Aung San Suu Kyi (22 page)

An important explanation for the fact that the protests did not make a greater impact was that they had been unorganized and spontaneous. A unifying force was lacking, something that could channel the popular anger and transform it into a constructive political movement. Ne Win survived the crisis. He had purchased several more years in power for himself.

During this time, Aung San Suu Kyi was living a peaceful life in Oxford. The family lived in an apartment they had been allowed to rent by St John's College: an open, light two-bedroom with a high ceiling and large windows looking out onto the garden. On the walls hung colorful mats from Bhutan and paintings from Tibet. The bedrooms were small. One of them, barely bigger than a cupboard, acted as both a nursery for the children and a guestroom when they had visitors from Burma or Bhutan, Michael's research colleagues or some family member from Scotland. Suu Kyi was in that sense very Burmese. The traveler in her home country is immediately met with enormous hospitality, and if it had not been for the laws of the junta that forbid “strangers” to spend the night in one's home, it would have been easy to spend a month in the country without having to resort to a hotel.

One of the visitors was Thant Myint U, a grandchild of U Thant. In his book
River of Lost Footsteps
he describes an everyday summer afternoon in the garden in Oxford. The children were playing on the lawn. They drank tea together while Michael Aris smoked his pipe. Aung San Suu Kyi encouraged her young compatriot to study in England. His brief account paints a picture of a relatively normal academic family, with the house full of books and thoughts occupied with research and writing.

Ann Pasternak Slater had lost contact with Suu Kyi during the years in New York, but now they were both in Oxford and also had small children of the same age. They rekindled their friendship. Pasternak Slater often marvelled over how Suu Kyi was able to stand all those visitors living there for weeks at a time in the cramped guestroom. Not for a second did she hint that it was an inconvenience. The friends often met when Suu Kyi came cycling from a hasty shopping trip in the center. The bicycle was always fully loaded with plastic bags full of milk, bread, and cheap fruit from the market. “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,” she wrote in her essay “Suu Burmese.” Visitors to their home remember how she often did all her household chores with Kim hanging in a square of cloth on her back and Alexander playing at her feet.

Their neighbor Nalini Jain recounted in an interview in the 1990s that Suu Kyi was a mother who enforced strict discipline in the home, a discipline that applied to herself as well as the others in the family. The children were expected to eat whatever was served and not to complain about the food. Michael has said something similar, that Alexander and Kim were so drilled to eat whatever was put on the table that they would, without hesitation, have gobbled up a snake if that was what Suu Kyi was serving that day.

Thanks to the university, the family was able to live well in the house in central Oxford, but basically these were frugal years for them. They only had Michael's meager researcher's salary to live on and at the same time two growing children to provide for. The couple never owned a car or a TV set.

Simultaneously, Suu Kyi was searching for something meaningful to do outside the home. “Suu maintained a house that was elegant and calm,” wrote Pasternak Slater, “but battened down at the back, hidden away among the kitchen's stacked pots and pans, was anxiety, cramp, and strain.” Peter Carey, who got to know them at the end of the 1970s, has the same picture of Suu Kyi. “She was very meticulous and disciplined, and extremely friendly by nature,” he said in my interview with him. “She loved the life of a wife and mother, but it was also as though she was searching for an objective. Something in which to invest her talents and gifts. She had lost her father very early on, perhaps even lost her country, and she had as yet not found a new mission in life.”

At the beginning of the 1980s, the most intensive years with small children were over, and Suu Kyi gradually started to consider her possibilities of resuming a professional career. Even when Kim was a newborn, she had worked for several hours a week at the university's Bodleian Library building in its Burmese section. She had also organized courses in Burmese for the staff there. A couple of years later she and Michael together became the editors of the anthology
Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh
Richardson. After that she began writing herself, and in this way she took a few first steps toward
her old dream of becoming an author. In rapid succession she published the children's books
Let's Visit
Bhutan,
Let's Visit
Burma, and
Let's Visit
Nepal, three countries that she knew well but that were completely unknown to most Europeans. The books are simple, easily understood introductions that neither touch on the political systems of these countries nor take up the violations of democracy and human rights. The subjects are history, culture, and religion.

During those years around the shift from the 1970s to the 1980s, Suu Kyi also decided to get to know her father better. Aung San had never ceased to fascinate her and to affect her choices in life. “When she was a young mother, living in Oxford, England, she'd occasionally meet former British colonials who had served in Burma at the end of the war. ‘Did they know General Aung San? What was he like? What did he look like?' One of them said, ‘He did look a little like Yul Brynner,' which she liked quite a lot,” Peter Carey has said.

In 1984 Suu Kyi published the book
Aung San of Burma
in a series on Asian leaders at the University of Queensland Press. It was a short biography of her father. In contrast to her books for children and young people, her text on Aung San is of a political character. Even then, four years prior to her entry into the democratic movement, one notices that she has an ambition to wrench the interpretation of Aung San and thus of Burma's post-colonial history out of the hands of the military junta. Although she does write about her father's revolutionary aspect and his experiences of cooperation with Japan, she is above all concerned with emphasizing his pragmatism and the fact that he left the army to shoulder the role of a civil political leader in a democratic system.

The book gave Suu Kyi a taste for more, and when it had been published she wanted once again to have a go at an academic career. Michael had moved his research to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and now Suu Kyi also applied to attend this college.

Their various academic projects caused the family to split up yet again. Michael was given an exchange appointment as a researcher in the old colonial town of Simla in India, and Suu Kyi was offered the opportunity of working for eighteen months at the University of Kyoto. The idea was to learn more about the contacts between Burma and Japan during the Second
World War, and she also planned to interview Japanese war veterans who had known her father.

Aung San Suu Kyi had always found languages easy and did her utmost to learn Japanese before her journey out. Author Justin Wintle describes how she transformed the family's bathroom at 15 Park Town in Oxford into a language laboratory, with Japanese words and sentences taped up all over the bathroom walls, so that she could go in there and review at any time of day. However, it was a time-consuming and boringly repetitive task, much harder than the other languages she had learned.

When she later ended up under house arrest in Rangoon, she once again took up her language studies, and with the help of books that Michael had sent her, she improved both her French and her Japanese.

Kim accompanied his mother to Japan and Michael took Alexander with him to Simla. Kim was only seven years old and neither he nor Suu Kyi felt particularly at home in Kyoto. For some unknown reason, Kim had been placed in a school where Japanese was the only language spoken, and he had difficulty in keeping up with the lessons and in finding new friends. There was a school for English-speakers nearby, so the decision appears strange, but the idea seems to have been that he should learn Japanese the hard way.

The Burmese Michael Aung-Thwin was also at the University in Kyoto, one of the few people whom Suu Kyi had met over the years who did not speak well of her. They had their studies right next door to each other and spent time there almost daily during the course of a year. Aung-Thwin has said in several interviews that he perceived her as a wandering hub of conflict who was in addition obsessed by her father. “We argued about Burma almost every day and had honest disagreements,” he said in the Web-based newspaper
New Mandala
in 2009. “So, when I said she was divisive, that's because she was. It's no secret. Everyone knew it, we, as well as her Japanese hosts. . . . And she was, indeed, always harping about her father. I would too if my father were as famous as hers. She even tried to convince my daughter how famous her father was by showing her a Burmese coin with his face on it. My daughter was hardly seven and couldn't give a damn.”

The political conflicts between them were about their different attitudes toward the military junta and which paths forward were feasible for Burma.
Aung-Thwin considered that there was a certain justification for Ne Win's dictatorship and that Burma's political system must be coupled with the specific culture and history of the country. Democracy means decentralization, he wrote in an essay a few years after having worked with her, and in Burma, as in many other countries, decentralization means anarchy. Aung-Thwin concluded that many people would prefer military rule if the alternative was chaos.

He wrote this essay about Burma, but also partly as an argument against the foreign policy of the United States, which often meant forcing its own political and economic system onto other countries without adapting it to local conditions. In Burma the ethnic conflicts and the hierarchical traditions demand the formation of the system in a different way than that of the Western world. It would have been easy to sympathize with that position, if it were not for the problem that he used this criticism to give moral support to the military junta.

Aung-Thwin's wife, Maria, was also skeptical toward Suu Kyi: “It was as if she didn't have a husband. She never once said anything about missing him . . . and actually it seemed that the farther she was from him, the better it was for her, or at least more convenient for what she wanted to do with her life.”

This quotation has been diligently used in the junta's propaganda against Aung San Suu Kyi, and it often creeps into articles and short biographies about her. It implies that she came to Burma some years later for reasons other than that of looking after her mother, and it makes her appear as a cold, calculating person who puts her own political ambitions before her family.

Kim and Suu Kyi stayed in Kyoto for one year, after which they traveled to join Michael and Alexander in Simla. They remained there for almost a year and after that returned to England, where Suu Kyi was to begin in earnest the task of writing her thesis. According to the rules of the university about the length of postgraduate appointments, she would not be able to earn her doctorate before October 1989, but she planned on working fast and to have her thesis completed in the autumn of 1988. Ma Than É, who also lived with them for three months in Kyoto, has described that time as a period of very hard work and great decisiveness.

There was something restless about Suu Kyi during that period. The feeling that she was searching for a mission, something to which to apply her energy and gifts, grew stronger. Early in the autumn of 1987, Khin Kyi arrived in Oxford to undergo a complicated eye operation. She stayed with Suu Kyi and her family for a couple of months. Suu Kyi was simultaneously applying for a post as assistant professor at the University of Michigan. Peter Carey helped her with her application, and when she was about to post it, she sent him a letter of thanks at the same time. She wrote,

I'm having a wonderful time experimenting with my new Amstrad 9512—I can't quite take writing seriously at the moment because it's just like a game with the word processor! But I must try to be serious— I have just done my application to Michigan and I am sending you a copy together with my copies of my CV and thesis outline. Thank you very much for agreeing to be a referee, Peter. I don't know if they will consider my application seriously enough to ask you for a reference but it is very good to have the encouragement of people like you and John [her supervisor at the university]. All those years spent as a fulltime mother were most enjoyable and rewarding but the gap in professional and academic activities (although I did manage to study Tibetan and Japanese during that time) makes me feel somewhat at a disadvantage compared to those who were never out of the field.

She does not seem to have had any greater hopes of being awarded the post, but her application shows that she took her academic career seriously. She was thinking of establishing herself as a researcher in Burmese history and literature. It may well have been so, if it had not been for that telephone call on the evening of March 31, 1988.

When she was confined to house arrest for the first time in 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi knew nothing about the future. One cannot prevent oneself from wondering about what she would have thought if she had known that when she would be released in November 2010 she would have spent fifteen of the past twenty-one years under house arrest.

How can anyone cope with such a sacrifice? How does one manage to avoid getting broken down physically and psychologically?

For Aung San Suu Kyi the answer has always been integrity and discipline. She has described the strict daily routine she set up right from the first autumn. She got up every morning at half past five and meditated in the faint dawn light. She read. After that she listened for a while to the radio, the BBC, the Burmese transmissions from the Voice of America, and after a time also from the Democratic Voice of Burma, which was transmitted from Oslo. When Michael Aris came for a visit he was somewhat amused by the fact that she was more up-to-date on world news than he was.