Free Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times by Rosalind Russell

and rain trees had stripped away its charming, leafy canopy, leaving the hardscrabble city beneath painfully exposed to the sun’s glare.
    As required, we registered with the neighbourhood State Peace and Development Council, where the flag of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar (soonto change to a new design in an overnight directive from the junta) hung on a pole outside. The authorities kept a list of all the residents in each house, including children, complete with ID or passport details. No one else was permitted to stay in our home; any overnight guests would need to register their names with the local SPDC office. The household lists were part of a pervasive system of control that reached from the top of government all the way down to the home. The regime’s secret police units were used to intimidate the civilian population and monitor people’s movements, keeping a particular eye on potential dissidents such as community workers, journalists and artists. Phone lines were tapped, foreign embassies were bugged and even the military government’s own officials spied upon. At a local level, each SPDC office had an intelligence agent assigned who oversaw a network of informers, ideally recruiting at least one per street. On the phone, on the bus, in the teashop, people were always careful; they never knew who was listening in.
    But Burma was a country of contradictions. Despite the bureaucracy, the Orwellian surveillance, to an outsider Rangoon could feel like a surprisingly hospitable place. The expatriate community was small and close knit; my daughter got a place in the nursery of a thriving international school; I arranged swimming lessons for her with a gentle, elderly man who had once represented Burma at the Olympics. There were parties, film festivals and tennis matches on shaded courts by the lake. This privileged scene was the preserve of foreigners and a small group of wealthy, middle-class Burmese, however. I found it hard to get a sense of the lives of more typical Rangoon residents: the man at the junction on Dhammazedi Road who sold strings of jasmine flowers for five cents apiece; the armed policemen who manned the sandbagged position at the foot of our lane; the women who wandered theneighbourhood selling winter strawberries in little woven bamboo boxes. It was dangerous to initiate conversations, to ask questions, and my early impressions of Burmese life were restricted to casual observations and happenstance.
    One day, two uniformed soldiers and another man came up the track to our house and rang the little brass bell that was tied with wire to the gate. I opened it, and they took two steps inside. They stood in a stiff row, eyes to the ground, the two soldiers flanking the civilian, a bookseller. He carried a sling bag containing a dozen or so Burmese paperback books, novels and recipe books. He showed me a couple of them with trembling, tattooed hands. ‘Buy, buy!’ said one of the soldiers, his voice low but with an urgency in his command. The men had the searching eyes and hollowed-out cheeks of hunger. The soldier pointed to the badge on the arm of his green army uniform, pulling the sleeve. Wordlessly, he was saying: ‘We are soldiers, you have to buy.’ His colleague, who spoke a little English, tugged at his empty breast pocket. ‘No money, no food,’ he said. I went into the house to fetch them each a thousand kyat note. Under the watch of next-door’s gardener, who had climbed his ladder to look over the wall, I walked slowly back and handed over the money. The soldiers straightened their backs, clicked their heels and saluted.
    *
    It was the National Day public holiday, with a high sky of wispy clouds and tolerable temperatures under thirty-five degrees. A month since the end of the rains, a touch of moisture still lingered in the air. Driving my husband’s white station wagon, with the logo of his NGO emblazoned on the side, I was on my way to the hair salon, where my