Suu Kyi (16 page)

On the surface, Khin Kyi took her son's death in the same stoical way as she had received the message about the murder of Aung San. At the time of the accident she had just been promoted to head of the planning commission in the social department. When one of her colleagues entered her office and told her the terrible news, she did not go home at once but stayed and finished her tasks for that day. It sounds absolutely bizarre, and some of the biographies of Aung San Suu Kyi's life imply that this is a later reconstruction fabricated by the junta with the intention of casting a shadow over the daughter as well. However, the information comes straight from Aung San Suu Kyi, so there is really no reason to doubt its truth. She used her mother's reaction as an example of her parents' feeling for social and societal responsibility. An almost inhumanly rational attitude in that case: her son's life could not be saved, and so there was no reason to hurry home from the job she had been employed to take care of.

Even if this story is true, Khin Kyi must reasonably have landed in a state of shock and the deepest grief, and after her son's death she no longer wanted to live in the house on Tower Lane. In the spring of 1953 the family packed their belongings and moved to the white stone house at 54 University Avenue, on the shores of the beautiful Lake Inya, a few miles north of Tower Lane. The area had previously been inhabited by British colonial civil servants and top businessmen, but after independence several of the villas around the lake had been taken over by the rulers of the new Burma. The commander in chief of the army, Ne Win, lived, for example, in a spacious villa on the opposite side of the lake. When Aung San Suu Kyi was confined to house arrest forty years later by Ne Win's underlings, they could have waved to each other across the mirrorlike waters.

Aung San Suu Kyi had a materially privileged childhood in a country where most people lived in poverty and misery. Yet her upbringing was not characterized by any luxury. Khin Kyi had the same ascetic attitude as Aung San had had. She was careful not to spoil her children.

“The toys of my early childhood seemed luxurious in post–World War II Burma, but they were quite modest,” wrote Aung San Suu Kyi in a newspaper chronicle in Thailand in the 1990s. “I had a series of round-eyed, hairless dolls made of thin, pink plastic, which buckled and cracked easily, and with moveable limbs attached by means of brittle elastic string that could ill withstand the attention of restless little hands.”

When things got broken, they were to be patched up and mended. There was no question of buying new ones. Suu Kyi really thought that the dolls were ugly and unpractical, but she regarded them with respect since she had heard some adults saying that Japan's industrialization had started with the manufacture of precisely that kind of toy. In her childhood fantasies, the dolls were transformed into keys that could open the door to a better world.

Her favorite toy was a kaleidoscope, a tube with bits of glass and beads that kept on creating new patterns when one turned it round and round. When the kaleidoscope got broken, her oldest brother, Aung San Oo, built his own homemade version with mirrors and colored glass. But in Suu Kyi's eyes the copy was never able to compete with the original.

Nowadays, most of the traces of the British colonial era in Burma have been erased. Apart from the architecture, the dusty and shabby houses in central Rangoon, which look as though someone has chucked a couple of blocks from London into the middle of Southeast Asia, everything has been more or less swept away. English is taught in some schools, it is true, but for many years after Ne Win's takeover of power even that was forbidden. He reintroduced English as a school subject when it turned out that one of his daughters was not admitted to a college in the United States on account of her inadequate grasp of the language.

That was not at all the case during the early 1950s. Many British people had chosen to remain in the country after independence. English companies still carried on trade and commerce in the country, and the prime minister, U Nu, was keen on attracting more foreign investors. The Indian population was still intact. During the colonial era, there had sometimes been more Indians than Bamar living in the capital.

To put it briefly: when Burma was still standing at the crossroads, Rangoon was a multicultural city, and Aung San Suu Kyi's youth was stamped by that.
For her mother, nationalism did not seem to have been about “driving out” the English or about setting the Bamar up against any of the ethnic minorities. Nationalism was about the right to rule over one's own destiny and to nurture, and be allowed to nurture, one's own culture. That other cultures coexisted in the country was not a threat, and it was not possible or even desirable to drive them out.

Khin Kyi's broad international network meant that many of the conversations in their home were carried on in English and she wanted her children to become bilingual quickly. On that point she had the same outlook as Aung San. Even as a boy he had demanded to be able to learn English at school, since it would not be possible to educate himself and influence the development of society if he did not master the language of the colonial power.

When Aung San Suu Kyi reached school age she was first placed in a private school, Saint Frances Convent, where education was carried out bilingually. A few years later she was moved to the prestigious Methodist English High School (MEHS), a school for the absolute cream of society, with high school fees, strategically situated in central Rangoon. MEHS was one of several schools in Rangoon that were administrated by Christian communities. Saint Paul's was only for boys, Saint Mary's and Saint John's were girls' schools. MEHS accepted pupils of both sexes. Many British children attended the school, and even Gen. Ne Win's six children went there. Bamar was a compulsory subject, but many lessons were held in English.

“Everybody knew who Aung San Suu Kyi was. As the daughter of Aung San, she was never able to remain anonymous. But she was not treated differently in any way,” says Jenny Tun-Aung, who attended the same class as Suu Kyi. “On the other hand it was already obvious that she was stubborn and that she always held her ground. Just as at other schools, the boys used to be nuisance to us girls, but every time they went for Suu Kyi she shouted at them and chased them all the way into the boys' lavatories.”

Her cousin Sein Win paints a similar picture. In the 1990s he became prime minister in the exile government that was formed when the junta refused to hand over power to the popularly elected politicians. Sein Win was born a year before Aung San Suu Kyi, and his father, U Ba Win, had been murdered together with Aung San in the Secretariat in 1947.

“Our common experiences made the bonds between our families unusually strong,” he explained when I talked to him in the spring of 2010. “We were neighbors and we children often played together. Aung San Suu Kyi was an ordinary girl who liked playing with her friends, but she had an extraordinary sense of fair play. If anyone tried to cheat at baseball or any other game we were playing, she always put a stop to it at once.”

The Swede Clas Örjan SpÃ¥ng, today working as a teacher in Stockholm, was in the same class as Aung San Suu Kyi in 1958. He stayed for a year in Rangoon, where his father worked at the Swedish company LM Ericsson. He remembers his classmate very well, not the least for her name. Everyone else in their class was given an English name by their teacher, Mrs. Brindley, but she insisted on calling the daughter of the famous national hero by her father's name. After a couple of days Suu Kyi corrected her teacher. “My name is not Aung San,” she said. “But you are related to him, aren't you?” asked Mrs. Brindley. After this Suu Kyi was called by her real name.

“That's why I remember her so well,” said Clas Örjan when, many years later, I met him for lunch in a small apartment on the outskirts of Stockholm. “If she had been given an English name it's possible I never would have picked up her real name or her background.”

There were around forty students in their class, and both Suu Kyi and Clas Örjan sat in the front, close to the teacher and far away from “the noise in the back of the room” where a group of young boys always talked and threw things at one another.

“Actually it was Aung San Suu Kyi who persuaded me to study French,” said Clas Örjan.

Many people say these kinds of things about Aung San Suu Kyi's school years, along with the observations that she found schoolwork easy and that she particularly enjoyed languages. As soon as she had learned to read, she left the world of dolls behind her and threw herself into the world of books. Sein Win relates that she always had a book with her, and when his own family came on a visit, they often found her sitting sunk into an armchair, deep in a book.

When she was nine years old she was given a tip by one of her cousins that she should read a book about Sherlock Holmes, and after that she was sold on detective novels. “How could Bugs Bunny adventures compare with
those of a man who could, from a careful examination of a battered old hat, gauge the physical and mental attributes, financial situation, and the matrimonial difficulties of its erstwhile owner?” she wrote in one of her texts about literature. In her everyday sympathetic manner she commented that “some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and absorbing a mystery.”

She soon read her way through all the detective classics, like those by George Simenon and Agatha Christie, but also threw herself into the more hard-boiled stories of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Later on in life she was very fond of P. D. James's stories about the quiet police inspector Adam Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh in particular seems to have struck a chord with Suu Kyi. “The dash of French artist's blood in his veins makes him more fascinating than supposedly exotic investigators like Hercule Poirot,” she wrote in a commentary that sounds more like a political stance for mixed marriage than a critical literary point of view.

She read everything and everywhere. She used to take a book with her when she went shopping with her mother. Reading during car trips was
unthinkable in the chaotic traffic of Rangoon. She would begin to feel sick. But as soon as the car had stopped, her eyes turned once again to the pages of her book. “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 couldn't wait for the next stop.”

Class photo from Methodist High School (1959–1960). Aung San Suu Kyi is fifth from the left in the middle row.
Courtesy of Jenny Tun-Aung, who is standing last to the right on the same row.

When she was about ten she dreamed of being a soldier and an officer, preferably a general like her father. “Up to then, of course, the army was an institution that served the people and not one that took from them,” she said in an interview conducted by Alan Clements. However, the dream of a soldier's life soon faded, possibly for the simple reason that women were not permitted to enter the army. Influenced by all the books she devoured, she now wanted to become an author instead. She wanted to write stories that fascinated and gripped the reader, such as those she enjoyed reading.

Later in life she was to realize part of that dream. During the 1980s she published several documents and books: one book about her home country and one about Bhutan (both written for children and published in Australia), an essay about her father, and several articles on political issues. But as yet she has not become an author of fiction.

It's obvious that Aung San Suu Kyi's main influence in her early life, her role model and guide during the years of childhood, growing up without a father, was her mother, Khin Kyi.

It is sometimes said about Khin Kyi that she did not get married to a man but to a destiny. The opposite is often said about Aung San, that he got married to a woman who had morals and backbone sufficient to hold up his ideals even after his death.

His ideals, not her own.

Apart from the fact that this reflects a patriarchal worldview, it is of course both false and true. False in the sense that Khin Kyi had very strong political ideas and pronounced concepts of right and wrong of her own, and they guided her during her very successful professional career. It is also true that she never remarried after Aung San. His significance for Burma's collective unconscious was far too important for her to “besmirch” it with a new love affair.

During the whole of the 1950s she toiled away to keep everything going in their daily life. Her working days were long and there was not much time to spend with the children. In that sense she was no different from her deceased husband. They had the same ability to focus on the task at hand and to be absorbed by their work. At the same time she saw to it that the children were given a strict and rather conservative upbringing. Khin Kyi was not the least careful about her children's appearance. When they had guests at home the children always had to wear their best clothes, well ironed and without flecks of dirt. This is what Suu Kyi related for Alan Clements: