Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Ma Thanegi has also written a book about her jail time, Nor Iron Bars a Cage. “I had no interest in politics at all,” she said. “But in ’88, it was young students out on the streets marching, and they were being shot down. I felt so guilty, so I joined in. Then Aung San Suu Kyi came out to speak, and a large group of us went to the middle of a muddy field to hear her; there were crickets and little frogs jumping all over. We took plastic bags to sit on, and we waited two hours for her to arrive. The sound system was so bad we couldn’t hear a thing. I’d seen Aung San Suu Kyi in my school when I was in the fifth grade, and she was in the second. So I mentioned that and we talked in English. On the spur of the moment I said, as others did, ‘Anything we can help you with, please tell us.’ The next day she had somebody call me. I knew immediately that I was going to be facing guns and going to jail. I had to be sure that I would not come apart at the seams; to be dignified is an Asian criterion of good breeding. So I thought about whether I could keep my dignity, and I said, ‘I’m ready.’ ”

A few years later, Ma Thanegi publicly opposed the sanctions Suu Kyi supported, accurately predicting that they would enable the generals to establish monopolies and line their own pockets. She anticipated that the generals would rape forests of their hardwoods and deplete mines of their jade, leaving little for generations to come. “There is not one tree left,” she said. Suu Kyi denounced Ma Thanegi as a traitor, but Ma Thanegi went to jail regardless, because of their association. She maintains that her ties to her jail friends are deeper than blood. “This afternoon I was with one of our friends from jail, at one of our houses,” she told me. “All the young jailbirds and all of us, having lunch and just talking. Some I haven’t seen since then, but when we meet again after twenty-five years, it’s like it was yesterday.”

Misuu Borit, also known as Yin Myo Su, is one of Myanmar’s most successful businesswomen, progenitor of the country’s most charming hotels, and leader of its restaurant culture. She said she found meditation completely impossible: “I can’t go to a place where people tell me to do nothing but concentrate. I tried it when I was little, but your legs go completely numb, you can’t feel anything anymore, and you get bored. My grandmother’s way of meditation is cooking, and that’s my kind of meditation.”

Borit’s parents had a small guesthouse near Inle Lake. When she was a child in the 1970s, her father would welcome the guests, her mother would cook for them, and Borit would perform as a dancing clown. In her high school in 1988, she began to attend political meetings but was afraid to tell her parents about them. One day, she came home late, and her father demanded to know where she had been. She had to answer a direct question. “He said, ‘Go take a shower and eat, and then we will go together back to the center where the students are meeting.’ He was not punishing me; instead, he was joining me. That’s how my father became a politician. And I ended up campaigning for my father, and I cast my first vote for him.” After he was elected in 1990, Borit obtained her first passport and went to study hotel management in Switzerland.

In the post-’88 era, some 85 percent of previously elected officials went to prison, many for long terms; Borit’s father served only two years. He told the family not to inform Borit; he wanted her to finish her studies abroad. But a friend sent a letter that said, “Sorry about your dad.” Borit had one aunt in Yangon with a telephone, and when she called to ask what had happened to her father, her aunt hung up. So she knew it was serious and headed home. When she walked in the door, her mother screamed at her to go back, lest she worry her father more. “It was kind of cruel, but it was her way of protecting me,” Borit said, “and she was right, because in those days, the generals were scared of everything. Knowing someone had been abroad and come back was suspicious. Three nights I spent with my mom, and they came to look for me.” Her mother hid her, and the next day, on her nineteenth birthday, she fled to Thailand, where she nearly starved before making her way back to Europe, to a French hotel school where she worked for her room and board. Five years later, she finally returned home and saw her father. He was done with politics and had set up a twenty-five-room hotel, and she joined him there.