Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times by Rosalind Russell
Authors: Rosalind Russell
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There was no room left for anything else in her life. ‘My mother wants me to stop this job,’ she told me. ‘But I am a journalist and I love journalism. I want to get my stories out.’
The exiled media was gearing up for the 2010 elections, the first to be held in Burma since the 1990 poll that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracyhad won by a landslide, but the outcome of which the junta had ignored. The elections promised a new parliament, and a government run by civilians. It was the role of DVB and other news organisations to inject a dose of realism: in the 2008 constitution, the military had put in place strong safeguards to protect their power, including reserving one quarter of seats in the two houses of parliament for military appointees. Many of those running for seats as civilians would simply hang up their army uniforms, political observers said. The NLD had dismissed the constitution as illegitimate and had decided to boycott the vote. No one was expecting much to change.
Thida left abruptly to catch an overnight bus to Mandalay. I put away my notebook and looked across the table at Zayar, who had set up the interview and had come to translate for me. He sipped on a soda with mint leaves and ice. Two elaborate Burmese puppets, with white porcelain faces and red painted lips, were strung up on either side of the café door, staring at us. From the far side of the wooden balustrade that marked off the terrace, street children selling out-of-date copies of
Time
magazine and the
International Herald Tribune
were trying to attract our attention. I wondered whether Zayar also smuggled out his reports. It was a fair bet that he did, but at that point he didn’t want to talk about it.
FIVE
The King’s Grandson
Getting accustomed to the hotel bicycle, I gently freewheeled down the gravelly driveway, admiring the hollyhocks and gladioli that bordered the sweeping front lawn. Between the two stone gateposts at the foot of the hill, I came to a squeaky halt, wobbled slightly and planted a foot on the ground to check for traffic. I pedalled off slowly to the right, trying to operate the seized-up gears. A gentle breeze ruffled the waters of the ornamental lake on my left, and beyond that, a line of Japanese red maples and mulberry trees rustled on the edge of the botanical gardens. The stacked roofs of a wooden, Chinese-style pagoda peeked out above the treetops. The air smelt earthy and fresh. It was the first of several occasions during my short stay in Maymyo that I would have to remind myself that I was still in Burma.
Since arriving in Rangoon – a port city that for nine months of the year is insufferably hot and wet or insufferably hot and dry – I had been tempted to visit Maymyo, the hill-station built by British colonialists to escape the fiercest of the summer months. From March to May, British officers, civil servants and their wives would decamp en masse from Rangoon to take up residence in the small town, laid out in the manner of a Surrey village, with mock-Tudor houses and pretty stone cottages. Sitting 3,500 feet above the city of Mandalay, it was comfortable and breezy, and surrounded by fields of flowers, coffee bushes and strawberries. It all sounded very enticing, but until the hot season of 2010 I hadn’t found the excuse to visit.
A few weeks earlier, while on a visa-run to Bangkok (a manoeuvre that involved skipping out of the country for a few days), I had been sitting with theBurmese historian Thant Myint-U over Starbucks iced lattes in a glass-walled shopping mall. The grandson of 1960s UN Secretary-General U Thant, the younger Thant was also a former UN diplomat as well as a historian and author. He knew Burma intimately, but, having grown up abroad, he also enjoyed an outsider’s perspective. In Rangoon’s information vacuum, I sometimes felt more isolated and ignorant of what was going on in Burma when I was there than when I was outside the country. The secrecy
The exiled media was gearing up for the 2010 elections, the first to be held in Burma since the 1990 poll that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracyhad won by a landslide, but the outcome of which the junta had ignored. The elections promised a new parliament, and a government run by civilians. It was the role of DVB and other news organisations to inject a dose of realism: in the 2008 constitution, the military had put in place strong safeguards to protect their power, including reserving one quarter of seats in the two houses of parliament for military appointees. Many of those running for seats as civilians would simply hang up their army uniforms, political observers said. The NLD had dismissed the constitution as illegitimate and had decided to boycott the vote. No one was expecting much to change.
Thida left abruptly to catch an overnight bus to Mandalay. I put away my notebook and looked across the table at Zayar, who had set up the interview and had come to translate for me. He sipped on a soda with mint leaves and ice. Two elaborate Burmese puppets, with white porcelain faces and red painted lips, were strung up on either side of the café door, staring at us. From the far side of the wooden balustrade that marked off the terrace, street children selling out-of-date copies of
Time
magazine and the
International Herald Tribune
were trying to attract our attention. I wondered whether Zayar also smuggled out his reports. It was a fair bet that he did, but at that point he didn’t want to talk about it.
FIVE
The King’s Grandson
Getting accustomed to the hotel bicycle, I gently freewheeled down the gravelly driveway, admiring the hollyhocks and gladioli that bordered the sweeping front lawn. Between the two stone gateposts at the foot of the hill, I came to a squeaky halt, wobbled slightly and planted a foot on the ground to check for traffic. I pedalled off slowly to the right, trying to operate the seized-up gears. A gentle breeze ruffled the waters of the ornamental lake on my left, and beyond that, a line of Japanese red maples and mulberry trees rustled on the edge of the botanical gardens. The stacked roofs of a wooden, Chinese-style pagoda peeked out above the treetops. The air smelt earthy and fresh. It was the first of several occasions during my short stay in Maymyo that I would have to remind myself that I was still in Burma.
Since arriving in Rangoon – a port city that for nine months of the year is insufferably hot and wet or insufferably hot and dry – I had been tempted to visit Maymyo, the hill-station built by British colonialists to escape the fiercest of the summer months. From March to May, British officers, civil servants and their wives would decamp en masse from Rangoon to take up residence in the small town, laid out in the manner of a Surrey village, with mock-Tudor houses and pretty stone cottages. Sitting 3,500 feet above the city of Mandalay, it was comfortable and breezy, and surrounded by fields of flowers, coffee bushes and strawberries. It all sounded very enticing, but until the hot season of 2010 I hadn’t found the excuse to visit.
A few weeks earlier, while on a visa-run to Bangkok (a manoeuvre that involved skipping out of the country for a few days), I had been sitting with theBurmese historian Thant Myint-U over Starbucks iced lattes in a glass-walled shopping mall. The grandson of 1960s UN Secretary-General U Thant, the younger Thant was also a former UN diplomat as well as a historian and author. He knew Burma intimately, but, having grown up abroad, he also enjoyed an outsider’s perspective. In Rangoon’s information vacuum, I sometimes felt more isolated and ignorant of what was going on in Burma when I was there than when I was outside the country. The secrecy
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