The military tear-gassed, defrocked, jailed, and tortured them. They raided monasteries, smashing statues and stealing donation boxes. Some who escaped to Thailand report that Burmese monasteries are now crawling with informers posing as monks. The entire clergy is depressed.

Other, more optimistic observers contend that the government’s response to peaceful protests may have further weakened its standing and that the monks have not yet been cowed. The more defiant among them are refusing governmental overtures of vegetables and rice, leaving the food outside their doors to rot.

I didn’t realize at the time how deeply the Burmese monks had etched themselves into my consciousness. I may be three years away from Myanmar, but every time I see a photo of those shorn men in saffron robes, the cobwebby smell of cooking and old teak and the throaty chanting come flooding back. The fact is, I’m more connected to their aspirations because of what I witnessed on the ground. And ultimately that’s why Aung Sang Suu Kyi and I will never see eye to eye on visiting. If I hadn’t been in Burma, the current struggle would just be more noise, another international story in the New York Times.

 

NEW YEAR'S DAY, 2005. There’s one thing Burma has in common with the rest of the world: The first day of the year was dead quiet. Even far-flung Yangon was in recovery from the night before.

Reunited with Than, we asked him to drive by the home of the Lady, as the Burmese call Aung San Suu Kyi. She has been under house arrest in a lakeside villa for 12 of the past 18 years. I wanted to pay homage, as she had been a silent presence on our journey, a mother figure forcing us to examine the ethical consequences of our visit at every turn.

Impossible, Than told us. The road to her house has been barricaded since 2003, when she defiantly drove out of her own driveway. The military was forced to stop her convoy, and the generals were furious and humiliated.

Aung San Suu Kyi isn’t your run-of-the-mill dissident—she’s more like a living saint. She’s the daughter of a national hero, Aung San, who negotiated Burma’s independence from Britain in 1947 and was assassinated shortly after. Today most Burmese carry a small photo of her in their wallets or tape one onto the back of their furniture. Deeply influenced by Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, she was elected president in 1990 by an overwhelming majority, but the regime ignored the election and slapped her under house arrest. Since then, her husband has died, her children have grown up abroad without her, and many members of her political party have been jailed.

The Lady has never fulminated against the military rulers, perhaps because she’s too much of a realist. Over the years, she has spoken to journalists about South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy, indicating that she’d be willing to work with the generals to free her people. Out of the blue, on November 9, 2007, Aung San Suu Kyi met with the junta and later pronounced that the doors to reconciliation were open. The regime, in turn, has stopped describing her as “irrelevant.” It’s impossible to know if the generals are serious or just posturing to curry favorable world opinion, but this may be a slim reason for optimism. Personally, I’m skeptical, as I’m sure most Burmese are. After 45 years of disappointment, optimism shouldn’t be indulged in too often.

Limited and measured: That’s the Burmese approach to hope. And never was that clearer than on our final day with Than. En route to the airport, he pointed out a socialist sign. “To a new and developed country,” it proclaimed. “Burmese like that sign,” he said. “Because to us the only way to a new and developed country is on a plane.”

*All names have been changed, as the Burmese military government employs people to scan the foreign press for “enemies of the state.”
"Where Everybody Knows Your Nombre" originally appeared in the January/February 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from Culture+Travel available on ARTINFO, click here.