Vanity Fair (October 1995) p. 120-144
Six years under house arrest made Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a legend. Her release is a victory over Burma's brutal strongman.
"Call me Suu."
Aung San Suu Kyi was showing me around the grounds of her lakeside villa in Rangoon, where she been held under house arrest for six years. I had made a number of attempts to see her since she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. But it was only after her release this past summer by the generals who rule Myanmar--as Burma is now known--that I was finally able to meet the world's most famous political prisoner.
Pictures don't capture her special aura. She was wearing a lungyi, the traditional Burmese sarong, which hugged her hips and gave her slender figure a sinuous grace. A sprig of yellow flowers dangled from the bun at the nape of her neck. Though only five feet four, she possessed a commanding presence.
"It's hard to think of you as just plain Suu," I said.
"Perhaps you'll change your mind when you get to know me better."
I took out my note book and asked," Where shall we begin?"
She looked around and said," Right here. On the day when they placed me under arrest, this garden was still quite beautiful. There were lots of white Madonna lilies, fields and fields of them, and frangipani, and frangrant yellow jasmines, and gardenias--all highly scented flowers--and a flower from South America that changes its color as it matures and is called 'yesterday, today, and tomorrow.'
"In the beginning," she continued, "I'd go out and work in the garden and talk with the guards. There were 15 soldiers, all of them armed. But a garden like this requires a lot of money to keep up, and I couldn't afford to take care of it. Of course, I refused to accept anything from the military."
She spoke with a British accent, which she had acquired while at Oxford University. When she wanted to exphasize a point, she curled her hands into fists and hammered them against her sides.
"Sometimes I didn't even have enough money to eat," she went on. "I became so weak from malnourishment that my hair fell out, and I couldn't get out of bed. I was afraid that I had damaged my heart. Every time I moved, my heart went thump-thump-thump, and it was hard to breath. I fell to nearly 90 pounds from my normal 106. I thought to myself that I'd die of heart failure, not starvation at all. Then my eyes started to go bad. I developed spondylosis, which is a degeneration of the spinal column." She paused for a moment, then pointed with a finger to her head and said,"But they never got me up here. However, I did have to let the garden go. When they released me, one of the first things I did was have a team of gardener come and clear it out. It was full of snakes, and had become dangerous."
The garden was now nothing more than a mud pile, for her release had come at the height of the monsoon season, when drenching rains turn vast expenses of Burma into a vaporous waterworld that stretches from the shores of the Andaman Sea nearly to the foothills of the Himalayas. Her freedom had also coincided with Wa-zo, the advent of Buddhist Lent, a season for fasting and penitence when teenage boys shave their heads and temporarily enter the monastic orde, and the country's hundreds of thousands of monks retreat from the outside world in search of Nirvana, the ultimate deliverance from suffering and misery.
We apporached her two-story villa. Like most buildings in Rangoon, it was in a state of ruin. Its crumbling stucco walls were stained black with mildew, and it looked as though it hadn't seen a coat of paint since the British granted Burma its independence in 1948. The quaint decay of Rangoon made me feel as though I had stepped back in time into a novel by Somerset Maugham.
I took off my shoes as I entered the foyer, and was confronted by pages of handwritten political statements which she had posted in defiance of her captors. To raise money during her years of confinement, she had sold all her valuable furniture, keeping only a dining-room table and a piano, which she had stopped playing after a string snapped during one of her temperamental poundings. One of the family photos on the wall showed her as a baby with her father, the founder of modern Burma, who was martyred by an assassin's bullet in 1947, when she wastwo.
All her life she has been obsessed with the father she never knew. She adopted his famous name, Aung San (pronouced Awng Sahn), and added it to her given name, Suu Kyi (Sue Chee). A heroic statue of her father stands in the middle of a park in Rangoon, and it is easy to see from its expression that Aung San Suu Kyi is his spitting image.
"I always felt close to my father," she said. " It never left my mind that he would wish me to do something for my country. When I returned to Burma in 1988 to nurse my sick mother, I was planning on starting a chain of libraries in my father's name. A life of politics held no attraction for me. But the people of my country were demanding for democracy, and as my father's daughter, I felt I had a duty to get involved."
As she spoke, a crowd was gathering in the stagnant afternoon heat outside her iron gate on University Avenue. Millions of her countrymen had learned of her release from the Burmese-language shortwave broadcasts of the Voice of America and the BBC. Neither the state-controlled television station nor the regime's daily mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar, had summoned up the nerve to acknowledge her freedom.
The junta's nervousness was understandable. In the minds of her countrymen, AUng San Suu Kyi had become a legend. Friends and foes never referred to her by name; they called her the Lady. The only other Burmese who inspired such awe was Ne Win, the country's longtime strongman, who, though now 84 and in the twilight of his rule, was referred to as the Old Man.
An aide came to tell her that it was time to address the crowd. I followed her outside, where I saw a team of her supporters lugging two huge Peavey speakers up the driveway to the gate. They lifted the speakers onto the limbs of trees and attached the wires to an amplifier. A desk was placed against the verdigris-covered gate, and Aung San Suu Kyi climbed on top and greeted the crowd outside. It roared its approval.
There were perhaps 500 people standing on both sides of the street, including a large number of students, as well as monks in saffron robes and nuns in pink vestments. Many of the women and children had coated their faces with *thanaka*, a pale-yellowish paste made from the bark of a tree, which turns to powder and is used as makeup and sunblock. They looked like the gathering of an African tribe.
I was struck by the courage of the people; after all, the last time they had turned out en masse to support leaders demanding democractic reform, the army had met them with tanks and machine guns, murdering far more people than were killed in the bloody massacre of Chinese students in Beijeing's Tiananmen Square a year later.
When I stepped back from the gate, I found myself standing next to one of her closest political associates. He had been imprisoned several time in the notorious Insein Prison, in the northern suburbs of Rangoon, which is, appropriately enough, pronounced "Insane" Prison.
"I knew her father, and she reminds me so much of him," he told me. "The way she smiles and tilts her head--all her gestures are similar to his. When she came back to Burma, she had no intention of becoming celebrity. She was inexperienced in politics. It was a hard destiny. But she had the gift. And she matured in six years of house arrest."
He looked up at Aung San Suu Kyi, who was exhorting the crowd. "We must avoid having extreme ideas," she told them. "Think before you do anything!" Since her release, she had struck a conciliatory tone. But it was possible that a real test of her leadership would come the next day, Martyr's Day, a national holiday commemorating the assassination of AUng San and six of his colleagues. EVeryone in Burma was wondering whether Aung San Suu Kyi's plans to lay a wreath at her father's mausoleum would set off a fresh round of clashes between teh forces of teh Lady and those of the Old Man.
That night I sat in the dining room of the Inya Lake Hotel, a mile north of Aung San Suu Kyi's villa, and watched as searching lights played over the murky water and boats patrolled the shore in front of the residence of Ne Win. The Old Man's compound is ringed by a steel fence and protected by landmines. Two thousands troops were reportedly stationed nearby.
In his younger days, Ne Win was a frequent traveler to the West. On a whim, he would collect a contingent of his ministers and fly to Vienna, where he consulted a famous psychiatrist by the name of Hans Hoff. Many of his trips were bankrolled with bags of rubies and other precious stones, which are found in profusion in Burma. In April 1987 he made a secret, seven-day trip to Oaklahoma City to visit Ardith Dolese, a wealthy American woman, whom he credited with having helped save his life almost 40 years earlier in England by referring him to a doctor when he was ill.
End Text Part I.
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