The Lady and the Peacock (30 page)

Ma Khin Kyi persisted in her efforts to turn Suu into a refined young lady. “My hands were never allowed to be idle,” she told Ma Thanegi. “I had to be doing something all the time, whether sewing or embroidery or practicing the piano.” But the impression she made on her first friends at
the English Methodist High School was far from ladylike. With the two most important males plucked from her life, it seems that the growing girl sought unconsciously to compensate by turning into a boy.

“Ours was a mixed school,” her friend Tin Tin remembered, “but Suu was not interested in boys. In fact she looked very much like a boy herself. Our uniform was a maroon skirt with a white top, but under them she wore a boy's shirt and vest instead of girl's ones.”
¹⁷
She had her hair in plaits and wore black lace-up shoes like a boy, her legs were stout and boyish and, according to Tin Tin, she even walked like a man.

She was also very tanned, Ma Thanegi (who was two years her junior at the Methodist High School) remembered, which was not the mark of an aspiring lady. “She told me it was because she was always playing in the sun.” But all these tomboy tendencies might be explained by the fact that she was a keen Girl Guide—her mother being the founder of the Burmese Guides. She has made little of this biographical fact, but her cheerful survival of thousands of miles of campaigning in conditions that would be an insult to the average pariah dog suggest close familiarity with the two-finger salute and the tireless quest for badges.

Her dead father already weighed heavily on her mind. According to Tin Tin, “Suu was always speaking about her father and always saying how she respected her father, and saying she has to follow her father's line.” And in fact her first ambition was to follow in his footsteps quite literally. “When I was ten or eleven I wanted to enter the army,” she said. “Everyone referred to my father as Bogyoke, which means general, so I wanted to be a general, too, because I thought this was the best way to serve one's country, just like my father had done.” At some point someone must have gently pointed out to her that the Burmese Army did not recruit girl soldiers.

Suu's fame as the daughter of the Bogyoke brought her no special status or privileges at the Methodist school, where practically all her peers had something to boast about. “The children of three out of four of our presidents, of Prime Minister U Nu, of many branches of the royal family, of most politicians, of diplomats before there was an international school, and of old money Rangoon aristocracy—they all went to our school,” said Ma Thanegi. “Our school was the only co-ed mission school, and the best school in the country. Most conservative people did not want to send
their children to co-ed schools so our parents were the most progressive, liberal-minded and westernized in Rangoon.”

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.”
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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 more 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.