The Lady and the Peacock (35 page)

Yet Burma was once again where the home was, if not the heart: In 1967, the year Suu graduated, Daw Khin Kyi decided to retire as ambassador to Delhi. She was not recalled to Rangoon, but the lack of sympathy between her and the regime made it more and more difficult for her to represent her country. On her return she was served with a tax bill for 40,000 kyats, even though serving diplomats, who were paid risibly small salaries, were exempt from tax. It was a typically petty act of vengeance by the dictator she had spurned.

A diplomat to her fingertips, Daw Khin Kyi never spelled out the true reasons for her decision to retire, but it is likely that, in the developing policies of Ne Win, she saw the steady erosion and betrayal of her husband's legacy. At the same time the ever more extreme political positions taken by her fugitive and estranged brother Than Tun, leader of the outlawed Burma Communist Party, under the influence
of Beijing's Cultural Revolution, may well have increased tensions further.

The man who had made an economic success of the army's first bite at power, from 1958 to 1960, was General Aung Gyi—the same Aung Gyi who was to become the first to go public with biting criticism of the regime in 1988, later briefly becoming Suu's colleague at the head of her new party.

Aung Gyi had been a subordinate of Ne Win's in the 4th Burma Rifles during the war, and when the army seized power permanently in the coup of 1962 he was given the job of Minister of Industries, overseeing what was intended to be Burma's rapid industrialization.
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A moderate socialist, he was in favor of keeping a private industrial and trade sector going in tandem with the nationalized industries.

But Ne Win came increasingly under the influence of another of his former junior officers, Tin Pe, the so-called “Red Brigadier,” who favored a far more radical, communist-inspired approach to the economy. In 1963 the Revolutionary Council, which now ran the country, issued its answer to Mao Zedong's
Little Red Book
, entitled
The System of Correlation of Man and his Environment
, “a mixture of Marxism, historical dialecticism and Buddhism” according to the historian Michael Charney, which spelled out the conditions for creating a socialist Buddhist paradise in the country—though, in deference to the Buddhist doctrine of
anicca
, impermanence, it was conceded that this would not be a final but only a provisional paradise.

This document has baffled generations of Burma scholars and is usually described as an indigestible hodgepodge. But its principle message could not be plainer: It parrots the far-left truisms of the People's Republic of China next door—for, as a famous Burmese maxim has it, “When China spits, Burma swims.”

Charney summarizes the document's thesis:

The only reliable classes were those who contributed to the material needs of society, such as the peasants and the industrial workers . . . As these productive forces attempted to change the economic and social system, those whose greed was satisfied by the existing system oppressed the material and spiritual producers. This oppression was responsible for
class antagonisms. To abolish these class antagonisms, the conditions that created them must first be abolished. Only then could a socialist society without exploitation be established . . .
²³

With the publication of
The System
. . . the writing was on the wall for “capitalist road-ers” like Aung Gyi: Tin Pe's economic notions gained more and more prestige, Aung Gyi's various posts were stripped from him, and in June 1965, while Suu was laboring under the Algerian sun as a volunteer, he was arrested.

The way was clear for Tin Pe to enact the sort of root-and-branch communist reforms that had already taken place in China, nationalizing the domestic rice market, the import and export trade and all private companies, from large to tiny: The bitter joke in Rangoon was that even the little noodle carts on the street were ripe for being taken over by the state. Burma's course was set for economic disaster—though of course it did not look like that at the time. Two years later, thoroughly fed up, Daw Khin Kyi headed home from Delhi.

On graduating, Suu could have rejoined her there. But given the way Burma's academic world had been eviscerated, she would have had no prospect of capping her university studies with an appropriate academic career. Or she could have taken the even less attractive course of allowing a matchmaker to find her a suitable boy and buckling down to life as an Asian wife, in what was becoming an increasingly stagnant Asian backwater.

Probably her mother hoped that she would follow one of these two courses. Instead she decided to do something completely different. She may well have encountered opposition: In a letter written years later, she indicates that her mother and brother considered her to be often “wayward” in her choices.
²⁴
But if that was the case now, Suu was grown-up enough to have few qualms about defying the formidable Daw Khin Kyi. And instead of going home she decided to follow the example of her beautiful and charismatic friend Ma Than É, the woman she came to describe as her “emergency aunt,” who despite her fame in Burma had left home and made a life abroad, and see what happened.

S
OME
people know exactly where they are going in life, and go there; for others, life is more of a puzzle. Suu's elder brother, Aung San Oo, who was studying electrical engineering at Imperial College in London while Suu was at Oxford—“he has all the angles of his father and none of the charm of his sister” was the tough verdict of a London acquaintance—was one of the former: He proceeded to a career and marriage (to a Burmese woman) in the United States with speed and dispatch, renouncing his Burmese citizenship in favor of American along the way.

Suu's estranged elder brother Aung San Oo at the Martyrs' Memorial, Rangoon, with his wife Lei Lei Nwe Thein in July 2007.

Aung San Suu Kyi however was one of the latter. Her puzzlement and difficulty can be sensed in photographs taken of her in those years. In one taken in her Delhi home in 1965 she stands beneath a photograph of her father in uniform. She is elegant in longyi and
aingyi
and already wears a flower in her hair, but her expression is quite blank; she is merely standing there, as requested. Five years later she attends a party at the home of the daughter of UN Secretary General U Thant in New York. It is quite a grand affair and Suu looks spectacular in a starched white
aingyi
with baggy sleeves; but while her hostess, Aye Aye Thant, beams at the camera with an animated expression, Suu's gaze, pensive under powerful eyebrows and the famous fringe, is elsewhere, the expression on her full lips almost sulky. She was raised in privileged circumstances, at home in diplomatic enclaves and grand apartments, and she had spent three years in one of the world's great universities. But this world, her blank expression seems to convey, is not my destiny. She was passing through, picking up clues as she went, but well aware that she was miles from her destination.

Her Oxford friend Ann Pasternak Slater worried for her. “Fragmentary memories of that period lie like fanned-out photographs—some of them, indeed, real snaps from her letters,” she wrote. “Suu in London, head high in a green armchair, serious, sad, uncertain where to go, all determination and an unknown void to cross . . .”
¹

She left Oxford and took her disappointing degree down to her guardians' place in London, which had been her surrogate home since arriving in England. Lord and Lady Gore-Booth, as they now were, lived in a handsome Georgian house, 29 The Vale, off the King's Road in Chelsea, in one of the most elegant and fashionable corners of London. Suu had a cozy self-contained flat there under the rafters, and was treated like one of the family.

She found part-time work as a tutor, and for a spell also worked as an assistant to Hugh Tinker, a Burma scholar who happened to be a friend of the Gore-Booths. It was a useful connection and one that kept her in touch with events at home. But from the perspective of a career it was a way of treading water, no more.

Pat Gore-Booth, now an elderly lady but still, at the time this book was being researched, deeply engaged in Burmese affairs, regards Suu almost as a daughter. “She called me Di Di,” she remembered in an interview with me at her home in London—the affectionate Indian term for “aunty.” “She was a great adapter, and became a full member of the family. She was always the first to offer to wash up, she was very interested in cooking . . . She was a very dutiful honorary daughter, she respected Paul very much for his supposed wisdom, his mixture of Irish whimsy and Yorkshire grit. She bore her third-class degree very well—at home she supervised the kids' homework, did the crossword . . . She still retained all the traditional graces of her race and yet she was full of charm and fun and very intelligent.”
²

The traditional good manners so essential in Burma can sometimes convey an impression of servility when translated to the West, and the way some of her English acquaintances describe her, Suu runs the risk of coming across as too good to be true. Yet as Ann Pasternak Slater and her other Oxford friends found out, she had a tongue in her head when required, and no inhibitions about using it. When Suu's brother visited her at her guardians' home, the froideur between the siblings was palpable. “Why were her relations with her brother so bad?” Pat Gore-Booth mused. “Perhaps he was envious of her charm. His English was not nearly as good as hers. They were polite with each other but no more than that.”

It was in this period that Suu quietly burned whatever bridges may have remained between her and Burma's military regime. In addition
to being a murderous tyrant, Ne Win was also a hypocrite. He imposed a joyless regime on his people yet at the same time he continued to indulge in the pleasures he had forbidden at home on his frequent trips abroad. He married three times, salted away a considerable fortune in Swiss banks, relaxed in Austrian and German spas, went to the races at Ascot and owned several fine homes abroad, including one in Wimbledon.

Yet for all his wealth and power, he would not be able to count the daughter of Aung San among his flatterers: When he summoned both the hero's children to an audience at his Wimbledon home in the spring of 1967, Suu declined the invitation, on the grounds that she was busy preparing for her finals. Pat Gore-Booth, with a lifetime as a diplomatic wife and mother behind her, is in no doubt that this was a faux pas, and that she should have pointed out the fact to Suu at the time. “From a diplomatic point of view, we should have said ‘Go,'” she said. “But at the same time we were proud of her independence.”
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*

Lord and Lady Gore-Booth had twins two years older than Suu called David and Christopher. David Gore-Booth studied at Oxford, then, after graduating, followed his father Paul into the Foreign Office, and crowned his diplomatic career with the post of High Commissioner to Delhi—where in 1997, during the Queen's visit to the subcontinent, he collided spectacularly with Labor Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. Christopher by contrast, who went on to become a croupier, was studying at Durham University, where he became friendly with one of another pair of twins. And on one occasion when Christopher brought this friend down to his parents' home in Chelsea, Suu happened to be present as well, and Christopher introduced them.

A tall, rumpled, gentle, amiable man, Michael Aris was one year younger than Suu though he looked considerably older, and concealed a vast and unusual ambition beneath his air of easy-going geniality. He and his identical twin brother, Anthony, were born in Havana, the sons of an English father, John Aris, and a French-Canadian beauty, Josette Vaillancourt, whom he fell in love with and married while working as ADC to the Governor General of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir (better
known as the thriller writer John Buchan).
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The twins and their older sister, Lucinda, had a peripatetic childhood between the Italian Alps, Geneva and Peru before settling in London. The twins were sent to a Catholic boarding school, Worth School, where they were taught by Benedictine monks.