Kerry Howley

I’d been putting off reading this 13-page George Packer New Yorker piece on Burma. The vast majority of outside reporting on the country is either narcissistic or condescending; if it’s not an account of the dangers undergone by The Intrepid Journalist, it’s a story of how “the people” are touchingly innocent in their simple worship of Suu Kyi, who is “graceful” and “elegant” and quickly substituted for the masses as a journalistic subject. Reporting is Burma is hard (though hardly dangerous) and it will always be easier to talk about the prolific Suu Kyi or the Military Intelligence on your tail.

But Packer tries something new: He finds Burmese people and converses with them.

Hnin Se is tall and slender, with black hair flowing down her back; she cuts it short during times of crisis. She maintains the outward calm that is typical of the Burmese, but once, when I asked how the rule of the generals could ever end, she hissed, “Kill them all.” She grew up in a fishing village in the Irrawaddy Delta. Her mother was a teacher and her father owned an ice factory; he took to drink and left the family, but not before encouraging his daughter’s artistic temperament. By the age of six, Hnin Se had read “Gone with the Wind” in Burmese. At fourteen, she was sent to Rangoon to continue her education, and for years she picked up dried fish and rice sent by her mother to the Rangoon jetty and sold them in Aung San Market to support the family. She was in her third year at Rangoon University, and just beginning to write fiction, when the events of August, 1988, took place. She saw police driving students into Inya Lake—where many drowned—and beating and shooting others who tried to escape. “As a nineteen-year-old girl, I might not have any knowledge about democracy,” she said, “but I had the sense to distinguish right from wrong.” In 1991, she distributed poems protesting the government’s refusal to let Aung San Suu Kyi, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, travel to Oslo. Hnin Se was arrested and sent to Insein. When she first laid eyes on the prison, she smiled. “I was already a writer, and I thought this would be a new experience,” she said.

For the crime of opening her cell window, Hnin Se spent her early imprisonment on death row, in a block with condemned women. They had to remain silent during the day, but at night they talked through six-inch holes in their cell doors and sang Burmese popular songs.

I love that the awkward phrase “Burmese popular songs” wormed its way into Packer’s prose and snuck past the editors. It’s exactly what Hnin Se would have said in rapid-fire Burmese English.

I once asked a teacher in Rangoon, a woman whose refined manners did not conceal her hatred of the regime, why attempts to destabilize the government through targeted attacks were so rare. “We can blame the religion, and we can blame the live-and-let-live attitude of the Burmese,” she said. “Even people like me, unless we go out of the country from time to time to refresh our minds, we become conditioned to the suppression. We are fearful without knowing we are fearful, and we are submissive without knowing we are submissive.”

The whole article is here, and it’s the most accurate portrayal of Burma under the regime that I have ever read.