Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

In 1993, the writer, activist, and physician Dr. Ma Thida was sentenced to twenty years for “endangering public serenity,” contact with illegal organizations, and printing and distributing illegal materials. Her health deteriorated drastically in prison; she developed pulmonary tuberculosis and endometriosis. At her sickest, she weighed only about eighty pounds, had a continuous fever, vomited constantly, and could barely drink water or walk more than a few feet. Then her liver began to shut down. Ma Thida had been allowed to keep a supply of medicines to treat other prisoners, but the prison doctor confiscated them when she sought to treat herself, on grounds that she might use them to commit suicide. Only after she began a hunger strike did he relent. Kept in solitary confinement, Ma Thida begged for a companion, even a murderer or a thief, but her request was denied. She was not allowed paper or pencils; in six years, she managed to write only three short stories using smuggled implements. “But I still owned my body and mind,” she said. “So I treated this as time to learn how to get free from the circle of life. In this way, I could find total freedom.” When her captors asked what she wanted, she said, “I want to be a good citizen. That’s all. Nothing more and nothing less.” She noted the incomprehension on their faces. But her jailer eventually said, “Ma Thida, you are free, and we are not.” Upon being released in 1999, she said to him, “Thank you for this time in prison.” She refused to thank him for releasing her. She clung to the prospect of writing about her prison experience, knowing that her books might be read only by censors, but even to make those functionaries understand her perspective would count for something. Now that her prison memoir is a Myanmar bestseller, she can inspire the younger generation to resist. “My imprisonment therefore becomes totally positive,” she told me.

She was at pains to point out that the reforms in Myanmar had been instituted by the military government, and she viewed them cynically. “We Burmese show tremendous grace under pressure. But we also show grievance under glamour, and the fact that these reforms have begun to unfold does not change the deep problems in this society that we learned to see so clearly while we were in prison. What’s really changed here is not the laws, not even the enforcement of the laws; what has changed is awareness. People are aware of their rights and use them to make demands and argue. That is the full measure of progress.” This was no small matter, in her view; more important than the next president was the population that president would lead.

Under the military junta, people were frequently jailed for their beliefs, but only after they had expressed them in public. Opinion was never as tightly controlled in Myanmar as in North Korea or Saudi Arabia. “It’s always been a pleasure working here compared to Cambodia, for example, where the intelligentsia is restricted,” said Vicky Bowman, a former British ambassador. “Here, the intelligentsia has always been visible. Sometimes it’s been in jail; sometimes it’s had to wait to publish. But it has always been around.”

Although the generals who seized power in 1988 kept the borders largely closed, the attention of the outside world remained vital to their opponents. “Please use your liberty to promote ours,” Aung San Suu Kyi famously said in 1997. The opposition no longer needed that outside amplification so urgently by 2014. There was a great deal of parsing this change among the people I met and a great many attempts to quantify it. The poet and activist Maung Tin Thit quipped that people who used to be arrested secretly for their radical views would now be arrested publicly. The artist Aye Ko, a leader in the 1988 uprising and later a political prisoner, said, “I won’t believe this government until they are out of power.” The comedian Lu Maw drew upon his reserve of catchphrases to characterize the ostensible reforms. “Snakes shed their skin, but they are still snakes,” he told me. “From 1952 up to now, same military. Only a new uniform every so often. Now, same guys but without the uniform.”

Ko Minn Latt, the young, dynamic mayor of a township in Mon State who hopes to run for Parliament, said, “As the people get less frightened, they get more angry, because it’s safe to be angry now. Ten percent are busy with religion, ten percent with getting rich, and the other eighty percent are furious. But problems built during the last sixty years can’t be solved within three. This is a ‘distorted democracy’—not only because these changes are led by the military government, which is still in power, but also because the people don’t yet know how to function in a democracy.” Still, he believed that the leadership had become too attached to their newfound status on the world stage to relinquish it; reform now afforded the ego boost once achieved through the brutal exercise of power.