Free Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly Page B

face as I cross the street or sit in a tea shop or walk into a market. The eyes look at me so directly; their aliveness is shocking. In most Western cities, strangers avoid eye contact. Our glances are usually fleeting—it’s impolite to look too long. If you smile at a stranger or talk to a child you don’t know, many people will disapprove. Some will fear that you are mentally deranged.
    People in the crowd smile at me; they smile at one another. More remarkable than the smiles are the stories the mouths can tell. I’ve heard some of them simply by going to tea shops and little biryani joints and sitting around for hours at a time. People don’t always want to talk, but sometimes they do. If we have time and enough common language to move past the preliminaries, I try to scratch below the surface.
    How easily the gold flakes off the Golden Land. People want to tell the stories that are forced under the surface of daily life. Everyone knows these stories, yet they are treated as secrets. The father dead in prison, or at a work camp in the North. The husband, son, sister, brother in prison. The fear of prison and the fear of hunger: these are the twinned specters in my impromptu interviews with strangers. One afternoon, when the lunch rush was over, a tea-shop boss came to my table and sat down for a chat. “You ask me what Burmese people think about the government,” he said. “Now I have time to find an answer. You know what? A lot of them don’t think about the government. They think about eating. They think about their children, eating.”
    Some ex–political prisoners are so weakened by malnutrition, torture, and disease that their physical bodies, to say nothing of their minds, are never the same again. One such man told me that food didn’t seem to make a difference. He still felt as if he was on prison rations.
    Familial separation is another common fear. Burmese family ties are strong. The potent glue of the family holds an individual’s world together, further secures that world in the firmament. Yet many families here are broken, not by divorce but by imprisonment and exile.
    Aung San Suu Kyi also lives this experience, separated as she has been for years from her husband * and children, who remain in Britain, where she lived before returning to Burma in 1988. The SLORC has mostly denied them the right to come and visit her. Most of her first continuous six years of house arrest were passed in profound isolation; even letters didn’t reach her. This family tragedy—the mother lost to her children, the husband separated from his beloved wife—is the most well known of thousands of similar stories that make up recent Burmese history.
    Suu Kyi’s famous, revered father, General Aung San, was the architect of Burmese independence from the British and later, during the Second World War, from the Japanese. He was a brilliant young statesman whose early assassination left Burma vulnerable to the military he’d helped create. His name has become the prefix for her own, to remind the ruling junta that people still remember her father as a heroic freedom fighter, and that she is following his path.
    But people are not here just because of who her father was. She has becomea politician and a leader in her own right; years of house arrest have not been enough to erase her from people’s minds. The generals continue to publish slanderous, mocking articles about her in the state-run press, but the burgeoning crowd around me proves that government hate campaigns haven’t succeeded. She is joined to her people not only by the will to change a corrupt political system but by a common experience of loss and sacrifice.
    Here they are, the people: expectant, patient, ordinary, remarkable. Their military leaders have failed them badly and with increasing violence over a period of fifty years. Behind closed doors, many would say that Burma is governed by murderers and liars. When the National League for Democracy, with