Aung San Suu Kyi in Queens

Just after dawn on Saturday Morning, my brother and I arrived at the gates of the Colden Center at Queens College, where Aung San Suu Kyi was schedule to speak later in the morning. A crowd had already started to form. Burmese Americans traveled from near and far to greet her. Some camped overnight with picnic blankets and lawn chairs. The queue was colorful, dotted with vibrant sarongs and longyis matched with sandals and sneakers.   I spotted a tote bag bearing Aung San Suu Kyi’s face on one side, and her father, Aung San on the other.  Some came carrying red flags with the golden peacock, the symbol of the National League for Democracy. A few hundred had arrived and a few thousand were expected  to fill the hall during her Burmese address at 10:30 Am.

Prior to this, there was an event in English at 9 am, organized by Queens College at their Lefrak Concert Hall. Congressman Joseph Crowley, a Queens College graduate, hosted the program. Crowley, wearing a Saffron colored tie for the occasion, noted he, like Aung San Suu Kyi, was currently in the minority party in our legislature, and that maybe he and Daw Suu, the leader of Burma’s opposition party, should exchange notes. Crowley acknowledged both Secretary Clinton and former first Lady Laura Bush’s support for Burma, and hoped for more bipartisanship on this issue.

When Crowley  learned of Suu’s visit to the U.S. to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, he told her the people of New York wanted to see her. “We want to give you a very warm, a very Queens, New York City welcome.” Actress Angelica Huston read from Suu Kyi’s seminal essay “Freedom from Fear.” Christine Quinn, the first female speaker of NYC’s City Council, offered her gratitude to the newly elected Burmese MP.  The city council has been active on fighting repression in Burma, and  Quinn acknowledged comptroller John Liu in the audience who has been addressing this issue with respect to the city’s pension funds.

Quinn went on to tell Daw Suu the ways in which she has helped the city of New York. “To see what you have been through with an unbelievable amount of grace and dignity…It gives all of us strength and courage… and reminds all of us that faith and perseverance are always rewarded, ” Quinn said.  “I hope you know what you have done for the 8.4 million people living in New York City…Reminding us that we have power. Reminding us that our voice maters and we are citizens of the world… we are in your debt every day.”

Aung San Suu Kyi received a standing ovation and assumed her place at the podium. Dressed in dark green and black Burmese dress, with flowers in her hair, she addressed the crowd unscripted, giving a glimpse into the way her mind worked.

She began talking about her love of New York when she had lived here many decades ago. “I loved the city at a time when people thought it was terrible. It was the only city in the world where I never got lost.” When she first arrived in 1968, she remembered her surprise to see that New York, a city of skyscrapers, did in fact look exactly like the post cards. She had a similar feeling when she was brought to Insein Prison for the first time. She was surprised that prison was just like the places with iron bars she read about in books. She recognized the similarity in these two moments, not to say that prison reminded her of New York (it did not), but to note that we can be surprised when we discover first hand that things are just like what we have been told. This applies too to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma.

“Many young Americans take it [democracy] for granted,” she said. “I always say to my friends who live in democratic countries: ‘Don’t take it for granted.’” She felt that those who didn’t vote showed “a lack of respect for a right you should guard with your life.” Democracy requires practice and we must practice our duty as a citizen. “Duty may sound like a boring word,” she said, “but duty is very stimulating if you really think about what duty is.” She argued challenges are exciting, and “the greatest challenges are the ones where you have to struggle with yourself.

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The Dancing Peacock

“As a child I would stand on the veranda of the house where I was born and watch the sky darken and listen to the grownups wax sentimental over smoky banks of massed rain clouds… When bathing in the rain was no longer one of the great pleasures of my existence, I knew I had left my childhood behind.”- Aung San Suu Kyi

Peter Popham’s recent biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, The Lady and the Peacock, touches briefly upon this childhood. Daw Suu lost her father, the venerable Burmese General, Aung San, in 1947 when she was only two years old, “too young to remember him.” Some of what she does remember, she no longer trusts as her own memories. “I think this may be a memory that was reinforced by people repeating it all the time. In other words, I was not allowed to forget.” As she would be constantly reminded in the many decades that came after, she was her father’s daughter, but it would not be until her mother’s death in 1988 , that she would come to realize the duty and responsibility of this role.

Popham captures the young Suu, searching for purpose in her early years in exile, first in school in Delhi, where her mother was appointed as Ambassador to Burma by the ruling leader Ne Win (presumably to get Aung San’s widow out of his way) and later at college in Oxford and working for the UN in New York. Popam notes that it was on a visit to Algiers while still at Oxford that Suu got her first exposure to struggle:

“Here was the politics of liberation, being enacted before her eyes in all its passion and difficulty. For the first time in her life her sympathies and energies were fully engaged, however briefly, as a participant in the sort of struggle that she was to find waiting for her in Burma twenty three years later.”

Before marrying Tibetan scholar Michael Aris in 1972, she warned him that one day she may need to serve her country.

“I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.”

It would not be for many years that she would come to realize that need. Reflecting on her domestic life in England prior to her return to Burma in 1988, Suu said:

“We called someone vicious in a review for the Times Literary Supplement. We didn’t know what vicious was.”

When Suu returned to Burma at the age of forty-two to the bedside of her dying mother, she witnessed her homeland in the midst of a revolution. Some of the most engaging parts of Popham’s narrative are from what comes after: Suu’s beginning days in politics on the campaign trail with the newly formed National League of Democracy. Aris was unable to join his wife on this journey as he left for England to take care of their two sons, but encouraged Suu’s companion and assistant Ma Thanegi to keep a diary to keep him in the loop. Popham included large excerpts from these diaries, and they are filled with charm. Thanegi kept a record of the details of daily life, what they ate, where there was a proper bathroom (Suu told Thanegi she should write a book about the loos of Burma), and the silliness that emerged when two people spent a long time together in close quarters on the road. Thanegi observed subtle moments of Suu remembering the family she left to serve her country. We witness both Thanegi’s and Suu’s refreshing honesty and sense of humor in these pages.

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