A Daughter's Memoir of Burma 9780231537803

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A DAUGHTER ’ S MEMOIR OF BURMA

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A DAUGHTER’S MEMOIR OF

BURMA W E N DY L AW- YO N E Foreword by David I. Steinberg

Columbia University Press NEW YORK

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Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2014 Wendy Law-Yone All rights reserved First published in the United Kingdom by Chatto & Windus as Golden Parasol in 2013. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Law-Yone, Wendy, author. A daughter’s memoir of Burma / Wendy Law-Yone ; foreword by David I. Steinberg. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16936-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53780-3 (e-book) 1. Law-Yone, Edward Michael, 1911–1980. 2. Newspaper editors—Burma— Biography. 3. Newspaper publishing—Burma—History—20th century. 4. Burma— History—1948—Personal narratives. I. Title. DS530.53.L39L39 2013 070.4'10922—dc23 [B] 2013047244

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Jacket Design: Chang Jae Lee Jacket Image: Bagan, Burma © Kevin Maloney/Aurora Photos/Corbis References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

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for John

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Contents

List of Illustrations Foreword by David I. Steinberg Prologue Part 1:

Inside

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

The Lost Nation Born That Way The Tiger’s Footprints Theatre of War Birth of The Nation On the Green Couch Steppe by Steppe Muckracker, Kingmaker No Return When the Show Opens in Earnest

Part 2:

Outside

11. 12. 13. 14.

Man of La Mancha Golden Parasol Alban Nobody’s Nation

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21 29 45 62 78 94 107 121 140 162

183 200 218 237

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content s

Part 3:

Homing

15. 16.

The Old Road Mum

257 278

A Note on Sources Acknowledgments Index

297 299 301

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Illustrations

Map ii Burma (Marc Hussain, 2013) Illustrations in the text 6 The Nation building, October 2011 & December 2011 (October 2011 reproduced by kind permission of Guy Slater) 11 Dad as a young editor & publisher 19 Our family, 1951 35 Edward, age 22 36 Eleanor, age 21 46 Grandmother Daw Saw Shwe, circa 1940 (reproduced by kind permission of the estate of U Ko Ko) 57 Grandmother Daw Phwa Tint, circa 1913 83 General Aung San & Daw Khin Kyi 89 Dad with U Nu, circa 1960 98 The Nation editorial staff, 1960 (reproduced by kind permission of Guy Slater) 109 Bandung Conference, 1955 123 Mum & Dad with U Thant, 1959 130 Dad, General Ne Win & Katie, 1960 143 Wendy, age 16 146 116B University Avenue, Rangoon, 1965

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169 176 181 186 195 211 221 227 245 255 260 269 287 289

illustr ations

My first office job at the Bangkok World newspaper, 1969 Mum & Dad with the twins, 1968 Dad inspecting a rebel camp on the Thai border, 1970 Exiles: Dad & Bo Let Ya in PDP Executive Committee meeting, 1971 Alban, 1969 Dad with Karen, Mon & Chin guerrilla leaders at Pattaya Beach, 1970 Living in America (watched over by Flex), 1976 Alban in Florida, 1971 Dad & his catch, North Carolina, 1974 The Burma Road, Arthur Rothstein, 1945 (reproduced by kind permission of the estate of Arthur Rothstein) Student refugee camp at Thay Baw Bo, 1989 Grandfather Tong Chi-fan, circa 1930 (reproduced by kind permission of the estate of U Ko Ko) Bongo( tragelaphus eurycerus), 1894, from Du Chaillu’s Travels in Equatorial Africa Grandfather Eric Percy-Smith, circa 1908

All photographs, unless otherwise stated, are from the author’s private collection. Digital retouching by Ultrafina.

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Foreword

Edward Law-Yone was one of a kind. He straddled multiple worlds, crossed cultural lines, moved through governmental and diplomatic circles with a sense of assurance and belonging, and yet was often in opposition to both the left and the right, while seeming on intimate terms with all factions. His name was synonymous with The Nation, the controversial and irreverent, but highly respected, English-language newspaper he published and edited. Through sheer force of personality, backed by his newspaper’s powerful voice, he swayed ministers, generals, and entire governments. I first met Edward Law-Yone in 1958, when I was in Rangoon with the Asia Foundation. Already something of a legend, Ed (as he was known to his friends) impressed me with his combination of charm, ferocity, and absolute confidence. When my foundation offered to pay for a national survey to determine who read his newspaper, Ed declined. “Everyone of importance reads The Nation,” he responded. And he was correct. I cannot recall anyone else in Asia who exerted such influence for someone in his position. The Nation was not without its critics. The active left wing, prominent in that period, was a strong opponent, often charging that Ed maintained connections with U.S. intelligence services, having worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. But Ed established his political independence and was firmly nationalistic, chastising the United States for various policy errors while also criticizing the left for its more egregious mistakes. He was well known beyond Burma’s borders, especially after winning the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1959 for journalism and literature.

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The current reputation of Burma, now Myanmar, as the longest military dominated state in the world (1962–2011) obscures its civilian origins. Some sentimentalists, appalled by nearly fifty years of arbitrary and repressive military rule, look back nostalgically at the civilian period following independence in 1948 as an ideal democratic era. No such golden age ever existed, although an ineffective type of pluralism and democratic rule was evident. Too few of us are left who remember the political dysfunction of that period, when foreign journalists posted to Burma would sometimes refer to the government as the “Rangoon regime,” since so much of the country was either under insurgent threat or in insurgent hands. Internal tensions were many, some fomented by the Cold War’s influence. In Rangoon, a Soviet Union diplomat tried to defect and failed. The Chinese refused to speak with Westerners at the ubiquitous cocktail parties, but they brought in song and dance troops for performances to extol Chairman Mao and proclaim that the East was Red. Per U.S. policy, American diplomats were not allowed to attend. Western foreigners were under verbal attack in much of the press, and were often suspected of collusion with various international political ploys. Yet Westerners were actually scarce in a city as big as Rangoon; one rarely saw any if one wandered downtown. True, there were a few residual economic advisors—a truncated diplomatic corps, the usual handful of missionaries, and a couple of nonprofit foundation types. I remember a Danish teak merchant, a Polish professor in exile, a West German chemical sales rep, and an American airline executive. We ex-pats could all be accommodated in a single largish room, and often felt we were marginalized. We congregated too much among ourselves, feeding on and regurgitating the many rumors that flourished on the social grapevine. Due to the threat of insurgents and/or bandits, travel “up-country” could only be undertaken by the diplomatic community with official Burmese approval. There was an air of dislocation and constant tension that came to the fore only when we boarded the plane to Bangkok. Perhaps we were the international equivalent of “waifs and strays,” the name of the orphanage run by

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the philanthropist Daw Tee Tee Luce, another Burmese Magsaysayaward winner. Her husband Gordon Luce, renowned British scholar of ancient Burmese history, held soirees where he played Bach on his phonograph and eruditely commented on it, while the howling monsoon winds and torrential rain increased our feeling of isolation. In our drinking and partying habits, we were probably closer to an incipient Noel Coward play rather than to a dour Joseph Conrad novel. What saved us from complete social and cultural insularity was a relatively small community of internationalized Burmese. They were our anchor in the uncharted, murky waters of Burmese politics. They became our friends—talking, drinking, gossiping with us, accompanying us on our risky up-country travels. Some had been trained or employed abroad, others had sojourned overseas, and most had been educated in elite foreign private schools, as had Ed. For many of us transients, these friendships were lasting and important. In Thailand— a nation more politically stable but less open on a social level—comparable human connections were not so easily achieved during the same era. That era ended abruptly in 1962, when General Ne Win brought in radical ideological and administrative changes under his militarycontrolled BSPP (Burma Socialist Programme Party). Singularly autocratic and mercurial, Ne Win set about nationalizing all private businesses and jailing the intelligentsia and nonmilitary establishment. The Nation was closed. Ed was among those imprisoned—in his case, for five years. The legal system was destroyed, the rule of law discarded. Though the civilian-ruled state had employed antidemocratic legislation dating back to the colonial period in order to pursue specific political ends and frustrate any opposition, the rule of whim under Ne Win’s military government was palpably different. It was far more intrusive and complete. Our Burmese friends became fearful of any contact with Westerners—a sad but understandable predicament. In the new climate of xenophobia, any “Westernized” Burmese, indeed any Burmese seen to sympathize with nefarious foreign influences, was under constant threat. For us foreigners, it meant even greater isolation.

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foreword

Ne Win had replaced a competent civilian bureaucracy with an inexperienced military on whose loyalty he could depend on but whose abilities were not up to their responsibilities. For a socialist economy, this was blatantly unproductive. The resulting poverty and desperation under the mismanaged and repressive military rule led to increased ethnic and political rebellions throughout the country and across the border in Thailand. In 1969, when former Prime Minister U Nu managed to flee to India and eventually to Thailand, Ed—who had also succeeded in leaving Burma with his family—was already waiting in Bangkok to help launch a campaign to oust Ne Win. Ed took over the foreign and public relations arm of the opposition movement, a position for which he was aptly suited. In spite of considerable external financial support, supposedly from foreign businesses aiming for concessions under a restored civilian government, the effort failed. Eventually, U Nu was allowed to return to Rangoon. He spent his declining years editing Buddhist scriptures at the World Peace Pagoda, where I spent an hour with him reminiscing on old times in the early 1990s. Ed left Asia for the United States, where several of his children had already gone ahead, and spent his last years in exile reading, writing, and fishing. He died in 1980, and thus was spared the terrible events of the failed people’s revolution of 1988 and the score of repressive years of direct military rule that followed. Having left Burma myself in 1962, unceremoniously booted out along with my colleagues in the Western nonprofit community, I was able to renew my friendship with Ed in Bangkok. This was at an optimistic moment—when U Nu’s forces had raised funds for what was planned to be a major offensive against the Ne Win regime. We met again several more times, after Ed and his wife Eleanor moved to Washington D.C. It was in D.C. that Ed gave me a copy of the memoirs that he had shared with his family. As an intimate, unvarnished account of much of the politics and many of the personalities of an anguished period in Burmese history, it struck me as a document that should be published. Given Ed’s propensity to be acerbic when he wanted, however, I

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suggested a legal review for so volatile a manuscript. Several decades on, the manuscript has finally been given an airing, through the agency of his daughter Wendy’s book. Using her copy of Ed’s recollections for parts of her own memoir, Wendy has crafted an engaging and indeed illuminating portrait of her father and her country. A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma has an encompassing span that reaches beyond Burma to China, Thailand, and the United States. It is partly a fond family reminiscence by a gifted author, very much worth reading for that purpose alone. It is also, however, a reflection on a different era in the history of Burma, now Myanmar— and, with Ed’s contributions, a primary source of the period. For Ed was not just an obscure observer; he was a player as well. His ancestry in China’s Yunnan Province, his education at an English-language school in Mandalay, his rise as publisher and editor of The Nation, his role in the bid to help bring back civilian rule to Burma, and finally his exile in the United States—all can be read as a microcosm of the vagaries of modern Burma. Wendy Law-Yone’s accomplishments as a novelist are self-evident. Her first novel, The Coffin Tree, is as subtle as it is evocative, and one that should be read by those interested in both literature and the Burma problem. Her second book, Irrawaddy Tango, is darker but also reflects a different aspect of Burmese society. The Road to Wanting, set on the border of Burma and China, is a disquieting fictional window on human trafficking. Now, in her first nonfiction work, Wendy captures the multiple fortunes and misfortunes that have shaped Burma to this day. The excellent result stands alone outside of any borders—beyond Burma, beyond Myanmar, even beyond the region. It is an honor to write this brief foreword and a pleasure to revisit the personalities, histories, and landscapes remembered by this multifaceted memoir. David I. Steinberg Bethesda,M aryland

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A DAUGHTER ’ S MEMOIR OF BURMA

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Prologue

The bomb went off at two in the morning, kicking me out of a deep sleep. I caught the tail end of the blast and felt the windows flinch. ‘Is it an earthquake?’ I heard myself ask. John was up in a flash, pulling back the curtains, peering through the plate-glass window of our second-storey room – out into the blank stillness of Rangoon after hours. ‘That’s no earthquake,’ he muttered, climbing back into bed. The next minute he was fast asleep. It was a bomb, then; it had to be. In my semi-conscious state, I found this reassuring. A bomb on my first night back made perfect sense. I had come home, it told me, to a world unchanged, a world left behind half a century ago. Yet it was rumours of change, expectations of change, that had lured me back. Word was that Burma, my long-forbidden homeland, was starting to let down its guard a little, to open its doors a crack. Aung San Suu Kyi, pro-democracy leader and pre-eminent political prisoner, had at last been set free. There was talk of an amnesty for all political prisoners. Talk, too, of peace agreements between the military regime and the armies of the ethnic minorities; of disengagement from the economic clutches of China and re-engagement with America and other capitalist countries. There was talk of a Burmese Spring. And falling on the ears of Burmese exiles like a siren song was talk of clemency. In the 17 August 2011 issue of the government newspaper, the New Light of Myanmar, President Thein Sein had as good as encouraged ‘Myanmar citizens living abroad for some reasons’ to return home.

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I was one of those prodigal citizens curious to test the new benevolence. And the beginning of 2012, a leap year, seemed an auspicious moment. The prospect of change is always unsettling, even when change augurs improvement. Even more unsettling was the notion that I wouldn’t be able to tell change when I saw it. I had left Burma in 1967, aged twenty. Only once since then had I been back – for a brief visit in 2001. Now, ten years on, would I even know old from new, familiar from different? The first big difference was plain to see right inside the terminal of Mingaladon airport. Back in 2001, soldiers with sub-machine guns and skulking military intelligence agents clearly ruled the roost. Now there wasn’t a khaki uniform in sight, and every single immigration officer at the head of every long line of foreign passport holders was a woman. A brisk officer riffled the pages of my American passport with the ease of a card sharp shuffling a deck. She perked up when I answered a routine question in Burmese. ‘Oh, so Auntie still speaks Burmese!’ She cast a glance over my shoulder, to where John was standing. ‘Your husband?’ I nodded. ‘American?’ ‘No, British.’ ‘Been to Burma before?’ ‘No, this is his first time.’ But why was she interrogating me, and not him? She must have read my thoughts. ‘I only ask,’ she said with a smart double bang of her stamp, ‘because of the religious festivals. There are quite a few this season. Take him to some of the upcountry ones, why don’t you. He’ll be most amused.’ On my last visit, a team of po-faced apparatchiks had spent a good half-hour scrutinising my passport and grilling me on the motives behind my return. At the reception desk of the downtown Panorama Hotel a bevy of young women were filling in forms and logbooks in rapid but beautifully legible roman script. They worked their calculators and phones

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with one hand, flipped through papers with the other, and issued tart reminders to their male colleagues – smiling lads who hovered about the lobby – to get the lead out and move it. Was Burma being run by women now? I wondered. What other transformations had passed me by? It was only hours later, when the explosion went off, that I was rid of the nagging twinges of doubt and displacement. All the cobwebs in my head were blown away, it seemed, by the blast. In my hypnopompic state – that psychic no-man’s-land between sleeping and waking – clarity reigned. For the first time since landing I knew exactly where I was. I was back on solid ground – the ground of the distant past with its old certainties. It’s New Year’s Eve, our second day in Burma, and I’m on a mission. Tomorrow we head upcountry – there’s a lot of ground to cover in our sixteen-day tour – but before we leave the city I’m determined to set eyes on a particular vestige of my childhood. I just hope it’s still standing. It was there the last time I looked, ten years ago. I know it was there just two months ago: I have pictures taken by a friend to prove it. But even there the changes are apparent. What those pictures show, apart from a brick facade splotched with green mould, is an accretion of rubble along the front of the building in question. Not a promising sign, but one must hope. We set out from our hotel on Pansodan Street and walk to the next intersection at Bogyoke Aung San Street. There, a right turn leads straight up the steps to Kyauktada, the stone bridge for which this township is named, or straight down the front entrance of RUBY, the Pepto-Bismol-pink mini-mall, where crowds swarm in to pick through the cornucopia of ‘made in Thailand’ clothing, Korean rice cookers, Chinese alarm clocks, Indonesian bamboo backscratchers, Japanese food preserves and other imported luxuries. We turn left – a bit of a detour, but we want to see something of this commercial quarter. Crouched on dwarf stools along the pavements are food vendors with trays of roasted corn and bushels of glistening plums, with kettles of hot stews and platters of cold noodles,

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shredded vegetables and meat. On the opposite side of our covered walkway are kiosks selling umbrellas, sandals, handbags, packaged snacks. The poster-plastered walls of the old cinema halls – the Shwe Gon, the Myoma, the Su Htoo Pan – are showing their age and then some. Curious about what’s playing, I approach a box-office window. ‘I don’t want a ticket,’ I inform the ticket sellers, a pair of budding starlets, ‘I just want to know what’s showing.’ The girls are puzzled. Showing? ‘Yes. Showing. Which movie is showing, can you tell me?’ Have I got the term right? I wonder. I used the colloquial Burmese word for movie, i.e. biskoke (for ‘bioscope’). Perhaps that’s outdated. ‘Yokeshin,’ I explain. Living image. Film. The girls exchange frowns; they shake their heads. Yokeshin! Yokeshin! I repeat loudly. If they still can’t understand, they must be hard of hearing. Then I happen to glance at the sign above the booth. MONEY EXCHANGE, it says very clearly, in both English and Burmese. ‘What was that all about?’ John wants to know as I slink away, but I’m not ready to be laughed at so early in the day. ‘Never mind. A minor misunderstanding. Oh, look at all the Aung San Suu Kyi key chains!’ They’re everywhere we turn. Not just key chains but calendars, posters, magazines, face towels, banners, wall hangings – all emblazoned with that world-famous visage. Less than a year ago, the public display of a single image of The Lady would have been anathema to the military regime, meriting a jail sentence. Now it’s up on the walls of restaurants and tea shops; it’s down on the pavements, strewn across plastic groundsheets, side by side with old IT textbooks, battered paperback fiction in Burmese and English, Japanese comics, German manuals for long obsolete appliances . . . Here it is, hot off the press, proof positive that change is forthcoming: a poster of Aung San Suu Kyi arm in arm with Hillary Clinton, whose momentous visit to Burma took place just last month. And here’s a portrait to end all family portraits: Aung San Suu Kyi with her famous father, General Aung San. It’s not one of the black-and-

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white photos showing her as a toddler in his arms, in the year of his assassination. No, in this convincing colour portrait, the 66-year-old daughter and her 32-year-old father are seated side by side, brought together by Photoshop magic. A perplexing image indeed, reminding me of the old riddle in which a man points to a portrait and says, ‘This man’s father is my father’s son,’ leaving us to work out who the person in the portrait is. Enough of our downtown wander; time to circle back. We take a left on Maha Bandoola Garden Street, then another left on Anawrahta Road. Ah, here we are – turning the corner onto 40th Street . . . Bad news – just as I feared. They’re tearing up the road! We’re treading on a still-tacky concrete surface, with sand and cement bags lining the edges. The air is thick with the dust of demolition. Maybe I’m too late; maybe there’s nothing left to see up ahead. I’m tempted to sprint forward and find out for certain. But at the same time I can’t resist dawdling. This, after all, is the downtown street of my childhood – this row of small businesses, shabby shops and crowded flats. It’s heartening in a way to see how little has changed; how obligingly intact things have remained since my last visit – since my childhood days, come to that. Faded shop signs in their hand-lettered fonts. Balconies with green slime coating their carved stone brackets. Laundry lines spanning windows with missing panes. Swags of electrical wires spanning the street. The only truly new addition is the satellite dish. But even these protuberances have an organic feel, flourishing along the tops and sides of buildings like the bushes and trees muscling their way through the cracked masonry of private homes and historic landmarks alike. Maybe the fresh concrete is misleading, and there’s no cause for panic. Lulled by the familiar dilapidation, I walk on – almost past my destination. But here it is suddenly, right in front of me: no. 290 40th Street. No wonder I nearly overlooked it: the whole thing has gone grey. Ghost grey since my friend photographed it just two months ago. The old red brick with its verdigris stains, the cement front steps, the wires and cables strung across the walls – the entire facade from top to bottom has been covered with a chalky grey undercoat. Without

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The Nation building, October 2011 (left) & December 2011 (right). Courtesy of Guy Slater.

the number plate, I would never have recognised the building. Not only has it been stripped of its character, it’s been stripped of every sign of life. The windows are boarded up, the front doors padlocked. And here too the road is being repaved, all the way to the edges of the building’s foundation. I cross over to the opposite side for a better perspective, unaware that I’m lurking at the entrance to someone’s flat. Behind me, the expanded metal doors judder apart. ‘Oh, pardon me . . .’ I jump aside. ‘I was just looking . . .’ Squeezed into the crack of the partly opened gate are a couple who look to be in their sixties. The man, Chinese, is sporting a cheerful batik shirt but looks profoundly sleep-deprived. His eyes are redrimmed and puffy; his smile is tired. The Burmese woman (his wife, I assume) is white-haired, but her eyes have a wistful, youthful shine. They regard me quizzically, straying now and then to John, who is still on the other side of the street photographing no. 290. ‘I was just looking at that building,’ I explain. ‘It used to be my father’s office.’

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The man’s eyebrows go up. ‘Your father’s office?’ ‘Yes. The Nation newspaper.’ ‘And your father was . . .’ ‘The editor.’ ‘The Nation editor? You don’t mean U Law-Yone?’ ‘I do. Did you know him?’ ‘Not personally, no. But as a boy I used to stand here and watch all the comings and goings across the street. So many important people driving up in their cars, one dignitary after another. I saw your father often, of course. But never to speak to.’ ‘That would have been – when?’ ‘Let me think. My parents moved to this building in the late fifties, about four or five years before . . . um, U Law-Yone . . .’ ‘. . . was thrown in jail?’ The man nods, averting his eyes, but his wife leans forward, a tender look in her eyes. ‘Do you know Plymouth?’ she asks me, but the question is really meant for John, who has stopped taking pictures to introduce himself. John says, ‘Plymouth? In England? Yes, I do.’ The woman’s face lights up. ‘We have a son in Plymouth,’ her husband explains, and for a minute his groggy smile lifts in a proud grin. ‘But you want to know about the building.’ I ask how long it has been boarded up. ‘Long,’ says the man. ‘Quite long. For a while it was a government printing office, but for most of the time it’s been lying empty.’ ‘Who owns it now, do you know?’ ‘The government of course. But they’ve got plans to restore it, we’ve heard. They finally did something about the big crack in the front, up there in the left-hand corner. A tree was growing out of it. It was splitting the wall.’ ‘They have two children,’ the wife interjects. ‘Who?’ ‘My son and his wife. In Plymouth. Shall we give you their address, in case you’re ever in Plymouth?’ We exchange business cards. Theirs is laminated, with the Plymouth

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address of their son on one side, their own names and address on the other. They’re still squeezed into the narrow opening, each clutching their side of the metal grille. Perhaps visits from people like us are an everyday occurrence, now that the country is opening up. Perhaps they’re tired of all the traffic, and that’s why neither of them shows the slightest inclination to crack the gate open a tad wider, to take a step forward, or to invite us in. ‘Do you know what happened to the old printing presses they confiscated when they closed down The Nation?’ I ask. ‘Not sure,’ replies the husband, ‘but I heard one of them was taken over by the Myanmar Times.’ ‘And where is the Myanmar Times?’ ‘Where?’ The man almost steps over the threshold to show me. ‘There! See there? Just behind that building you’re looking at.’ The Myanmar Times is the leading English-language news weekly, founded in 2000 by an Australian entrepreneur and a Burmese partner with close ties to the government. Once seen as a sophisticated mouthpiece for the military regime, the paper now exercises a degree of editorial independence denied its competitors, chief among them the New Light of Myanmar, the official English-language daily. Over the years I have seen many issues of the Myanmar Times. I have followed the ups and downs of its original founders, both jailed in the course of power struggles among various adversaries and advocates in the government. I have read about the paper’s takeover by a private media company, and its move to a new location. But I never knew that this is where it moved to: this white art deco building on Bo Aung Gyaw Street, back to back with our old Nation. But now that I’m on the doorstep, it seems highly unlikely that one of my father’s old printing presses has ended up here. The Myanmar Times is a slick twenty-first-century publication – slick by Burmese standards, anyway. What possible function could an ancient flatbed press with a million moving parts serve on these premises, except possibly as a showroom relic? I remember as a child wandering into The Nation’s printing room, on nights when I was allowed to stay up late at my father’s office. I

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remember the uneasy thrill of watching one of those monster machines in action, wheels turning, levers pumping, cylinders spinning, trays shuttling back and forth. Alarm bells rang and rang, unheeded, while a river of newsprint went streaking past, spewing out printed sheets that required urgent folding and stacking. The floor buzzed, it shook, it sent a steady shock up through my feet, all the way to my fingernails. The roar was so deafening that the pressmen only spoke in sign language. I could never bear it for very long: I had to get out of the way, before I too was sucked up, chewed up, and spat out as pulp by that insatiable, unstoppable giant. Now of course I’d give anything to set eyes on such a dear old relic, a throwback to the dark ages of hot lead, when The Nation was in its prime. ‘Then go in and ask,’ says John, motioning me towards the security guard at the front desk. The guard looks, well, guarded, as I explain my interest in the building. In my nervousness I go into unnecessary detail about a newspaper that no longer exists, and the presses that produced it. He cuts me off before I can finish. ‘Just a moment,’ he says, and mutters into the mouthpiece of a phone with his back to us. Then he informs us that someone will be down soon, and invites us to wait. There is nowhere to sit in the lobby, so we stand by the front entrance (another half-open expanding metal gate). I am staring absently at the street, thinking of what to say to the summoned employee, who may or may not allow me a look at an antiquated printing press, when something tells me I’ve stood here before, viewing the street from this very spot. I’m trying to put my finger on what it is that seems so familiar, so recent, when it comes to me in a vivid mise en scène. There, out on the street, the aftermath of a bomb blast is played out in slow, silent motion. Glass shards spray the air. Chunks of metal and masonry hit the ground, bouncing soundlessly among the litter of paper and rags and broken furniture pieces. Smoke swirls thickly over the debris, then clears to reveal two bodies lying on the ground, their khaki uniforms in shreds. Taking the pulse of one, then the other, is a young man who quickly whips off the shirt and vest he’s wearing and strips them into bandages.

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‘Do you know what I’ve just realised?’ I’m about to tell John about my epiphany when the individual we’ve been waiting for materialises, introducing himself as a reporter for the Myanmar Times. How can he help? Gone is my plea for a glimpse of an old printing press. ‘I have just realised,’ I blurt out, ‘that this is where my father got his start as a newspaperman. Right here. Yes, in this very building, back when it was the New Times of Burma. He used to work here, before he set up his newspaper in the building behind this one. It was his boss, Tin Tut, who was assassinated out on the street right there. Tin Tut was the former foreign minister. Someone threw a grenade at his car. My father came running from his office out back, and found his bodyguards still lying on the ground . . .’ The reporter, round-faced, round-eyed, looks like a teenager but is probably in his thirties. He nods sympathetically. ‘Please come upstairs and meet the English-language editor,’ he says. ‘He’ll be pleased to show you around.’ On our way up the staircase with its slightly treacherous open treads, I turn to the young man. ‘Sorry. I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Wendy Law-Yone.’ ‘I know,’ he says quietly. ‘I’ve read your articles. Online.’ The newsroom upstairs turns out to be a stylish loft conversion: steel columns, glass walls separating the editors’ offices, recessed lights in the high ceilings. Industrial shades hang over bright blue cubicles, each equipped with a desktop PC. Most of the consoles are superannuated models with bulging backs, but everything else looks new, not least the large abstract paintings – exuberant cocktails of hot and cold hues that decorate the upper walls of exposed brick. No sign of any flatbed presses. The English-language editor on duty is American. Thirty-ish, athletic, he’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and looks like he’s just come in from a long bike ride. Which he has, he tells me. It’s supposed to be his day off, but he’s been called in on account of breaking news. I explain my interest in the Myanmar Times building. Both the

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Burmese reporter and the American editor nod knowingly at the mention of The Nation, even though it ceased to exist before they were born. They seem genuinely interested in the story of its founding. So as they walk me through the newsroom, inviting me to look around and take all the pictures I want, I give them a tour of my own, pointing out hidden connections between this building and the one at the back: physical connections like a now sealed-off door to a common passageway, as well as other, less tangible linkages.

Dad as a young editor & publisher

It was 1948, the year of Burma’s independence. A century of British rule had ended. The task of nation-building was just beginning. My father, Ed Law-Yone, was looking for a job. Dad had worked in transportation for most of his adult life – first with the Burma Railways, then, during the war, as an officer in charge of the city’s evacuation when the Japanese air strikes on Rangoon began. At war’s end, after a stint with the American OSS (the Office

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of Strategic Services was the wartime predecessor of the CIA), he joined the newly formed Road Transport Board, as Chief Traffic Superintendent. But he didn’t want to remain in transportation all his life; he was ready for something different. In the course of his transportation career my father had had to deal with all sorts of personalities, many of them foreign nationals. This qualified him, he believed, for a career in international diplomacy. He went to call on an old wartime acquaintance, then a senior civil servant in the colonial government. The man was now foreign minister. Tin Tut was his name. The minister greeted him warmly. ‘You couldn’t have timed it better, dear boy,’ he said. ‘In fact, you’re the answer to a maiden’s prayer.’ Tin Tut’s colloquial English was to be expected. Among other distinctions, he was the first Burmese to pass the rigorous Indian Civil Service exams. Tin Tut had a dilemma on his hands. A cabinet minister wasn’t supposed to be editing a newspaper as a sideline, but he, the foreign minister, was having to do just that. He had been looking for someone to take over the New Times of Burma and relieve him of the conflict of interest. This wasn’t the job my father had in mind. He knew nothing about editing. Before the war, he had contributed a few articles to magazines like Blackwood’s in London, to the Illustrated Weekly of India, and to the Rangoon Times, but that was the extent of his experience in publishing. ‘You know nothing about diplomacy, yet you were prepared to have a fling at it,’ Tin Tut pointed out. ‘Editing is just common sense.’ A compromise was reached: Dad would sign on as acting editor for three months, giving the minister time to find a suitable job for him in the Foreign Office, as well as a replacement for the editor’s position. But when three months went by and no mention was made of the promised diplomatic posting, it fell to Dad to bring up the subject. Tin Tut was blunt. ‘Forget about diplomacy,’ he advised. ‘You’re not cut out to be a diplomat. But you do have a good future as a

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newspaperman.’ Stay, he said, and Dad’s salary would be doubled . . . Before he could finish, Dad reached for a blank sheet of paper on the desk between them, wrote out his resignation and signed it with a flourish. Then he picked up his hat and walked out – validating Tin Tut’s judgement about his lack of diplomatic skills. When his temper had cooled, Dad thought things over. Well, maybe Tin Tut had done him a favour. He now knew all about running a newspaper, and newspapers, it had to be said, were fun. Running his own newspaper might be even more fun. He’d just have to start one. And for that he needed space. Rangoon after the devastation of the Second World War was not quite a Coventry or a Dresden, but the damages sustained were worse than in any other British colonial capital. Pounded by Japanese and Allied bombs, the city was still a mess of rubble and wreckage. With hordes of refugees and squatters in search of housing, space – any kind of space – was at a premium. But the answer to Dad’s prayers was right at his doorstep. He discovered that the landlords of the New Times, the paper he had just quit, owned the empty building at the back, on 40th Street. He asked if he could take a look at it. No. 290 40th Street was a bomb-damaged husk, and it stank. Outside, it reeked of open sewage and rotting garbage. Inside, it reeked of manure. The Japanese, it seemed, had stabled their horses in the building during their occupation. But the price was right – it relieved the owners of the burden of repairs. Still, my father wondered whether it was a good thing to be quartered so close to his old employer. Practicality won out, however, and he signed on the dotted line. Now that he had his newspaper office, all he needed was his newspaper. For that money was required – and money he didn’t have. But he did have jewels – rather, his wife did. My mother, like most Burmese women of her generation, had been tucking away bits and pieces for The Future. That Future, they agreed, was upon them. Dad took the jewellery, wrapped in a handkerchief, to a pawnbroker, who put a value of Rs 4,300 on the total. Next he took the bundle to a Ceylonese businessman whom he knew slightly, and disclosed the amount of the pawnbroker’s valuation, saying he did not wish to

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pawn; he wished to sell. Without undoing the knot in the handkerchief, the businessman wrote out a cheque for Rs 5,000. Mum had contributed her life savings as capital. To this she added her kitchen table, a sturdy teakwood affair that settled nicely on the compost floor of the former stable. There was no electricity in the building – there was no electricity in most of the city – but a hurricane lantern and a portable typewriter with a missing ‘e’ completed the office equipment. In this way, with no printing machine, no newsprint, no type, no ink – and no roof – the first edition of The Nation was produced. The printing was done on credit, on the same flatbed owned by the old Rangoon Gazette, who also printed the New Times of Burma. The rift with Tin Tut was soon water under the bridge. Tin Tut, in any case, had resigned as foreign minister and was now brigadier of the Burma Auxiliary Force, one of the government paramilitary groups fighting the rebel forces that threatened Rangoon soon after independence. As foreign minister, Tin Tut had always kept a loaded gun on his desk, which Dad would carefully point away from himself before sitting down to a meeting. Brigadier Tin Tut now had full-time bodyguards: two Gurkha soldiers with sten guns who trailed him everywhere he went. Meanwhile, proximity to the alma mater, the New Times of Burma, was turning out to have its advantages. Dad would waylay the newspaper boys when they came in with the daily vernacular papers, and steal a glance at the headlines. He would then walk twenty blocks (the Gazette phone came in handy for longer distances) to check out the lead stories, rush back to rewrite them, and feed the copy to the Gazette composing room post-haste. After that it was back to the kitchen/office table to hammer out the daily columns under various noms de plume and, last of all, the leader for the day. By three o’clock in the afternoon, The Nation was out on the streets. One evening in late September 1948, a terrific blast shook the rafters of Dad’s new office. He dashed to the connecting bathroom door that led to the rear entrance of the New Times, but finding it locked from the inside, he went round the block, stopping to listen to various eyewitness accounts of what had happened.

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He reached the front entrance just in time to see Tin Tut’s private car disappearing down the road. The only soul in sight was the forlorn figure of Mr Webb, the Anglo-Burmese printer of the Gazette. The old man was standing in the middle of the street and had to be shaken by the shoulders before he would speak. ‘He’s still alive,’ was all he could say. ‘Who? What happened?’ ‘He was alive. He said to me, “Webb, send me home.” But he sounded weak, ever so weak.’ Webb was in tears now. Dad pieced together that Tin Tut had been seriously wounded by a Mills bomb, and was on his way to hospital. Rushing into the New Times office, he found the staff incoherent, moaning and cowering. He telephoned Tin Tut’s daughter, telling her as calmly as possible what to expect. He forgot he was no longer editor of the New Times, and began barking out orders, trying to bring everyone back to their senses. He later learned that the official vehicle bearing Tin Tut into which the bomb had been tossed was a Fordson station wagon with a metal screen between the front and rear seats. This had saved the driver’s life, but Tin Tut and one of the two guards riding with him in the rear took the full force of the blast. Tin Tut’s legs were badly burned, and his jawbone was shattered by shrapnel. Both guards had been carried out of the car into the New Times building and were now lying on the cement floor. While waiting for the ambulance, Dad went from one to the other, binding the worst of the bleeding with strips he’d torn off from the shirt he was wearing. Later, he learned that only one of the guards had survived. Tin Tut reached the hospital in a coma but never recovered consciousness. Nor were his murderer, or murderers, ever found. Tin Tut had set my father on the path to newspaper publishing. Now it was Tin Tut’s assassination that put his newspaper on the map. The Nation bested the other papers – the New Times included – with his eyewitness exclusive. Circulation shot up. Dad’s paper was on its way. * * *

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‘So this is where my father must have tried to come through the door when the bomb went off . . .’ I point to the sealed wooden door half hidden by boxes of printing paper. ‘Interesting,’ says the editor. ‘I never really noticed that door before.’ The reporter leads me to a window that looks out onto the back of the old Nation building. The developers – or restorers, or whoever is responsible for the paint job in front – have not yet made it to the back. The walls here are another shade of grey – the grey of layered mildew, and soot, and old distemper. The windows are either boarded up, or hang open on broken hinges, hinting at cobwebby spaces within. On one of the cement ledges, framed by a half-open window, lies a dead bird, its feathers a matching mottled grey. There is really nothing more to see. I thank my hosts for their courtesy and we exchange cards. In passing, the editor mentions again the reason for his presence in the office on his day off. Something about an explosion. Explosion? What explosion? ‘You didn’t hear the explosion two nights ago?’ he asks. I almost forgot. ‘Oh, you mean the bomb?’ ‘It wasn’t a bomb, though it sounded like one. People thought it had to be a bomb. But it was a warehouse fire that ended in a huge explosion.’ ‘Here, let me show you.’ He brings up on his computer screen a slide show of the inferno: tiny silhouettes in hard hats, aiming their little hoses at a fortress of flames; close-ups of stricken, ash-smeared faces; the incandescent windows of a warehouse tower on the verge of explosion . . . I stare at the images, wanting to take in the full horror of it all, trying – really trying – to concentrate on the numbers that the editor is reeling off – seventeen dead, eighty-three seriously injured, a thousand people left homeless. But all I can think of is how wrong I’ve been. Wrong in taking the explosion for a bomb, wrong in reading it as a sign that I had come back to a world unchanged. Everything is changing, and fast; I see that. Here I am, in the newsroom of the leading English-language newspaper, recalling the career of my father, editor and founder of the leading English-language

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newspaper of his day, later to become a leading enemy of the state. What’s more, I, his daughter – another writer, another enemy of the state, for all anyone knows – am being given a preview of the next edition of the Myanmar Times: front-page photos, lead editorial and all. This is not the Burma I knew, the Burma that those thousands of ‘citizens living abroad for some reasons’ have been banished from. It’s a different country now, and not only because its name has been changed to Myanmar; not only because of my long absence. I feel like a foreigner suddenly. A foreigner with a faulty memory. And yet. Here, welcoming me back, are two young journalists, one American, one Burmese – complete strangers with whom I feel an inexplicable kinship. The Burma they inhabit is profoundly dissimilar to the Burma I knew; and they belong to another generation besides. Nevertheless, they are as familiar to me as long-lost family. Which, in a way, they are. They are avatars, after all, of my father and his newspaper brethren. They have inherited, for better or worse, the family business. ‘Good luck,’ I say to each of them as I take my leave. And I mean it. For all the changes in the air – the reforms and amnesties, disengagements and re-engagements – something tells me they are going to need it. Or maybe it’s just that I, like so many of my fellow exiles, am still too dazed to be anything other than dubious that the worst is finally over – as dazed as the firefighter seriously injured in the explosion and later quoted in the Myanmar Times. Regaining consciousness in hospital after an operation on his head, the first words he uttered were: ‘Has the fire been put out? Is it dawn?’

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part 1 Inside

Our family, 1951. Left to right: Mum, Marlaine, Dad carrying Wendy, Byron, Alban, Hubert

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1 The Lost Nation

Because I was born in 1947, just a year ahead of The Nation’s founding, I never knew a time when there wasn’t a Nation. Dad’s newspaper was something I took for granted: a fact of life, a birthright. At home it was a staple, like oil or salt. It served as our daily almanac, forecasting the weather and our horoscopes, publishing the schedules and outcomes of the horse races that Dad was so keen on, revealing the numbers of lottery tickets my uncles never won, posting the results of exams my older sister and brothers passed or failed in. It announced engagements and weddings, births and deaths of people we knew; ran puzzles, riddles and cartoons that kept boredom at bay. Sometimes it ran stories about us, the editor’s children – with pictures, no less: about a giant fish my brother Byron caught with some difficulty in Inya Lake, unaware that it was already dead; about my role as Olivia in a school production of Twelfth Night. The Nation was my nursery primer. It taught me to read, and probably to write. My first sentences were modelled on headlines. There was no end to our newspaper’s usefulness. We used it to line things with – kitchen shelves, birdcages, packing crates. Or to wrap things in – produce from the market, glasses and crockery to be put in storage, packages to be delivered to the Bishop Bigandet Home for Incurables, or to the Home for the Aged Poor. The Nation constituted quite literally the fabric of our lives. Then, one day, there was no more Nation. One day armed men came and took our father away. A year later they took his newspaper away. It was as simple as that.

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They took away other fathers, other newspapers, other homes, too – by force if necessary, and also when not necessary. They did away with democracy by throwing the elected leaders of government in jail. When university students protested, they blew up their student union building. They seized private property, deported long-domiciled Indian and Chinese families, and terrorised one and all with their allknowing, all-seeing Military Intelligence Service. They called it the Burmese Way to Socialism. When my father was arrested without charge or trial, then held in an undisclosed jail for an indefinite term, it followed that his newspaper would be silenced as well. Under the circumstances, the death of The Nation was both inevitable and honourable. Or so it seemed to us, his family, at the time. Even after his release from prison followed by his flight to Thailand, there were greater losses to bemoan than the loss of our Nation. But years later, when our family was scattered, it struck me as a great shame that nowhere in any of our combined mementoes of Burma was there a single issue of The Nation. I was missing, I felt, some essential proof of identity, as basic as a birth certificate. It would take many more years to recover it. In the late 1990s, I made several trips to London, flying into Heathrow from Washington DC, where I was living at the time. The series of rooms I rented over that period were all in Bloomsbury, and as soon as I had settled in I would head for Tottenham Court Road tube station and hop on the Northern Line to Edgware. Jet lag would kick in by Mornington Crescent, and I’d struggle to stay awake by scrutinising the panels above the seats across from me – the adverts, the Underground map, the cartoons, the emergency instructions – until every image, every message, took on a runic significance. When at last I stepped out of Colindale station into the damp, dusky air of suburban north London, I had only to turn right and cross the street and there, at 130 Colindale Avenue, in the nondescript red-brick building that housed the newspaper archives of the British Library – in that collection of three hundred years’ worth

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of newspapers, magazines, comics and periodicals originating in Britain and its former colonies; in the miles and miles of microfilm with something like 56,000 separate print titles – right there, on a shelf in the basement, were not one, or two, or even three, but thirty-three reels containing just about every single issue of our lost Nation. As often as I visited the Newspaper Library, I never got over the wonder if it – the ease of access to such a long-lost relic. I had only to flash my British Library reader’s card, put in my request for three reels of microfilm (the maximum allowed at one time), and sit back for ten to fifteen minutes. Then – presto! – there they were, those magic reels. For the next several hours I would sit spellbound in the dark of the microfilm reading room, peering at a square of illuminated glass behind which slid issue after issue of The Nation. Then, rather like the young Marcel’s magic lantern show in Swann’s Way – with Golo, the knight on horseback, riding jerkily across an ancient landscape – the world of my childhood would light up before me. I had all but forgotten those grainy ads – those remedies and specifics for the diseases of the day. Santoids Worm Syrup (‘Beware of Imitations’). World Famous Zam-Buk (‘For disfiguring skin & scalp diseases’). Andrew’s Liver Salts. Wincarnis Tonic. And those Hollywood posters! The Flame & the Arrow. My Foolish Heart. Here was a song I still knew the words to – in Madame Zeno’s ad for ‘Modern Ballroom Dancing taught in Eight Easy Lessons, Lady or Gent’: There may be trouble away But while there’s moonlight, music Love and romance Let’s face the music and dance The Old Muchacho Way. Ah yes, the Old Muchacho Way. The glamour, the sparkle of Rangoon in the 1950s:

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Presenting for the first time in Rangoon: Two Nights Only The Vishnevskys A Troupe of the Iranian Artistes In a full programme of International Dances Songs and Comedy Bal Parisien at the Strand Hotel ‘No auction, no raffle, no increase in bar prices, no squeeze.’ Here was a timeline of the Burma I once knew – in the blocks of old hot-lead type projected askew, in the 28-point headlines of the day: INSURGENTS MINE RAIL TRACK, PILOT TRAIN PLUNGES INTO STREAM BURMA HAS ONLY 20 DENTISTS BUT EVERY TOM DICK & HARRY IS PULLING TEETH, ROTARIAN SAYS There were columns by Bertrand Russell on Why Communism Will Fail; by Christmas Humphries on Buddhism; by J. S. Furnivall on whether Burma was ‘civilised’. And there was that voice, emanating loud and distinct from the editorial columns: When we come to analyse our dearest beliefs we discover that about ninety percent of them are based on fallacies which we have too easily swallowed. Thus it will be found that . . . the Burmese, who are in fact the most complacent and self-satisfied race on earth, have deluded themselves into the belief that they are suffering from an incurable slave mentality which is responsible for all their misfortunes. ‘Apathy towards inefficiency is blameworthy,’ another editorial scolds. ‘People get the government they deserve.’

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At the end of each day at the Newspaper Library, dizzy and queasy from eye strain, I would emerge as from a seance. For hours I had been conversing with my father – hearing his voice, anyway: the combative, cocksure voice that lampooned and lashed out at the corrupt, the inept, the lazy, the ignorant, or the merely annoying. It was a voice without any of the fear that paralyses most Burmese, if not half the world – the fear of embarrassment. No editor and publisher who so insouciantly put himself on the front page of his own newspaper could be seen as easily embarrassed. LAW-YONE TALKS ON BRITISH PARLIAMENT OLD PETERITES AT FESTIVE REUNION DINNER Law-Yone . . . appointed himself Chairman and executive committee of the Old Peterites Association . . . His resolution was passed unanimously and boisterously. It was all part of his style, his devil-may-care approach to newspaper publishing. The masthead of The Nation editorial page said it all: below the logo of a chinthè, a mythical Burmese lion, seated athwart a quill pen and a sword, was a quote purportedly from Thomas Jefferson: Let me make the newspapers of a country, and I do not care who makes its laws. In the end, of course, he did have to care. For the men who made the new laws were the men who threw him in jail and shut down his newspaper. The same men who would go on ruling the country for decades. But he must have seen it coming. Here’s an editorial that quotes the anarchist Bakunin (‘no dictatorship can have any other aim than the perpetuation of itself ’) and ends with this warning: ‘No matter whether it be a Russian or a Burman who sits as dictator, his regime will seek to perpetuate itself by killing criticism, if necessary by killing the critics.’ I looked at the date. 1 March 1951. Eleven years to the day, almost, before the coup that would lead to half a century of military dictatorship. * * *

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My visits to the Newspaper Library returned me to a long-delayed task. For years I had put off dealing with my father’s papers, a bestowal he’d handed me near the end of his life. To call it a bestowal is perhaps misleading. What he’d given me was the licensce to edit his papers: he had wanted my help in getting them published. This was some time in 1976. By then most of my immediate family – my parents, four of my five siblings and I – had left Burma by separate routes to settle in the United States. I remember driving one spring day from Washington DC to visit my parents in Durham, North Carolina, where they were living with my brother Byron. My father was waiting outside on the drive to greet me, impatience written all over him. I had bought some groceries on the way and was unloading the bags from the boot of the car when he asked me bluntly if I had read his manuscript. I’d had this manuscript for over a month. ‘Dearest Wendy,’ read the cover letter. ‘Nobody seems to know what I want out of these notes, but obviously what I want is to compile a book.’ To call anything he submitted for scrutiny ‘notes’ was an affectation: anyone else daring to call them that would have hell to pay. But Dad was not above understatement when it suited him. ‘You have absolute discretion to cut or enlarge,’ the typewritten letter continued (another statement I wouldn’t for one moment take seriously), ‘but you will want to pack the action tighter, in general.’ Elaboration on the content and structure of the book filled the rest of the page. ‘No, Dad, I haven’t,’ I said, trying not to sound too apologetic, or too defensive. Not only had I not read the manuscript: I had done my best to forget about it. ‘I haven’t had time.’ I’d had my own share of crises and woes – who didn’t? – but none of them, I knew, would count as a valid excuse. The truth was I didn’t know how to tell my father that I just wasn’t up to tackling the story of his life – a life marked by what seemed to me a series of spectacular setbacks: a long imprisonment; the loss of a newspaper he’d built from scratch; the fiasco of a revolution; the frustrations of indefinite exile (to name only the most glaring low points).

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My father turned as if to walk away, then startled me by spinning round. ‘What’s the matter with you!?’ he snapped. ‘What the hell is the matter with you?’ He was biting the tip of his tongue and clenching his fists. ‘A brain-damaged person,’ he sputtered, ‘could read those pages in the time you’ve had!’ I went on unloading the groceries as if nothing had happened. A show of indifference was my feeble revenge – though what seized me was exactly the opposite of indifference. Blood rushed to my head. My throat closed up. ‘Well, Dad,’ I thought of saying, ‘maybe it does take a brain-damaged person to read your pages.’ That would show him. Of course I only thought of saying it. As usual in such circumstances, I said nothing. From my father I inherited anger; from my mother, repression. True to the course of Dad’s temper – erupting one minute, dissipating the next – he was laughing by the time I hung up my coat and settled in for the visit. But no further mention was made of his manuscript. He went on to write other things: newspaper articles and editorials, a history of the kings of Burma and, eventually, a fuller memoir (he’d written a partial one, sub rosa, while in jail). But he never asked for my help again, and I never offered it. After his death in 1980, copies of his various drafts – some painstakingly cleaned up and retyped by my sister Marlaine – circulated among a few friends and supporters all hoping to find a publisher. I imagined the nightmare of editing and annotating any work of Ed Law-Yone’s. The intricacies of Burmese politics! The byzantine characters and their biblical genealogies! It would take more than a labour of love to disentangle the skeins of Dad’s narratives. Who had that kind of energy? Years passed. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. I had published two novels during that time, and read the manuscripts of many friends – only not my father’s. I had achieved something of an epic – an epic of avoidance. All of that, however, was about to change. My unearthing of The Nation in the British Library newspaper archives was a corrective to inertia. Having recovered one long-buried bequest, I was impelled to retrieve the other long-neglected bestowal – his papers, letters and manuscripts.

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For more than two decades I had managed to distance myself from this burdensome legacy, while always keeping it close to hand. In that time, wherever I went, whichever new place I moved to, the two large cardboard boxes labelled DAD’S PAPERS and BURMESE WAYS (the title he’d given one version of his memoirs) went with me. In that time, important documents were misplaced, precious heirlooms were lost, favourite books vanished inexplicably; but there was never a moment when I didn’t know where those two cardboard boxes were. On the day I finally decided to bring them out of storage, I was seized with sudden anxiety. It had been so long: what if white ants or worms had got to the papers? I went to the coat closet of my small house in Washington DC, and with rising panic began taking down the boxes stacked high in one corner. The two that I wanted were at the very bottom. I carried them to the dining table and sliced open the tape. The first foot-high stack of papers was bound with thick rubber bands. One of the rubber bands fell apart at the touch, but the pages were intact, unblemished. I was about to lift out the next lot of papers when I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. On a label that Dad must have picked up from the dry-cleaner’s after they’d resoled his shoes – on one of those cardboard labels with a hole in the corner and a string through it – was typed: WENDY DON’T LOSE MANUSCRIPT WHATEVER YOU DO. DADDY

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2 Born That Way

Viewing my father’s life through his memoirs was a little like viewing an old Chinese painting. The Chinese have no word for ‘perspective’ in the Western sense, the closest equivalent being toushi, which means something like ‘to penetrate and look at’. For what is ‘perspective’, really, in a panorama where the viewer’s eye is led along lines that slant in so many directions, so many shifting vantage points? Whether the focus is on valleys and mountain peaks, or on human figures in architectural settings, the artist’s ‘story’ is highlighted in eccentric ways, with a freedom and authority that results in a view both fullfrontal and bird’s-eye. So it was with Dad’s manuscripts. Taking up his autobiography for the first time, I was stopped by the opening line: 1911. That was the year they cut off the queue in China. Which queue were they cutting off in China? I imagined a milelong breadline of Chinese peasants being put to rout. But in the next sentence, something else was being cut off: That was also when a native woman cut my umbilical cord with a pair of unsterilised scissors in the jade mining hamlet of Kamaing. When the Burmese want to be polite they do not ask where you were born. They enquire, ‘Where is your navel buried?’ Mine is well and truly buried in Kachin soil in the far north of Burma. What did the Chinese queue have to do with the Burmese navel? I wondered. Two lines into Dad’s manuscript, and my focus was straying. But in the next paragraph I saw the light. My father, an immigrant from Tengyueh in Yunnan, [was] close-cropped even before the fall of the Manchu dynasty . . .

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So a pigtail was what Dad meant by queue – the degrading pigtails that Han Chinese men were obliged to wear by their Manchu rulers, up until the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the birth of the People’s Republic in 1911. That was when Sun Yat Sen ordered all queues be cut off and banned forthwith. To be ‘close-cropped’, therefore, as Dad’s father was, denoted a certain freedom from subjugation. A frontiersman on the borderlands of China, my grandfather came from a long line of mavericks beholden to no particular sovereign. Tong Chi-fan was his name. Grandfather Tong was a nonconformist in one sense, but a traditionalist in another. When at the turn of the twentieth century he struck out from his home town in China for Burma across the border, he wasn’t exactly trailblazing. He was following rather in the millenniaold tracks of merchants, pilgrims, smugglers, marauders and other desperados all going in the selfsame direction. Tong Chi-fan’s ancestral home was a province so far removed from the centre of imperial power that it came to be known as Yunnan, or ‘south of the clouds’, according to one meaning of the word. This wild, mountainous region in China’s south-west had long been inhabited by aboriginal groups of Tibetan origin whose chieftains had either ignored or actively resisted imperial rule. Kublai Khan did manage to subdue the local ruler in the mid-thirteenth century, but it was only in the Ming Dynasty, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, that the rogue province was subsumed into the Chinese empire. Before long, Han settlers from the interior – dissidents, upstarts and other outcasts – were invading Yunnan in large numbers. By the late Ming period, tens of thousands of Yunnanese traders were venturing even further south, into Burmese territory; and by the second half of the nineteenth century, overcrowding and dire poverty in their provincial towns and villages sent waves of migrants surging over the 900-mile border shared with Burma. By Grandfather Tong’s day, the westward wanderlust was so ingrained that special ‘farewell centres’ were set up where young men bound for Burma could take ritual leave of their families (or be welcomed home on a distant day, God willing). One such centre was

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at the top of a steep flagstone path in Heshun, a suburb of Grandfather’s home in Tengyueh. Known as the Duan’nai Slope, its symbolic message was clear. The road to Burma would be a sheer, slippery slope, strewn with the bones of those who had gone before. And if ever proof were needed, it was there for the viewing, in a Chinese temple within the old Burmese capital of Amarapura: a register of Chinese traders who had died in Burma, most of them in search of jade. Only the more successful traders made the list, yet the names ran into the thousands. Jade was the holy grail that drew men like my grandfather to Burma. Jade was in his blood, in his ancestral unconscious. It was a Yunnanese trader, according to popular legend, who discovered Burmese jade – or jadeite, as we know it today – in Kublai Khan’s day. This was a green stone of exceptional translucence and hue, soon to surpass in value the white jade, or nephrite, that had sent connoisseurs into ecstasies for some four thousand years. The Chinese quest for Burmese jade had been going on ever since. Quite how Grandfather Tong hoped, or first tried, to enter the jade trade is not known, but his first paid job was as interpreter for the local British magistrate in Kamaing, an important jade mining centre in Kachin State. For this position Grandfather was well qualified. First of all, he was literate. Second, he came from a province more racially and linguistically diverse than any other in China, if not in the world. Many of the languages he had grown up with were spoken on the Burmese side of the border as well. Dandyish in his argyle sweaters and Harris tweeds, Grandfather was ready in his thirties to settle down with a Burmese wife. He found her in Ma (Miss) Saw Shwe, a sixteen-year-old girl of Shan parentage. Saw Shwe was well read in the Buddhist scriptures, and no slouch at languages herself. She had a mind of her own, and a mouth (as her husband was soon to find out) to go with it. But then she was the niece of Amatgyi (Minister) U Po Saw, the anti-British rebel who proved such a thorn in the side of the forces sent to pacify Upper Burma that the chief expeditionary officer placed a bounty of Rs 1,000 on his head.

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Upper Burma had fallen under British administration, but the ‘pretensions and disorderliness’ of the Kachins was a continuing nuisance. To escape the unrest, the young married couple bundled up their infant son one moonless night and climbed into a skiff with a party of fugitives headed down the Mogaung River. Kachins on the warpath were nocturnal beings, and getting past their scouts undetected was difficult enough without a howling infant. My father howled lustily, forcing his parents to administer shock treatment. They plunged him into a basin of water to stun him into silence. It was either that or risk having him thrown overboard by the other passengers. The boat made it safely to Myitkyina. There, on the banks of the Irrawaddy River, the hegira ended. Ever the entrepreneur, Grandfather saw an opportunity in mules. He set himself up as an independent contractor, and before long was supplying the Royal Mail service in the far-flung outposts of British Burma with up to a thousand mules at a time. Grandmother, tiny, skinny and impatient, had trouble nursing her baby, so a wet nurse was brought in. When the baby went on to solids, he was still difficult to feed and the maid had to chew the food into a paste before coaxing it into his mouth. Grandmother wasn’t that bothered: she was still a child herself. On moonlit nights she would strap her son onto her back for street games of hopscotch or doe, a kind of outdoor tiddlywinks played with flat doe seeds. When the time came to send her son to school, Grandmother delivered him to the Buddhist monastery across the bund. (Primary schools throughout Burma were all run by monasteries; hence the Burmese word kyaung, which means both school and monastery.) He learned to read so fast that the monk couldn’t understand how such a clever boy could be so thick as to provoke corporal punishment on a daily basis. He was often caught setting squirrel traps, or fishing. When repeated beatings with palm fronds failed to cure him of the Buddhist sin of killing, the monk gave up and went to the other extreme of covering up for him whenever his mother came to see how her son was doing. The boy was also a great climber, and faller-off, of trees, until a

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tumble from the pinnacle of a pagoda left him with a broken hip and wrist. It was high time to send him to a proper school – the best school in Upper Burma, some 350 miles away in Mandalay. St Peter’s was a boarding school for the sons of the privileged. Run by Christian Brothers, it was divided into two codes: Anglo-Vernacular for Burmese boys, European for the sons of mixed marriages. Dad naturally was placed in the Anglo-Vernacular section, and there he might have remained but for a fateful transgression. He tagged along one day with some of the older boys in his division who were joining a countrywide strike to protest the inequities of the colonial educational system. At eleven, he was the school’s youngest protester, merrily camping out for four days with the crowds at the Setkya Thiha Pagoda. But when Grandfather found out about the delinquency he sent an angry telegram to the Christian Brothers demanding that his son be transferred to the European code, where sordid distractions like strikes and protests were less likely to interfere with his studies. The transfer from one code to the next involved nothing more physical than crossing a chalk line in the same compound, but what lay on the other side was a new world. There Dad was initiated into the fag system of the British public school, and learned English the hard way, with light-skinned boys jeering at his mistakes. He learned that English was two languages – the kind printed in books, and the spoken kind, with its subtle, indefinable conventions. He was given a Christian name (Edward), and somehow his nickname, Lao Yong, morphed into the surname, Law-Yone. That year was memorable for another reason. At 7.45 on the morning of Monday, 2 January 1922, a thirty-one-gun salute boomed out across the Rangoon River. Approaching the Lewis Street Jetty was the Dufferin, the great Royal Indian Marine ship conveying the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, on his Far Eastern tour of the colonies. It was the very first visit of a scion of the royal family to Burma, then still part of British India. When the prince arrived in Mandalay to play polo in an exhibition tournament, Dad was among the schoolchildren cheering on the sidelines and waving the Union Jack for the royal team. Recalling the event

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half a century later, he could summon up the whole scene: how the horses thundered up and down the field and the players swung the lead and whacked and chivvied at the polo ball, swilling beer between chukkers. He remembered the sweating ponies, the clouds of dust, the sepoy attendants who went scurrying after errant balls in the prickly grass when they weren’t standing at attention, bayonets glistening. He remembered ‘a dashing fellow with matinee-idol good looks, nimble and athletic’, on the sidelines. This, he was told, was none other than the prince’s cousin, Lieutenant Lord Mountbatten. He remembered ‘a great blue-eyed, moustachioed player on the home team’ by the name of Percy-Smith. And he remembered how impressed he was that the pretty little girl with the St Joseph’s Convent contingent who had caught his eye – and whose name, he learned, was Eleanor – was the daughter of that Percy-Smith. Eric Sydney Percy-Smith of 19th Fane’s Horse and the 17th Jat Lancers had been posted to British Burma early in the twentieth century. One morning, while on tour in Bhamo, the administrative centre of Upper Burma, Percy-Smith – then in his thirties – was on horseback when he came upon a well where a Burmese maiden was washing. Her name was Ma Phwa Tint, and she had very little English. PercySmith had only slightly more Burmese – even though Indian Army officers were required, in theory at least, to pass the Higher Standard examination in the languages of their postings. But he helped the girl draw water from the well, and he must have had a way with a bucket, because before long they were married. Not married in church – Christian marriages between British officials and Burmese woman weren’t countenanced in those days – but in a Buddhist ceremony. For Phwa Tint, sixteen-year-old daughter of a schoolmaster, marrying a senior Imperial Police officer was almost like marrying into royalty. Percy-Smith was soon transferred to Mandalay, and it was there, in 1912, that my mother was born. They named her Eleanor. Two sons had preceded her: Donald, aka Polo, and William, known mostly as Willie. But Eleanor was the girl her mother had secretly longed for. At six, Eleanor was delivered into the care of the Good Shepherd

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Nuns in Mandalay, who ran St Joseph’s Convent, the principal European girls’ school in Upper Burma. The rules of convent life prevented all but occasional visits from parents, but for the first year of Eleanor’s schooling her young mother kept a tearful vigil outside the convent gate. Her father came to visit perhaps half a dozen times in all. He was mostly away on tours of duty, or on long leaves of absence. Sometimes he would appear with a large dog on a leash, calming his daughter’s fear by setting her on his lap and asking for a song. ‘Swanee . . .’ Mum obliged, ‘how I love you, how I love you, my dear old Swanee . . .’ And there was that day when she was taken with her schoolmates to watch her father play polo with the Prince of Wales, on a hot dry field at the foot of Mandalay Hill. She remembered a lot of things about the occasion, but seeing her future husband there was not one of them. She did, however, remember the love letters from that cocky Edward Law-Yone, which came cunningly wrapped around bars of chocolate. ‘I always sent back the chocolate,’ Mum would point out with every retelling of the story, ‘but only after reading the letters. “Tell him I won’t have him to clean my shoes,” I said to the go-between. Little did I dream that I would spend the rest of my life cleaning his shoes.’ He proposed to her in the drawing room of a Mademoiselle Marie Denigré in Mandalay. Mlle Denigré had come out to Burma as a young girl to help her father, a French mercer appointed to supply the Burmese court with velvet. She had been privy to the internecine conspiracies of the royal family, witnessed their gruesome consequences, and lived through the fall of the monarchy and the transition to colonial rule. She had been immortalised as ‘Julie Delange’ in The Lacquer Lady, F. Tennyson Jesse’s best-selling novel about the bizarre and bloody disintegration of the Burmese Edward, age 22 royal dynasty.

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Young Edward Law-Yone had come to Mlle Denigré’s attention as a bright schoolboy who could sit rapt for hours, hanging on her every word as she recounted the old days in the palace. She took a shine to him; he took dictation from her. She fed him history and cakes. He brought his beloved, Eleanor, to meet her. Mlle Denigré gave them tea in her drawing room – the same drawing room where governors, district commissioners and former court ladies came to call – then discreetly withEleanor, age 21 drew to allow the young couple a rare moment of privacy. Edward stated his case succinctly. ‘I know you,’ he told Eleanor. ‘I’ve watched you.’ ‘So I’ve noticed.’ ‘You’ll marry me, won’t you?’ He made it sound as if the question was already settled. ‘But,’ said Eleanor, ‘don’t you have to pass your exams and get a job or something?’ He assured her these things would be attended to, but the question needed a yes or no. In that case, she said, all right, yes. So now it was all settled. But they still had to finish school: graduation was a year and a half away. Over Christmas and the summer holidays Eleanor went home to her mother’s modest bungalow in Mandalay, and Edward went home to Myitkyina, to the family’s sprawling timberand-thatch house on the banks of the Irrawaddy River, with a Model-T Ford parked outside and liveried servants within. Below the veneer of plenty, however, the family fortunes were slowly unravelling. When the First World War broke out in 1914, the British had cancelled Grandfather’s mule contracts without warning. Grandfather had taken legal counsel, but it was many years before the colonial government agreed to pay up, and the only one who

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appeared to reap any gain from the settlement was the solicitor, a Mr Rodney Swinhoe. Not one for belt-tightening, Grandfather proceeded to dabble and spend. He had a fondness for altruistic pursuits. Releasing slaves was one of them. Prior to (and indeed a while after) the League of Nations ban in 1926, slavery was still common in the Hukawng Valley and the Triangle regions of Burma’s north. The colonial government’s efforts to abolish the practice cohered in a number of slave-releasing expeditions, and it was to these expeditions that Grandfather attached himself, returning home with yet more shrunken heads and Naga spears to add to his eccentric collection. The crash was bound to come, and come it did when Grandfather least expected. He had placed his trust – and a hefty chunk of his fast-dwindling assets – in the hands of a Burmese con man by the name of Ba Lun who claimed to have got his hands on a Treasury freak – two ten-rupee notes with the same serial number – and to have since mastered the art of forgery. Ba Lun said all he needed was paper of a particular stock on which to print the currency. Grandfather was persuaded to invest in that pricey raw material. Dad was present when Grandfather received the news that Ba Lun had absconded. The old man turned pale in his easy chair and stared into the middle distance. All of a sudden he leapt to his feet, stood rigid, fists clenched, and let out a Peking-opera wail in ear-splitting falsetto. Then he sat down, calm and cleansed, and told his son to go and pack. He was taking him upcountry, to look at jade. It was time the boy learned the business. After that, he would take him shooting. The pheasants would be out in full force by then. They went to Kamaing, Dad’s birthplace. In one of his many stabs at prospecting, Grandfather had bought a derelict jade mine which promptly collapsed and flooded, killing several men. Undeterred, he turned to the art of ‘finger pulling’. This was a system of secret pricing at jade auctions, where nobody was permitted to bargain openly, since the voicing of an expert opinion would affect the market value. Hence the trick was to value it under cover – by means of hand signals under

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a handkerchief. This allowed the seller to realise the highest price for each lot without letting others know the actual amount paid – and the buyer to resell at whatever price the market would bear. Grandfather was in his element pulling fingers and mixing it up with miners, diggers, prospectors, merchants, middlemen, pimps, tramps and other miscreants. A fascinating world, but it was the second half of their trip that Dad was really looking forward to: the pheasant shoot. He couldn’t wait to try out his new hand-engraved gun, a present from his father for passing his exams with distinction. The pheasants were out in numbers that year, but Dad never got to bag a single one. He came down with cerebral malaria and was sent to recuperate in nearby Mogaung, at the home of Grandmother’s relatives – the family of Po Saw, the anti-British rebel with a price on his head. When Dad returned to school for his final year, it was to graduate with the governor’s gold medal in English. He presented it to his fiancée, in lieu of an engagement ring. Unlike the chocolate that came wrapped in his love letters, she kept it. With his formal education completed, Dad returned home to Myitkyina to swot for the ‘Little Go’, the Cambridge University exam for second-year students. His father had made it clear that nothing but a law degree would suffice as further education, so he was trying to get up to speed for the battery of exams awaiting him. But why was a law degree so important? Dad wanted to know. His father made big eyes at him. Why? So that he could have a Barrister at Law sign hung outside the house gate, that was why. And then? ‘And then, you silly fellow, you go ahead and become a merchant.’ The Inns of Court were not to be. Grandfather died suddenly, leaving Rs 51 in the family safe. Instead of applying to Cambridge, my father applied for a government job. Back came a polite letter explaining that he would have to go through a few preliminary steps before he could be considered for the position of District Commissioner. The first step would be to apply for the position of clerk. He had heard of red tape, but this was absurd. Nevertheless, he

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complied, and entered government service as a clerk on the lowest rung. His duties were to assist the deputy commissioner during trials, and on his tours of the province. Often these tours involved marches of some two hundred miles to administer justice and collect tribute in remote border tracts. Dad attended his first Frontier meeting. This was a kind of Locarno in miniature, Chinese and British magistrates meeting once every three years to settle cross-border disputes. Plaintiffs and witnesses, all of them toting muskets or daggers, were heard. The customary law on both sides was invoked. Fines were imposed, stolen buffalo compensated, abducted wives redeemed or renounced. In settling accounts, figures were so skilfully juggled that the money owed by the British side to the Chinese amounted precisely to the amount owed the other way. Between travels, the young clerk read every book in his boss’s office that he could lay his hands on, from the novels of Sexton Blake (‘the poor man’s Sherlock Holmes’) to the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas and Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code. One day a Burmese official by the name of U Ba Yin came to call on the deputy commissioner, H. H. Craw. Ba Yin was a revenue surveyor elected to the legislative council under the British. He also happened to be a friend of Dad’s family, so it was with some pride that Dad went into the DC’s office to announce the presence of the Honourable U Ba Yin. ‘Tell him to wait,’ was the DC’s curt response, although he didn’t seem particularly busy. Ba Yin waited. And waited. An hour passed. Two hours. Unable to restrain himself any longer, Dad barged into the sanctum and demanded to know if the DC was going to see the minister or not. The DC gave him a dirty look and muttered a peremptory, ‘Tell him to come in.’ The scene that followed was so bizarre as to remain with the young clerk all his life. Shown into the DC’s office, the elected representative of the people, dressed in silk and satin of a resplendence surely not found in many places in the world, suddenly collapsed on the floor.

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A shiver passed through his body as his fingers groped together in supplication, as though pleading for his life. Dad started to bend over the prostrate figure and help him to his feet, wondering if he had suffered a stroke, but the seizure turned out to be nothing more than a shikoe, an act of obeisance expected of a slave in the presence of the master race. It was the first time he had witnessed such appalling conduct. Kowtowing may have been common practice under the old monarchy, but in the Kachin State, where Dad and his mother were born, bowing to the knee to any person, of whatever race, culture or station, was simply unheard of. He couldn’t understand it. Had he been in Ba Yin’s place, he would have expected the deputy commissioner to call on him. With a government job under his belt, my father went back to Mandalay to ask his fiancée’s mother for Eleanor’s hand in marriage. Grandmother said he should go and ask the nuns. They were the ones her husband had left in charge of their daughter. They were the ones, therefore, whose permission he needed. Fine, said Dad, he would do that. He got up to leave but in reaching for his hat managed to knock over a small basket of eggs Grandmother had just bought from the market. ‘Of course being your father,’ my mother liked to recall in later years, ‘when he got back to Myitkyina he sent her a giant crate of eggs. It wasn’t necessary, but that’s the way he was. Excessive. Proud to a fault. Always a big spender, a big giver. Born that way, I suppose.’ A few months into his job, Dad was pressing for promotion. He had mastered the drudgery of office work, toured the entire district, including all three border approaches to China, and felt qualified to be a junior officer. Told he wasn’t old enough to sit the competitive exam, he quit his job and went to try his luck in Rangoon. He found work at the Burma Railways – and was there long enough to join the boxing team and get a few bones broken. He would have stayed on too, if the depression hadn’t set in. But now the Railways had no

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permanency to offer, so it was back to his old job with the Frontier Service. He was twenty-two when he returned to Mandalay to claim his bride. The wedding took place in the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, followed by a small reception at the convent. The best man was Alban Hosie, Dad’s Railways mate; the bridesmaid was Mum’s school chum Gladys Hutton, soon to be ordained as Sister Gladys. Mum had sewn her own dress, a flowing ivory silk with organza panels cut on the bias and Chantilly lace on the bodice. Dad’s threepiece serge suit was no less elegant, though one of the trouser legs could have used a press. The stylish young couple were seen off at the train station, to the explosion of fog signals that the groom’s Railways friends had placed on the track, against all regulations. Their honeymoon was to be Dad’s new posting – at Fort Harrison, the frontier outpost overlooking the Kambaiti Pass to China. Fort Harrison (later renamed Sadon) was a hill station five thousand feet high. It had something like an ideal European climate, where peaches and raspberries flourished. Rhododendrons – white, cream, orange, lavender, plum and crimson – foamed over the walls and hillsides. Along forest paths carmine trees glowed like flaming bushes. Sunsets were the early-evening entertainment. Bundled in woollens, they sat out on the terrace of their stone cottage while the skies behind the forested mountains were rinsed in dyes of rose, turquoise and gold. At times they could see two, even three, separate squalls in the valley below them. Then the sun would suddenly burst through the storm clouds, revealing an emerald-green swatch of padi. They even had running water, thanks to a split bamboo duct the villagers had constructed to channel the only spring at the top of the hill. The villagers all took to Eleanor. When she needed a bathroom they pitched in and built her a bamboo shed larger than the cottage. They brought her presents of honey and the meat of serow, a curious cross between a goat and an antelope. The Poultons too were charmed by Eleanor. John Poulton, an Irishman, was Dad’s immediate boss. On arrival at their post, Mrs

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Poulton had found herself short of underwear, so my mother had given her one of her brassieres. In return the Poultons brought fruit. ‘Do you like them?’ Mr Poulton enquired. The fruit was a kind of persimmon Mum had never tasted before. ‘Mm, yes,’ said my mother, ‘they make you passionate.’ She thought passionate meant being active, filled with energy, and didn’t know why Mrs Poulton giggled while Mr Poulton turned bright pink. Dad organised football games, introduced quoits to the local playing grounds, and spent many a night in the bush, sitting up over kills in the hope of shooting a tiger. Evenings at home were spent reading by the fire, or writing. More and more books filled the shelves in their cottage as Dad penned essays and articles he hoped would end up in the London press, and Mum penned letters to her mother, and to her old convent friends: Susan Ho, Lettie Cotton and Sister Gladys. Dad’s first superior, H. H. Craw, had been transferred; the new district commissioner for Myitkyina was J. K. Stanford, ornithologist, explorer and author of the encyclopedic Birds of Northern Burma. ‘JK’ taught Dad how to use a collector’s gun, and to make a rough skin or two. It was JK, too, who first initiated him into journalism. An English couple passing through town one day saw Dad sitting on a park bench, engrossed in a journal, and couldn’t believe their eyes. ‘Oh, do look, darling!’ the wife fluted. ‘John Chinaman’s reading Blackwood’s!’ The Frontier office was up on a rise behind the cottage, from which position Dad could signal to Mum down below to say he was on his way home for supper – or whenever he felt the ground shake. Earthquakes were not uncommon in that region: a few years before, Htawgaw Fort, lying fifty miles north and on the same fault as Sadon, had been razed by a severe quake, and Sadon might well be next in line. Dad would rush out of the office to see if Mum was all right, and there she would be, by the hedge, waving to say all was well. One day they were visited by a tremor that cracked the wall of their cottage. They took it as a sign that it was time to move back to Myitkyina – especially since Mum was now pregnant. * * *

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A procession of villagers, led by fourteen red-turbaned policemen, came four miles down the hill to see them off. Among them was an elderly man from the Atzi tribe who had been Mum’s faithful retainer. He had sat with her day after day repairing the rickety chairs in the cottage, or making little cane stools of no particular use. This man walked seventeen miles further before he could be persuaded to turn back. They offered him some silver coins, which he refused. ‘I wish you were not going,’ he kept saying. As they rounded the bend where he could follow them no further, Mum said, ‘Don’t look back, but I think the silly old man is going to cry.’ It was only then that Dad told her the story behind such devotion. Years before, in Myitkyina, a man had run amok in front of a liquor stall and hacked four people to death before leaping into the river, where he was finally disarmed. He’d since been in jail serving a life sentence, but being of good behaviour was now eligible for parole. The problem was that the prisoner was without any relatives, and there was no one responsible to keep an eye on him. Dad was still serving as a clerk in Myitkyina when the letter from the Jail Advisory Board appealing the case came to his attention. As the prisoner’s native village was in Sadon, where Dad had just been posted, he agreed to stand in as his sponsor. Thus it was that a convicted murderer became Mum’s boon companion, caning furniture by day and staying up nights to stand guard over the cottage while Dad was off stalking tigers. Back in Myitkyina, Dad took to shooting birds with abandon. He acquired an old .450 Winchester and laid the countryside to waste, poaching sometimes in the Pidaung Game Reserve. In the week preceding the governor’s annual visit, the headman of the village across the river would seed the fields with padi to attract jungle fowl, and trim the hedges to provide beats for His Excellency. Then, when all was in readiness, Dad would sneak out and pull down the first harvest of birds. Once, he took Mum along to the bungalow at nearby Waingmaw, his hunting base, and left her with his morning’s bag of some ten

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cocks and two peafowl, a protected bird in those days. He had cycled back to the jungle for the afternoon kill when the divisional forest officer showed up unannounced at Waingmaw. Finding Mum alone with so many braces of birds, the Englishman asked ironically who the great hunter might be. Mum, deceived by his casual tone, not only told all but proudly displayed the peacocks hanging in the kitchen. Disarmed by her naivety – and perhaps by her condition (she was heavily pregnant) – the DFO took off as abruptly as he’d arrived. Had he lingered until Dad’s return, he would have been compelled to arrest him. My brother Hubert was born in Myitkyina in 1934. Jobs in the Railways had opened up by then, and Dad was hired to take up a posting in Mandalay. There, Marjolaine, their second child, was born in 1936. Alban came a year later, in Thazi, the busiest junction in the railway system, where our father now served as stationmaster. Byron was born in 1941, on Dad’s thirtieth birthday. It was my turn next – the post-war baby.

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3 The Tiger’s Footprints

The two nations of my childhood, my father’s newspaper and independent Burma, came into being in the selfsame year, in 1948. Related to these twin events was the lesser event of my own birth. Not lesser to me, of course, and not strictly speaking related at all. But I was confused into seeing a connection. The confusion was caused by my paternal grandmother, a most impressive old lady despite being the skinniest person I’d ever seen who wasn’t at death’s door. Fixing me with her great insect eyes, Grandmother Daw (Mrs) Saw Shwe predicted that I would follow in my father’s footsteps (‘footprints’ was the word in Burmese). This she construed from two separate conjunctions: one was my birth in a hospital that used to be my father’s school; the other was my birth in the year of The Nation’s founding. Given the size of her preternaturally large head, I never thought Grandmother could be wrong about anything. But she was only half right in this case. Mandalay Hospital where I was born did indeed use to be St Peter’s, my father’s alma mater. The birth of The Nation did not, however, coincide with mine. I was born in April 1947. The Nation came into being a year later. Grandmother had simply conflated the two dates. But the half-truths of childhood have long half-lives. Even when I grew up and got the chronology straight, so ingrained was my identification with The Nation that I often had to stop and think whether I was born in 1947 or 1948 – or whether The Nation was founded in 1948 or the year before. Of course by the time I reached that melancholy stage of childhood

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Grandmother Daw Saw Shwe, circa 1940. Courtesy of the estate of U Ko Ko.

known as the age of reason, all the big events that had dominated the lives of my parents and siblings – war, independence, the early days of Dad’s newspaper – were ancient history. I grew up in The Nation’s fat years. ‘Don’t think money grows on trees!’ Mum would often say. I didn’t think money grew on trees. I knew full well where money came from: it was printed downstairs, on old machines. This was no secret: everyone knew of the connection between our house and money, for we lived in the Thomas de la Rue Building. ‘Ah, Thomas de la Rue!’ people would say, at the mention of our address. ‘The mint!’ Before the Thomas de la Rue Company became the world’s largest printer of banknotes, it was the largest printer of postage stamps for Britain and its colonies. And before that it produced playing cards. Over the course of its long and lucrative history Thomas de la Rue boasted many industry breakthroughs: the first envelope folding machine (shown at the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851); the first ‘practical’ fountain pen in 1881 (described by its designer as one that ‘can not only be filled in a flash and written with, but could be used to syringe your ears and

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spray the geraniums with insecticide’); the first through-the-wall ATM machine in 1967. But printing money was what Thomas de la Rue was best at, and the surge in the company’s twentieth-century fortunes came from entering the Nationalist Chinese currency racket during the hyperinflation of 1937–49. To pay for its costly wars and mounting debts, the Chiang Kai-shek government needed ever larger amounts of cash, which it produced first by manipulating the banking system with disastrous consequences, then by running off unsecured banknotes in quantities that guaranteed gross devaluation. When the currency collapsed, so did Chiang’s Nationalist government. But while the Nationalist funny-money spree lasted, Thomas de la Rue churned out acres of Chinese banknotes in a secret factory within the French settlement of Shanghai. When the Second World War broke out and France fell, de la Rue moved its printing operations to a backup plant in Rangoon, and when Rangoon fell, to Bombay. By the early 1950s, part of the old Rangoon plant on Campbell Road was being rented out as a private residence (to our family), and the printing presses were no longer producing the Chiang Kaishek specie, or any specie at all. It still smelled of money, however – or so it seemed to me as a child. Dad’s newspaper offices had that same inky, rusty, machine-oil smell. Years later I learned that one of the old Thomas de la Rue presses had in fact been sold to The Nation back in the 1950s. My olfactory sense may have been keener than I realised. In my earliest memories of the Thomas de la Rue house, we’re all spread out on the second floor: my parents, my sister, my brothers, me. Hubert, the eldest, is seventeen. Marjolaine (‘Marlaine’ to us) is fifteen. Then there’s Alban, age fourteen, and Byron, age ten. I am four years old. Jocelyn, aka Jo Jo, the youngest member of the family, has yet to come on the scene. Offices occupied the ground floor, some in use by people I knew only as clucks and pyoons (clerks and peons), some littered with paper and massive machinery. As the building’s residential tenants, we had

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the run of the open areas, the two top floors and the big roof terrace. On the terrace I was allowed now and then to stay up past bedtime with my older siblings. While my sister and her friends lounged on deckchairs, chatting and giggling, and my brothers and their friends sat cross-legged on mats, strumming their guitars and singing, I would ride around on my red tricycle, up and down the wide terrace, until, sweaty and tired, I would collapse onto a mat, to worry about the end of the world. It was a worry that preyed on the grown-ups, too, though they tried to hide it from me. But from their sighs and whispers, their snatches of conversation, I put two and two together. ‘What’s the world coming to?’ I heard. And: ‘It can only come to a bad end.’ Or: ‘We’ll all be wiped out anyway.’ Setting out to destroy the world were two Japanese officers called Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were responsible for something called the atomic bomb. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the only villains. Dacoits and insurgents were also to blame. Dacoits were robbers with guns and knives. Even police made themselves scarce at the mere mention of dacoits. Insurgents were dacoits who blew up trains and bridges and set fire to villages. But at least insurgents kept to the countryside. But how exactly were atomic bombs, or dacoits and insurgents, going to make the whole world come to an end? Discreetly, I tried to get to the bottom of things, asking in an offhand way whether the rumours were true. No one said yes, but no one said no either. It had to be true, then. And that meant only one thing: when the world ended, nothing would be left. Nothing. Flat on my back on the floor of the terrace, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to imagine Nothing. Impossible. There was always Something weaselling its way in. If only someone, anyone, would tell me the truth. The one person who would know was Dad. Dad had the answer to every important question. But Dad was gone all day, and I was already asleep when he came home at night. Some mornings, after I was dressed and ready for school, I was allowed to wake him with his newspaper and Nescafé. I would have to wait till he’d had his first sip before climbing onto

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his bed. Lying on his back with his elbows on the mattress, he would lift his forearms so I could step onto the stirrups of his palms. Some practice was needed. It took a few repetitions of falling off and climbing back on before I could find my balance. ‘Ready?’ he would ask. Then, la-da-dee-ing the tune from The Merry Widow waltz, Dad’s hands would lock over my feet while he lifted me. When our arms were fully extended – his towards the ceiling, mine toward the walls – he would hold me there, teetering, for a few seconds. Then came the ‘Rom-pa-pa-rrrromppp!’ announcing the end of our circus act, and it was up to me to fall off the bed without hurting myself. ‘Off you go now,’ he’d say, reaching for his paper. I couldn’t understand why he was always so eager to read it every single day. It was his newspaper, after all. He already knew every last thing that had gone into it. At the bottom of each page it said, ‘Edited, Printed & Published by U Law Yone for The Nation Ltd., at the “Nation Press”, 290 40th Street, Rangoon.’ But nothing was as important to my father as his newspaper. He stayed up all night to put it to bed (like a baby, I thought, whenever I heard the phrase). Once again, questions about the end of the world would have to wait. I went to my nanny, Than May. ‘Tell me!’ I insisted, anxiously kneading the soft flesh on her forearm. ‘Just tell me. Is the world going to end?’ I spoke mostly English with my immediate family, Burmese to my other relatives and to the servants. So what I asked Than May was whether the world was going to ‘fall over’. ‘If it falls over, it falls over,’ came the heartless reply. ‘But I don’t want the world to fall over! I don’t want you to be . . . lost.’ I started to sniffle. I couldn’t imagine a world without Than May, who had been with me for as long as I could remember. ‘Then don’t say things you don’t want to have happen,’ Than May scolded. Then she spat, thwee-thwa, to cancel out the bad luck I might have brought on. I waited for the spell to settle. ‘So now the world is not going to fall over?’

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‘Haw! You see? You’re saying it again.’ And she would go through the whole business with the thwee-thwa again. If only I could believe her. But my nanny didn’t know everything. She was the same age as my sister Marlaine, who was already at university, but she, Than May, had never learned to read. I could read. I could see for myself the big black words jumping out at me from our newspaper. BOMB. FIRE. DACOITS. SHOOTING. POLICE. Than May couldn’t read, but she could recognise letters, even English letters. Sometimes, she would unfurl the newspaper cone that our afternoon snack of banana fritters came wrapped in, point to the familiar flag on the masthead and pretend to read ‘the nation’. My nanny was good at giving the impression she knew more than she really did. When one of her admirers handed her a letter, she would unfold it and frown at its contents for a long time before folding it up again – as though she had carefully read it. Then she’d tuck it into the front of her blouse, or into the black band at the waist of her longyi, and walk on with an air of indifference, her flat bum swaying and her flat little nose in the air. Later, on the back stairs where no one could see us, or when Mum was out for the evening, I would read out these letters to her. Afterwards, face twitching in concentration – insolent, Mum called Than May’s pouty expression, for failing to show remorse when scolded – Than May would dictate her replies to me. Some of our correspondence was in Burmese. I liked writing the Burmese script, which unlike the English alphabet was all circles and half-circles. If I took my time, I could produce a letter that looked pleasing – to Than May, at least. ‘Ha! Beautiful handwriting! Now tell me what you wrote.’ The problem was that I didn’t always understand what I was reading, or much of what I was writing, either. English was easier. I stuck to capital letters, in the style of headlines. THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND LETTER. I CANNOT SEE YOU TONIGHT. Letters, I had observed, must always be acknowledged as ‘kind’. Sometimes it was necessary to be blunt. IF YOU DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE I WILL CALL THE POLICE. Soon I was reading and writing so many letters that I lost track of

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what I’d said to whom. But a few of ‘our’ replies were increasingly friendly. MEET ME THIS EVENING, PLEASE DON’T BE LATE. One afternoon I came home from school to find my mother acting like a policeman. The police had in fact been and gone earlier in the day, I later learned. Mum was now taking up where they had left off, interrogating Than May. It seemed one of my uncles had come home and found a stranger in the house. He had spotted the intruder at a window on the top storey. By the time he sprinted upstairs, shouting, the man was gone. Than May was there, however. Suspiciously dusting. So who was he? Mum enquired in a conversational tone full of threat. Than May, pale and far from insolent for a change, swore she didn’t have the faintest idea. The man – she had never seen him before in her life, never! – just walked in, pulled her hand, and left. ‘Pulled? What do you mean pulled? Show me.’ ‘Like this, Mummy.’ Than May clasped my mother on the wrist. ‘Just like this. It didn’t hurt or anything.’ Than May shot me a look – and I caught on that the hand-puller was someone she knew, someone I knew, because I had written to him, even though I couldn’t remember who it was. I had a feeling it was one of the clucks and pyoons from downstairs. My heart was beating so hard, I was sure my mother would wheel round, demanding, ‘What’s that noise?’ as she often did at sounds no one else noticed. In the end Mum let the matter drop, and the stranger’s identity remained a mystery. But her suspicion of Than May never let up. ‘She’s a sly one,’ she’d say, even when my nanny was on her best behaviour. Nothing escaped Mum’s notice, especially not Than May’s comings and goings. Quite why she had to be watched so closely was a mystery, but it had to do with ‘bringing strange men into the house’. Our house was already filled with strange men – dotty uncles, mad cousins, servants with sudden tempers, private tutors with peculiar tics – so what was the big deal? Mum’s vigilance, I sensed, was somehow linked to the dark secret that no one would confirm or deny: the unspeakable end of the world. * * *

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The truth of the matter was that outside the cocoon of our large household, life in the early 1950s was far from tranquil. Independence had been won, but at no small cost. On the morning of 19 July 1947, 32-year-old General Aung San, leader of the interim Burmese government suing for independence, had called a meeting of the Executive Council in Rangoon. The meeting was well under way at Secretariat when a jeep with a false licence plate bearing five men in army uniform was waved through the gates by unsuspecting guards. The armed men left the jeep running while they jumped out at the entrance to one of the ministries in that stately colonial edifice and ran up the stairs. Viscount ( John) Slim, son of Field Marshal William Slim, commander-in-chief of the Allied Land Forces in South-East Asia, was in Rangoon serving as a young Indian Army officer when he heard the gunfire from a mile away. What struck him about the noise, he recently recalled, was how long it went on – unnecessarily long, it seemed to him later, when he found out the cause. By the time the gunmen made their escape in the jeep they had left idling, seven of the ten men upstairs in the Council Chamber were either dead or dying. Aung San was certainly dead. So was his elder brother, and one of his young aides. Momentum towards independence sped up in the wake of the assassination. The final negotiations were taken over by U Nu, leader of the majority party, the popular front known as the AFPFL (AntiFascist People’s Freedom League). Six months later, at the astrologically determined time of twenty minutes past four on the morning of 4 January 1948, independence was declared. The Union of Burma was finally free – free of the Japanese, free of the British, free to start tearing itself apart. Less than six months later, the country was in chaos, with the central government under attack from a multiplicity of insurgent groups: the ‘Red Flag’ and ‘White Flag’ Communists; the ‘White Band’ and ‘Yellow Band’ PVO (the People’s Volunteer Organisation, formerly General Aung San’s private army); the Union Military Police; rogue elements from the AFPFL; half a dozen ethnic armies, and marauding dacoits with no political affiliations.

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For the next two years, the country was effectively under martial law as civil war continued on a myriad of fronts, with every warring faction split into two or more sub-factions, and rebel forces controlling nearly nine-tenths of the land. At one point, with Karen rebels threatening to take over the government from their stronghold just nine miles outside Rangoon, Dad found himself in hostage negotiations. One of his employees – Jimmy, the advertising manager – had been captured by the PVO and was about to be taken away somewhere by boat. Jimmy was a Karen. The Karens are the ethnic minority inhabiting the south and south east of Burma. The PVO were known to hate Karens, especially their armed faction, the KNDO (Karen National Defence Organisation). Jimmy was not a member of the KNDO. True, he had won a Military Cross during the war, but he was better known for playing the accordion. Unfortunately, that counted for nothing with the PVO. What counted was that Jimmy owned a gun. The PVO were especially intolerant of Karens with guns. Some of them had recently marched into Rangoon chanting, ‘We want to eat Karen flesh.’ Dad hurried to the wharf to bargain with the PVO chief. ‘Bogyi,’ he began politely (Bogyi could mean either Boss, or Colonel, or Big White Man), ‘you need the Karen’s gun. We need the Karen. You’ve taken his gun. May we have him back?’ They argued back and forth for a long time, but in the end the PVO chief gave in and let Jimmy go. Dad and Jimmy had just got back to the office to celebrate Jimmy’s freedom with whisky (kept on hand for just such occasions) when the phone rang. It was Mum. ‘This is your wife,’ she announced. She talked that way – as if he might have forgotten who she was – whenever she was miffed. ‘Some men have come and taken your gun.’ Mum was in the bathroom when they drove up in front of the house. She looked out of the window and could see that the men getting out of their jeep were PVO types: they were in some sort of uniform, anyway. Whether they were Yellow Band or White Band she didn’t know and she didn’t care. To her they looked like dacoits, so

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the first thing she did was unscrew her diamond earrings and hide them on the windowsill. Then she went outside to ask the intruders what they wanted. The men weren’t rude, but they were carrying grenades. ‘Auntie,’ said their leader, ‘we don’t want to cause trouble. We’re just going around collecting arms, and we know Uncle has a Colt.’ Without a word Mum went into the bedroom and came back with the six-shooter dangling from her fingers like a dead rat she couldn’t wait to dispose of. ‘Here, take it,’ she said to their leader. ‘But I want a receipt.’ ‘A receipt, Auntie?’ ‘Yes, a receipt. For my husband’s gun. Colt.’ One of the men scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to her. ‘Wait a minute,’ said Mum, as he was turning to leave. ‘That’s my pen. I want it back.’ The man looked at it for a long time before handing it over. He seemed more taken by Mum’s Parker than by Dad’s Colt. ‘And that’s when I recognised him,’ Mum said later, when Dad was home. ‘He had a mask, a handkerchief tied across his nose, but I saw his eyes. The fellow was U Tint’s son. I’m sure of it. That’s how they knew about the Colt.’ I wasn’t surprised that the masked man was a son of U Tint. This scary, rowdy drunk was one of Dad’s wartime friends. Every time I heard his voice I ran and hid. He had blood-red lips from chewing betel nut, but I worried that there might be real blood in there as well, on account of his habit of biting people while intoxicated. Yet none of the adults seemed to mind either his drinking or his biting. Everyone just laughed at him as if he were a big bumbling dog. But whenever he bit me, it hurt, even though he said he was just playing. If I were just playing in that way, I’d get slapped so hard my thigh would break, as my nanny liked to say. This U Tint’s son was friendly with my brothers at one time, and that’s when he must have heard about, or seen, Dad’s gun. It made sense to me. A masked man who stole his friends’ father’s gun was just the sort of son that a man who bit children would raise.

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‘I married a brave one all right,’ Dad said about Mum after he stopped laughing his head off about the diamond earrings and the receipt. On another occasion, an armed man barged into Dad’s office, demanding the refutation of a story he had been running. The Nation had alleged that barrels of oil were being stolen from river barges. The man said he didn’t deny oil was being stolen. But he didn’t like the implication that thieving could only have been done with the connivance of the river patroller, especially since he was that patroller. ‘Mmm,’ said Dad, nodding reflectively. ‘Well, Uncle, what are you thinking?’ the patroller asked, impatient. Dad said he was thinking what a good thing it was that The Nation staff had been trained to bolt the doors downstairs and pick up crowbars to prevent the exit of anyone who entered the premises with a sub-machine gun. The patroller stared at him for a long time, no doubt pondering whether and how to call his bluff. Then, laughing to show there were no hard feelings, he removed the magazine from his sten. ‘What can you give me then, Uncle?’ he asked, referring to the retraction he wanted. ‘Tea,’ said Dad, and offered him a cup, which he slurped down gratefully. No more mention was made of the retraction. Dad escorted the man downstairs and showed him out the door. Other Nation staff had their own brushes with armed invaders. The circulation department was run by U Thant Zin or, more precisely, by U Thant Zin’s capable wife. Once, on the way to the bank with 5,000 kyat’s worth of office funds in her bag, Mrs Thant Zin came face to face with a gunman who had just held up the dentist next door. The gunman backed out the door with his barrel pointed at her the whole time, but she coolly stared him down. Yes, the world outside was a dangerous place: by far the safest place was home. ‘Safety in numbers,’ Mum used to say. Whichever house we moved to, however small or large, it was always so overpopulated that any troublemaker was bound to think twice about dropping in. Relatives and friends came and went non-stop. Mostly they came and

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stayed. There was Mum’s brother, Uncle Polo, who claimed that in order to preserve his sanity he required occasional ‘domestic leave’ (as he called the frequent abandonment of his wife and four children in Myingyan, a town in the Dry Zone). Our house was Uncle Polo’s sanatorium, a benign bedlam where he could recline on the couch all day, shrouded in cheroot smoke, without being nagged or harassed. Sometimes he brought his eldest son Edward with him. Edward was my age, but unusually quiet and cautious, I thought, for a boy. He got on Mum’s nerves, nevertheless. ‘Donald!’ Her accusing tone would startle Uncle Polo out of his reverie, and he’d spend the next minute swatting the cigar ash off the front of his vest which, despite the washerwoman’s potent bleach, always came out the colour of an old tooth. Only his sister called him Donald. Everyone else called him Polo, in honour of his polo-playing father. ‘Donald! Your son spilled ink onto the couch and it’s never going to wash out now!’ ‘Must be,’ Polo would comment, meaning, ‘what must be, must be.’ Sucking his teeth, he would settle back into his recumbent position and gaze at his son with mild curiosity, as though he’d never seen the boy before. Mum’s two elderly cousins, Auntie Zon and Auntie Yi Yi, would also come and cool their heels for long stretches, sometimes bringing along Mya Mya, Auntie Yi Yi’s spinster daughter, my sister-two-wombsapart (as the Burmese call a second cousin). First cousins too passed through in relays: not just the children of Mum’s two brothers, but the many children of U Ko Ko, Dad’s younger brother who lived in Myitkyina, as well as the two children of Dad’s youngest brother, U Khin Maung Aye. Confusingly, both uncles were called Ko Ko. Ko Ko means Older Brother in Burmese, but it also happened to be the real name of Dad’s younger brother, U Ko Ko of Myitkyina. So naturally we called him Uncle U Ko Ko. Dad’s youngest brother, however, who lived in Rangoon and whose real name was U Khin Maung Aye, was simply Ko Ko to us. Not that he was anyone’s Older Brother, but being a great deal younger than Dad, he could have been one of our older brothers, our real Ko Ko. So that was what we called him.

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Grandmother Daw Phwa Tint (Eleanor on her lap, Polo on left, Willie on right), circa 1913

Both the Ko Kos and their relatives adored Mum but feared Dad. The minute he came into a room a hush descended. Then everyone scattered like cockroaches in the kitchen when the light went on. Perhaps they were afraid that he would pronounce them fools, as he often pronounced politicians and other big shots in his newspaper. ‘Your father,’ Mum would say – whether with pride or disapproval I was never sure – ‘does not suffer fools gladly.’ I thought he suffered me gladly enough. When I showed him my report card expecting he’d be pleased to see the As, it was the B that caught his eye. ‘Only fools get Bs,’ he said, almost kindly, as though it was time I was told the earth was round not flat. There were only two people I knew of who weren’t afraid of Dad. One was my teenage cousin Aung Aung, son of Uncle U Ko Ko.

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Aung Aung would stride in and out of rooms, annoying everyone with his nervous pacing, until we realised that what he was doing was mimicking Dad, right down to the arm-swinging and loud sniffing that accompanied Dad’s pacing. Or he would belt out a song that sounded like, Barron-sittee-yaaaaah!, and it would turn out that he was imitating Dad telling my brother Byron where to sit. Byron! Sit here! We watched anxiously to see what our father would make of this cheeky performance, but he seemed determined to ignore his nephew, granting him at most a little snort of amusement. Aung Aung was, after all, a little mad. And the one thing that stumped Dad was madness. So even when Aung Aung confronted him with a question that no one else would dream of asking (‘How much money do you make, eh, Deddy?’), Dad would just go on reading his paper, or scribbling with his fingers on the invisible page before him. The other person who seemed to have no fear of my father was his mother. Actually, Dad’s mother was the only person in the world (according to Mum) of whom he was just a little afraid. This was as it should be, we were told; parents should inspire in their children the feeling known as chit-kyauk-yothei (love-fear-respect). I could see how my grandmother Daw Saw Shwe might inspire love and respect. But fear? Fear was what I felt for my other grandmother, Daw Phwa Tint, who failed to instil the other two sentiments. We called both grandmothers Amei (Mother). Mum, however, called her own mother Mama, pronouncing it Mah Mah, which means hard in Burmese. Mah Mah was hard all right. Hard-hearted, hard-headed and hard to please. She spied on the servants and tattled on us children. In our downtown Lewis Street flat, which came after the Thomas de la Rue building, my brothers and their friends would no sooner have set up a game of indoor badminton than this amei would plonk herself down on the sidelines. Turning her head stiffly from side to side, she kept her eyes on the shuttlecock like a joyless umpire. Once, Denzil Durham, a friend of my brother Alban’s, swung his racket a little too far and whacked her on the head. Amalé! Amalé! she screamed. She was dying! Dying, did we hear?

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No, dead. She was dead. Almighty God, her skull! Her completely cracked skull! Where was the dirty dog that did this to her? We took turns running into the next room to laugh in relays before running back to feign concern. The story went that when Mum and Dad were first married, in the days when each mother was convinced that her child was far too good for the other’s, Dad’s mother decided to pay an unannounced visit to Mum’s mother. The latter was on her way home from market, where she had just spent good money on a bunch of choice bananas, the flat, spear-shaped, hpi-gyan variety. Seeing Dad’s mother crossing the field in her direction, she leaned lazily against the fence and began feeding the bananas to the nearest cow as though it were something she did daily, pretending all the while not to have seen her surprise guest. Unlike Mum’s amei, who was solid and stiff-limbed, Dad’s amei was small and quick, with a birdy little chest whose ribs showed through the material of her blouse (a fabric mysteriously called lawn). And unlike Mum’s amei who lived with us year round, Dad’s amei came to visit only once in a while, and only ever briefly. Her home was way up in the north, in Myitkyina, and that’s where she preferred to be. This amei never raised her voice, or threw her weight around, or expected to be waited on. She treated everyone – servants and grandchildren alike – as individuals worthy of curiosity and sustained interest. Secretly, of course, I believed myself to be her favourite, and would rush to impress her by reciting all the Burmese verses I’d learned since her last visit. The one she seemed to like best was written in the twelfth century, in the reign of King Narapatisithu. This great ruler, beloved by his subjects and venerated for his benevolence in building countless canals and reservoirs, pagodas and shrines, was blessed with a long life – a fate denied most Burmese sovereigns. Yet his ascension to the throne had not been easy. In fact, something of a killing spree had been necessary to achieve it. First his brother, the reigning king, had to be put to death; then more and more family members, and their courtiers

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as well. Finally, it was the turn of the royal scholar Anantathuriya, tutor of the deposed king. On the eve of his execution, Anantathuriya composed a poem for his new sovereign. For every being that prospers, another goes to ruin, it began, ending with the line, As for this body of mine, it is already decaying. It was a poem about life’s evanescence, about acceptance and forgiveness. The king had already ordered Anantathuriya’s death when the poem was read out to him. Moved by its message, he immediately issued a stay of execution. But the order went unheeded and Anantathuriya’s head rolled on schedule. Our history teacher Daw Myint Myint had mesmerising teeth. Large and higgledy-piggledy, they constituted an obstacle course whenever she opened her mouth to speak. I often felt my tongue worrying in sympathy at my own not exactly even set of teeth as I watched her lick her beleaguered lips, and dab at their corners with her hanky. But as soon as Teacher began reading out Anantathuriya’s poem, all teeth were forgotten. I couldn’t wait for the chilling finale – for the moment when she would gasp as though someone had just punched her in the chest. Then, miming the king’s dismay on learning that the author of so poignant a poem had been executed, Teacher would fall into a swoon, eyes closed and head gently wagging. Naungda, naungda! she moaned, coming out of her trance. Naungda was the word for remorse, but Daw Myint Myint’s performance turned it into something far greater than remorse. Naungda was the awareness of undoable error followed by incurable regret. After a performance like that, it wasn’t difficult for me to memorise the great poem.

သူတည္းတစ္ေယာက္ ေကာင္းဖို ့ေရာက္မူ သူတစ္ေယာက္မွာ ပ်က္လင့္ကာသာ ဓမၼတာတည္း။

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Puffing on her giant cheroot, Grandmother Daw Saw Shwe would nod her head in time to my metre, her big bulging eyes fixed on a point slightly above my head, as though a bee were circling it and she was torn between calling my attention to the danger, or just trusting that the danger would pass. It was clear, she said then, after one of my earnest recitals, that I was going to follow in my father’s footsteps. ‘But remember,’ she warned, ‘Big tiger, big footprints.’ I couldn’t think of anything I wanted less to follow than the big fat footprints of a tiger.

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4 Theatre of War

This is the life story of an ordinary Burman . . . of a family that has known flood, fire, war, and much anxiety besides. So begins the preface to my father’s memoir, with a sentence that is only partly true. More precisely, the first part of that sentence is patently untrue, for my father was anything but ordinary. He was not an ordinary Burman, or an ordinary Sino-Burman, or an ordinary Kachin, the ethnic minority he most closely identified with. Nor did he ever think himself ordinary. But he liked to strike an occasional note of modesty – suspect as it sounded to anyone who knew him even slightly. To me it always seemed that what set apart our family stories of flood, fire, war, etc., from similar stories of other families was the very lack of ordinariness about our father’s response to such crises. Whenever the subject of fires came up, Mum would recall yet one more time the big fire that broke out in Kemmendine, Rangoon, before I was born. The fire, they could see from the top storey of their building, was getting closer and closer. When it was time to start moving things out, Mum began by herding the children outside. She put Byron, the baby, in the pram. Then she handed Byron to one of the older children, and used the pram to load things into. By this time the chair they had kept from their Frontier days, when she and Dad were first married – the old cane chair that the ex-convict had mended – was sitting outside on the field, with their other belongings. And on the chair was Marlaine’s doll. Now, that chair went up in flames! Yes. That’s how close the fire was. But a

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miracle occurred at the very last minute. The wind shifted. Their house was spared! It was the only house left standing in that whole street. But while she was rushing around trying to carry the children outside one at a time, and packing up their things, and worrying about what to save, what was our father doing? Our father was carrying out, stack by stack, his new set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, bought on instalment and only just paid off. ‘Your father. All he could think about was saving his blessed encyclopedias. Not his wife. Not his children. His books first and foremost, if you please.’ I liked hearing stories about Dad’s eccentricities. But it was against the backdrop of war – the war I had just narrowly missed being born into – that his derring-do came to life for me, giving new meaning to the phrase, Theatre of War. February 1941. As the threat of a Japanese invasion loomed large in Burma, Dad volunteered as an air-raid warden for the new air defence unit in Rangoon. He was on duty one night when a message from Mum reached him. Immediately he dashed off a note to her: ‘Thank you for my birthday present.’ His new son and he were born exactly thirty years apart. The boy deserved a romantic name. Byron. That’s what they would call him. Dad was working for the Burma Railways at the time. He had risen from stationmaster to senior commercial inspector, despite early clashes with management. He once issued a warrant to arrest a European lady who was refusing to pay for her train ticket on the grounds that she was the wife of a military secretary. When the district superintendant stormed into his office, demanding to know just what the blankety-blank he thought he was doing, Dad pointed to the Coaching Manual on his office shelf. ‘Show me in that book,’ he challenged, ‘where it says only wives of vegetable sellers may be sent to the lock-up.’ He had another run-in with the same superintendent a few months later. This time it was over one of Dad’s hard-working subordinates,

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a Hindu box man whose job was to guard the line box for outgoing trains. One morning the box man failed to show up, and was missing for the next six months. When he finally surfaced, destitute and contrite, he pleaded to have his job back. He had been in jail, he explained, for adultery. Dad went to appeal to the superintendent on the adulterer’s behalf, but the martinet said no. Dismissed was Dismissed. Dad waited till his next day off to jump on the express bound for Rangoon, where he went to see the Railways chief. How the fat Englishman laughed. Of course the box man could have his job back. ‘How many of us, my boy,’ he mused, ‘would be in our jobs today if every time we went off the rails we were sacked?’ He paused to savour his pun before dismissing Dad with a wink. ‘We’ve been lucky. Or if not lucky, some pretty footwork, what?’ Dad should by rights have been sacked for insubordination, but the Burma Railways was going through a reshuffle. Instead of being fired, he was promoted to Commercial Inspector, whereupon he lost no time in overhauling rates and fares, and setting up new collection and delivery services. It was not the remit of a Railways official to stop buses on highways and insist that their wheels be weighed, but Dad took it upon himself to do so anyway. Reprimanded, he limited himself to stopping buses at level crossings. Before he could get himself into more hot water with his superiors, however, the first Japanese bombs rained down on Rangoon. It was time to pack up the family and take them up north to Myitkyina, to live with his mother. On returning alone to Rangoon, he moved into a chummery with a group of friends. The battle for Burma, soon to turn into the longest and bloodiest of the British Commonwealth’s land campaigns in Asia, had just begun, but work was slow at the Railways head office. Dad was out having fun with his friends one evening when his car was stopped by a group of American pilots. These AVG (American Volunteer Group) pilots, famously nicknamed the Flying Tigers, had been sent to defend Rangoon with their Buffalo Brewster planes, and were rather full of themselves. They needed a lift to the airfield. But Dad was turning left, and the airfield was to

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the right, eight miles out of his way. So he said no and drove on – but only after one of the pilots took a swing through the window and gave him a bloody chin. Rangoon fell to the Japanese a few months later, in March 1942, spurring a frantic exodus for which the city’s population was totally unprepared. Even as a Railways official, Dad couldn’t get a seat on a train – or on a boat, for that matter. Bodies clung to the sides and roofs of every train, and the tramp steamers were all packed to the gunwales. Dad bought himself an old Baby Austin with the Rs 500 he had borrowed from a friend, and set out for Mandalay, some six hundred miles north of Rangoon. He found the old capital in smithereens, blitzed to a fare-thee-well. Carrion birds – vultures, crows and hawks – were helping themselves to the bloated carcasses on the streets. At the Burma Railways office, he discovered that the commercial department had been reduced to two – the traffic manager and himself. And now the traffic manager was on his way to India, where all British, Indian and Chinese forces were being driven back in the wake of the Allied defeat in Rangoon. The war was far from lost by Dad’s own reckoning, and he was impatient to join the army. But he didn’t relish the idea of Officer Training School as a means to a commission. So he earned it instead through points accrued from his voluntary cadetship at St Peter’s School. Enlisting as a second lieutenant in the British Army, he was assigned to ‘Movement Control’. His first posting was to Myohaung, outside Mandalay, the most thoroughly bombed junction in the country. Fires lit up the town day and night. His overworked staff had no idea where their families were, or what the next hour would bring; they could barely keep their eyes open – but still they muddled along. They had to be fed, however, and food was becoming scarce, so Dad gave his assistant, an Irishman by the name of Sergeant Marshall, permission to ‘forage’. Sergeant Marshall’s idea of foraging involved blasting a few wagons and returning with some dog biscuits and a few cases of dry sherry. He once secured what he thought was ten tons of beer, which turned

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out to be ten tons of hydrogen peroxide. He gave up foraging when he fly-shunted into a truckload of glycerine. When Dad decided to try to scrounge a meal for himself at Fort Dufferin in Mandalay, he was stopped by a Chinese soldier with a bayonet. Pass! No pass, no entry! Dad produced his ‘pass’ from the wallet in his back pocket: a yellow card that came with a tube of Kolynos toothpaste. The guard waved him through. Back in Myohaung, he began sending civilian trains crammed with women and children ahead of troop specials. But when he started marshalling the troop trains, a livid Colonel Prendergast demanded to know what gave him the idea that he could act on his own, without the say-so of his superiors. What gave him the idea, Dad replied, was that he’d been doing it every night for some years. A Colonel Roberts finally ordered him out of the area. The enemy, he said, was fast advancing, so he had better make himself scarce. He drove Dad to Fort Dufferin, where he took him to view an amazing collection of new cars. ‘Choose one,’ said Roberts. ‘And after that, you’re on your own.’ Dad picked out a Morris with a jaunty sun roof, and peeled off in the direction of Shwebo. His was the last car to cross the bridge before it was blown up. At Shwebo he found GHQ emptying itself at speed, and caught Colonel Roberts just as he was about to leave. ‘Good Lord, we’d forgotten about you,’ Roberts exclaimed. ‘What are you going to do?’ Dad requested permission to go to Myitkyina, evacuate his family to India and return to Shwebo. ‘Yes, go. Go to Myitkyina, but don’t come back,’ was Roberts’s order. At the railway station, the last evacuee train was ready to pull out. The only place Dad could find for himself in that press of frightened women, screaming children and loudly swearing soldiers was in a corner of a goods wagon. His army uniform counted for nothing, but the faithful Railways staff brought him food and tea. One or two stationmasters tried to make over their cash bags to him. At one station the staff asked what was to become of them, and when he comforted

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them with words, one man sprang forward and kissed his hand. Dad reached Myitkyina in the dark, to find Mum and the kids loaded onto a bullock cart, all set to head for the jungle. He offloaded them right away, and told them they were staying put for the time being. In the morning he saw the chaos along the foreshore near their house. River craft of all kinds were adrift, while Bren guns still in their wooden crates were stacked on the bank, left behind in the pellmell Allied retreat. He could see it was time to hightail it out of town after all, so back on the bullock cart the family went. They rode through field and forest, camping out in villages, hiding in trenches when necessary, until they reached Rampur, a settlement with a large Gurkha population. There, Grandmother Daw Saw Shwe had somehow managed to evict squatters from the only house in town with a proper tin roof. Into this house they all moved: Mum, Dad and their four children; Grandmother and her second husband, U Lun Maung; a deaf Chinese aunt on Dad’s side, a couple of Mum’s cousins. The children soon made themselves at home. Byron the toddler lurched about the house, opening and closing cupboard doors. Alban scratched pictures in the ground with a home-made bamboo stylus – war scenes with crashing planes and exploding bombs. Any loud noise sent him into a crouch, head between his knees, praying, ‘O Lord, save us! O Lord, save us!’ Marlaine was a dutiful little girl, helping around the house and learning to sew on an old Singer machine that someone had left behind. And Hubert, barely ten, was a natural linguist, soon acting as interpreter in Dad’s negotiations with the Japanese occupying army. There was a lot to negotiate over. Facing shortages themselves, the occupiers had imposed a skewed barter system on the occupied. But everyone knew that in practice their soldiers could seize anything they fancied, and this included women. Anglo-Burmese women were especially vulnerable, being partly of the same race as the arch-enemy, the British. Mum was Anglo-Burmese, and although there was no tangible proof of her British pedigree, the kampeitei, the dread secret police, had their suspicions. They barged into the house one day,

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demanding to see photographs of her. When Mum couldn’t produce any, they started to take her in for questioning. A tense exchange followed between Dad and the kampeitei officer in charge. Dad insisted on accompanying her. The officer insisted there was no need. ‘Then at least let my wife take her mother with her,’ Dad argued, giving his mother a meaningful look. The old lady caught on and stepped forward without batting an eye. The kampeitei grudgingly took her along, and Dad breathed a sigh of relief knowing that Mum could have no better chaperone than her ferocious mother-inlaw. To everyone’s relief, both Mum and Grandmother were sent home after having their photographs taken. Next it was Dad’s turn to come under suspicion. The Japanese had begun conscripting labour for their notorious Death Railway, and as an able-bodied male, Dad was an obvious candidate. To seek immunity, he went to appeal to Arthur Khin Maung, the Japanese-appointed district commissioner of the region, an old friend from his Frontier Service days. Without consulting the Rangoon government, Arthur appointed him his deputy. Leaving Grandmother and her husband in Rampur, Dad moved the family back to Myitkyina, where they discovered that the Japanese had seized all the grain in the district. Food, especially rice, was in short supply, so he sent his men down to the capital with a plea to the Minister of Agriculture, Thakin Than Tun, later chairman of the Communist Party of Burma. Miraculously, two wagonloads of unpolished rice were delivered in short order. Having introduced food rationing, Dad was standing in line for his own daily quota when the directive for his dismissal arrived. Rangoon had got wind of his ad hoc appointment as Arthur Khin Maung’s deputy, and sent a messenger to Myitkyina with the order to rescind it. But by now Dad was not just deputy; he was acting district commissioner, Arthur having been called south for a conference. He ignored the order and sat tight. Rangoon would have bigger things to worry about. One day a Japanese officer dropped by at the house, uninvited, for

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a cup of tea. Lieutenant Takahashi was among the more agreeable officers, and appeared to want nothing more than to pay ‘U RawYone’s’ family an occasional courtesy call. But at some point the officer announced the need to visit the toilet. ‘We’ll have to show him your chamber pot,’ Dad whispered to Mum. This was housed in a curtained-off cubicle right outside their bedroom. ‘Not on your life,’ said Mum quite loudly. She was not about to be bullied by every second Japanese officer. But this was no unruly foot soldier in urgent need of a toilet. This was Lieutenant Takahashi, wielder of an anti-tank gun, and Dad was having to tell him that he was very sorry, but they didn’t have one. What? No toilet? Then where did they go? the officer wanted to know, and Dad said he went in the bushes, which was true. At this Takahashi made unpleasant sounds in Japanese, unclasped his belt, and headed for the shrubbery. He was still grumbling when he reappeared. Picking up his sword, he left without a word. But very early the next morning, a bullock cart drove up to the house carrying, in addition to Takahashi and a couple of foot soldiers, an assortment of planks and zinc sheets. With their officer barking out instructions, the men set to work. In no time at all they had built a latrine for the family. All this time – throughout 1943 – the situation had been bleak for the Allies, but by 1944, the tide was turning on a number of fronts. The Japanese were losing ground in the South Pacific, and the Allied forces were planning several offensives into Burma from India, and from Yunnan, in China. In April 1944, the Japanese launched a massive attack on Imphal, in India’s north-east region of Manipur. The resulting battle lasted four long months, and would later be likened to Passchendaele, the Somme and Stalingrad. The siege ended with the Japanese forces being driven back with heavy losses. It was the turning point of their defeat in Burma. The distance from Myitkyina to Imphal was nearly 540 miles by road, but increasingly the battle felt closer and closer, until it was

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practically at the family’s doorstep. Chinese soldiers suddenly appeared in the village smoking Philip Morris cigarettes, then disappeared just as suddenly. One night there was a heavy barrage of mortar- and machine-gun fire, and in the morning the Chinese were back again. This time they came to make trouble in the family compound. They tossed a grenade into Dad’s fowl run, stripped the women of their jewellery, and seemed more intent on loot than battle. By nightfall the Japanese had counter-attacked and driven them back to the airfield. With their lives in daily danger, it was time for the family to take to the tall grass again. But two years in the jungle – the last few months in and out of damp trenches – had taken their toll on Mum. And this was not counting the recent miscarriage. Five months pregnant, she had gone to the market in a bullock cart, along a road so pitted with holes that she blamed herself later for having been so reckless. After she lost the baby, the Indian doctor making the house call said it wasn’t to do with the bullock cart, but Mum wasn’t convinced. There wasn’t enough time to recover, however – let alone grieve. Even as the unfortunately named Dr Pariah sought to reassure her, planes were buzzing overhead, the children were hunkered down in terror, and Dad was trying to wrestle his deaf Chinese aunt to the ground, because she couldn’t see what was so dangerous about remaining outside when the planes were merely ‘shouting’. They had just enough time to bury the baby at the back of the house before moving on. Hubert, the oldest, stood sadly over the grave, the last to leave. Mum was barely able to move. She had been bedridden for weeks with fevers, aches and pains in her joints. But move she had to, come what may. Early one morning, when Dad poked his head out of the trench, he spotted a lone Gurkka and signalled to him. He counted out 170 pieces of silver – every coin in his possession – and, handing it to the man, implored him to take the whole family to the airfield. The Gurkha hesitated. But when he saw the effort it took for Mum to struggle to her feet, he simply picked up Byron, now three years

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old, and started walking. The family followed in a procession to the edge of a teak forest, where Mum, clinging to Dad for support, was in so much pain that they had to stop and rest. They had little more than four miles more to go, but she could barely stand, let alone walk, and now the shooting match was on again. The Gurkha guide kept detouring for cover, prolonging her agony. At long last they reached a stream, beyond which they hoped was safety. Dad swam the children across one by one. Then came the ordeal of Mum’s crossing. There was no other way but to strap her to the Gurkha’s back. In later years, they would replay the comedy of Mum walking the plank hugging a complete stranger, but at the time nobody was laughing. When, half carrying, half dragging Mum, Dad presented himself on the airstrip to a Colonel Hunter with the US Army, the colonel greeted him curtly. ‘Oh yes, we know all about you,’ he said. ‘You’re under arrest.’ Dad was suspected of collaborating with the Japanese. So now they were safe, but summarily separated. Dad was flown off to the airfield at Dinjan in Assam, there to be arrested by British Security, while Mum and the children were sent to an interim camp in Palasbari, where they would all come down with dysentery and scabies. After days of questioning by Field Intelligence in Dinjan, Dad was transferred to a godforsaken prison in what is now Bangladesh, where more bad news awaited him: his stepfather, U Lun Maung, had been shot dead by the Chinese, and his mother had narrowly escaped being killed by a bomb. She had been carried out of her trench with blood pouring from her ears, moaning, ‘I won’t die until my son comes back from India.’ Eventually Dad ended up in the infamous Red Fort prison in Delhi, by which time Mum and the children had been moved to the equally infamous Refugee Centre in Calcutta. After a sweltering summer in a tent shared with two Indian Independence Army officers, all three roundly cursing the British Empire, Dad was finally freed. Five months after their separation in Myitkyina, Dad was reunited with the family at the Refugee Centre in Calcutta. The children had

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suffered from bedbugs and malnutrition, but were otherwise fine. Mum, in the hands of a specialist, was back on her feet. Hard to believe that only a few months earlier she had been lying on a camp cot at Myitkyina airfield, under a coloured parachute set up by some kindly American GIs. At the other end of the field, under more coloured parachutes, dozens of wounded Chinese soldiers were lying on stretchers, waiting to be treated by the famous ‘Burma Surgeon’, Gordon Seagrave. Dad had followed Seagrave as he went with his nurses from one stretcher to another, joking with the men he was about to cut open or sew up, taking frequent drags from a cigarette held to his lips by one of the nurses. Meanwhile, the Japanese were lobbing shells from a .75 mm ‘Pistol Pete’ as often as they could reload. It was difficult to find the right moment to approach the great doctor, but at last Dad got in his plea. Mum was sent for and after a brief examination Seagrave took Dad aside. ‘Have you seen any of the Dr Kildare pictures?’ he asked. Dad, nonplussed, said he had. ‘Then you’ll remember Lionel Barrymore in a wheelchair,’ Seagrave said. ‘Arthritis, and that’s what your wife’s got.’ Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do for her: she must be taken to hospital immediately. But to keep her going in the meantime, he might give her a cholera shot. (This he said more to himself than to Dad.) The cholera shot not only kept Mum going, it brought almost instant relief. She would swear ever after that her subsequent treatment with a specialist brought steady improvement, but it was Seagrave’s cholera shot that had saved her life. Now, a mere five months later, Dad found Mum not only back on her feet, but more beautiful than ever. It was an emotional reunion, with Mum in Dad’s arms, laughing and crying, and the children encircling them, uncertain about what it all meant. Dad had just two days to find a flat for the family to move into, for in two days he was flying to Kandy in Ceylon, to begin his induction with the OSS. Yes, he told Mum, he had been recruited by the American Office of Strategic

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Service. He didn’t tell her that this meant he was being trained for intelligence work. On his release, he had been making his way to the Army Base Repair Organisation headquarters, to ask if he could have his army job back, when he ran into a Dr James Russell Andrus, an American economist working for the Office of War Information. Learning that Dad was looking for a job, Andrus mentioned several employment opportunities, none of them very interesting. Then he uttered the magic words: ‘Of course, if you want to volunteer for dangerous work . . .’ ‘How much will it pay?’ was Dad’s only question, and the die was cast. On their last evening together in Calcutta, the family sat in a circle, talking and laughing. Mum told stories about the old times in Burma. Then she brought up the snake in the latrine, always good for a laugh. Dad was doing his business in the outhouse one day (with a book, as always), when a fourteen-foot snake slowly uncoiled itself from under his toilet seat and began sliding sideways. Dad flung the book and himself out of the hut so fast that the children fell over with laughter. When he pointed out sternly that it might have been a Russell’s viper – or worse, a banded krait: not for nothing were banded kraits known as two-steps, he lectured, because two steps was all a person could manage after being bitten – they laughed even harder. ‘Yes, dear,’ Mum tried to soothe him, ‘but the sight of such short legs spreading so far apart was too much for us.’ On the plane to Colombo, Dad remembered the hilarity at his expense and thought he understood why Mum chose that particular story, so deflating to his ego, to send him off. She was reminding him, maybe, that the same reflex for self-preservation that had kicked in with the snake would see him through the rest of the war. That and the ability to laugh at himself. Not all spies begin their training by being slapped, but that was Dad’s induction into the OSS in Ceylon. Hardly had he unpacked his kit in the

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camp at Peradiniya, on the outskirts of Kandy, than he was summoned to head office. There, without any warning, his hair was rumpled, his shirt pulled off, and his face slapped hard. Cameras started to whirr. The film unit of Stars and Stripes, the American military newspaper, was filming a scene showing an enemy agent being grilled. To this day I find it difficult to imagine my father meekly subjecting himself to a slapping, even in the interests of war propaganda. Difficult likewise to picture the time he was slapped by a Japanese officer – genuinely slapped, and not for the purpose of propaganda. The Japanese in Burma were apparently as fond of slapping as Prussians were of goose-stepping. That Dad was the recipient of a Japanese slap I know only from Hubert and Marlaine, my two eldest siblings, who remember the public humiliation, followed by Mum’s frantic, ‘Edward! Edward, please!’ as she sought to restrain her husband from losing all reason and retaliating. Dad himself never spoke of this incident; nor does it appear in any of his manuscripts. But this was typical of his narratives: defeats or setbacks that couldn’t be ridiculed were omitted altogether. Humour, for him, could be a weapon of self-defence or a form of revenge. The Japanese slap was not funny, so it wasn’t worth mentioning. The American slap was funny, and became an oft-told tale. The Americans put Dad in high good humour anyway. He was pleasantly surprised, for a start, to find that his boss was a woman. Cora Du Bois was a cultural anthropologist, one of many wartime social scientists and scholars serving with the OSS, the newly created intelligencegathering agency for the US Armed Forces. OSS agents, their missions later dramatised in movies like Cloak and Dagger starring Gary Cooper, had been famously successful in infiltrating Nazi Germany. Now, in Burma, they were recruiting irregulars from among the Kachin and other indigenous groups to serve as guides and saboteurs for the Allied China–Burma–India Theatre. Dad’s second surprise at the OSS camp was the company he was suddenly keeping. His colleagues were anthropologists, ornithologists, psychoanalysts – the sort of people he had never met before. He played

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chess with the formidable Gregory Bateson, anthropologist, cyberneticist, inventor of the Double Bind theory, and husband of Margaret Mead. He flirted with Cora, unaware perhaps that she had just embarked on a lesbian love affair with another colleague at the camp. After a few survival courses that included recognition (how to tell one ship from another, one snake from the next), cooking (how to smoke a porcupine) and aquatic sports (steering a kayak through rough surf ), Dad was assigned to the Arakan Field Unit and flown to Chittagong on the western coast of Burma. With Manly Fleishmann, his operations officer who would become a lifelong friend, he headed for Arakan where together they dodged a few Japanese bombs, but found the town of Akyab practically deserted, with jackals roaming the streets. When he landed on one of the outlying islands with the marines, there too the Japanese were already dead, having committed hara-kiri. Back at the field hospital, which had just begun to function again, he was about to question his first wounded Japanese officer when he was called away. Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander of the South-East Asia Theatre and overseer of the recapture of Burma from the Japanese, was touring the hospital wards and needed an interpreter. Mountbatten stopped by the bedsides of the wounded to offer words of solace, which Dad would then translate. One man was so swathed in bandages that only the tip of his nose and an eye showed through. Mountbatten expressed sympathy, and assured the patient that he and his people were now safe because the British Army was back. ‘Ask him what Japanese did this and when,’ he said to Dad. Dad asked, and through the muffled mouth came the reply. ‘It was no Japanese. I had a fight with the guy next door. His wife and I . . . well, you know . . .’ Lord Louis was hard put to understand what it was that had reduced his interpreter to such helpless laughter, and waited stiffly for Dad to pull himself together and continue translating. The Allies had gained the upper hand: the Japanese were in retreat; but Dad and his Arakan Field Unit were still busy gathering intelligence,

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training local spies, getting shot at by a stray 75 mm the Japanese had mounted at the exact spot on the Arakan coast where they were trying to land. One day they found themselves adrift in a small boat, with the Japanese on one side and the friendly fire of Indian troops on the other. In order to send SOS signals, they had to strip off their clothes, socks included, soak them in petrol, and signal by passing a helmet across the burning cloth. When their rescuers approached, a searchlight was beamed on them and a megaphone blared out the order to stand up and be recognised, which they did stark naked. AFU next moved to Ramree at the southern tip of the island. After a night of heavy fighting at a village, they found eight Japanese stone dead, shot by one Gurkha sergeant with a Bren gun. By then other intelligence outfits – Force 136, V-Force, Z-Force, BIC – had caught up with them, bringing their own field cinema unit. Dad was asked to pose with a drawn sword in one hand, and a foot firmly planted on the chest of a fallen foe. From playing a Japanese prisoner of war getting his face slapped to playing a brave Burmese soldier with dead Japanese at his feet – he had come a long way in his wartime movie career. Appointed operations officer when his friend Manly Fleishmann was recalled, Dad was flown to Jessore to attend jump school. Jessore was a mere seventy-three miles from Calcutta, so he was able to visit his wife and children in their new flat. Mum, having completed her course of injections, felt well and looked radiant. He took her out to dinner with Manly, who was passing through, and afterwards to dancing at the Great Eastern, where they spotted Gene Tunney in a naval uniform. They had to make the most of such precious moments; they never knew when they would next see each other. The war had been advancing at a hectic pace: the British Fleet was in Burma, and there were whisperings about a naval invasion. But the end when it came for Dad was anticlimactic: he was ferried home to Rangoon on the Prinz Eugen, a battered man-o’-war that looked more like a tramp steamer. His cabin mate was a towering American lieutenant, a blond Nordic type by the name of Grangaard, whose taunts were becoming insufferable.

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‘Whaddaya gonna do when we hit Burma, huh? You won’t be needed then.’ Dad replied that the army might not be needing him any longer, but there was other work to be done. ‘But the British will be running you fellas again!’ ‘Yes, maybe, but not for long.’ ‘Yeah? And how’re you gonna end British rule?’ ‘Simple,’ said Dad. ‘You people have taught me a thing or two. I count thirty-six districts in Burma, each with only one or two top Englishmen. Under the guise of presenting petitions our women will assassinate them, and our men will stab the rest in dark alleys.’ The next morning Manly took Dad aside. ‘We know you, Ed,’ he said. ‘But others don’t and some of them lack your perverted sense of humour. So lay off Grangaard, he’s X-2.’ So counter-intelligence had been spying on them! The Prinz Eugen berthed alongside the Keighley Street wharf on the Rangoon River. A little red post-office van drove up. In it were Dad’s old friends from the chummery, among them U Tint, the alcoholic child-biter. Laughing and talking all at once, they drove him to Judson College, where he was billeted. Dad was home and dry.

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5 Birth of The Nation

Lieutenant Grangaard must have hit Dad in a soft place with his jibes about redundancy. For underneath his bravado was uncertainty about what he was going to do next. ‘I was by training and temperament a civil servant,’ he wrote – another statement that was only half true. His temperament was anything but that of a civil servant. Still, he recognised that ‘it behoved even civil servants to have their wits about them when the end of world war presaged political upheavals’. He wanted to meet the new political leaders and find out what sort of Burma they had in mind to rebuild. All in all Dad had served with the OSS for only half a year (from October 1944 to April 1945), but he was being kept on now on a monthto-month basis, to demobilise and debrief the teams of operators still out in the field. The temporary arrangement suited him fine: it gave him time to educate himself on the shifting political landscape and get a feel for who was who. Under colonial rule Burma had known limited degrees and forms of self-government, but the bid for full independence began prior to the Second World War. When Japan declared war on Britain on 8 December 1941, secret talks for the liberation of Burma were already in process between Aung San and the Japanese War Office. A key student leader in the anti-colonial strikes and protests of the 1930s, Aung San had since risen to national prominence, and in the run-up to the Japanese invasion of Burma, he was busy recruiting a military corps for training in Japan. This select group, who called themselves the Thirty Comrades, were organised into the Burma Independence

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Army and would become the dominant military force in post-war Burma. In return for their support of Japan against the Allies, the Japanese agreed to a provisional Burmese government under their occupation, with the promise of full independence in the future. But when towards the war’s end it became clear to Aung San and his comrades that not only was ‘independence’ under the Japanese illusory, but that a Japanese victory was far from assured, they switched their allegiance to the Allied war effort and fought alongside the British. Now that the war was over, negotiations for full independence were back on the table. The British, after some hesitation, had finally agreed to set in motion a transfer of power. Dad was winding down his wartime duties and happened to be in uniform when he met General Aung San for the first time. Aung San therefore assumed that he had come to call in an official capacity. Dad explained that he was not there on business but at the instigation of a mutual friend who thought they should meet. Then what was he doing in uniform? Aung San wanted to know. The general was brusque, shy and shockingly young. But for his gaunt face and the brooding, slightly petulant eyes, he might have passed for a junior cadet. His uniform looked lived in and hung loosely on his angular frame. Dad said he was in uniform because he was entitled to be, although if he had the money he could conceivably start buying himself some new clothes. But his entire pay was going to the upkeep of a family still stuck in Calcutta. ‘What do they pay you?’ Aung San asked. When Dad gave him the figure, he clucked. ‘Too much! When you work for us you’ll have to take less.’ Dad noted the when, not if. ‘Not much less, I hope,’ he replied. ‘And why not?’ ‘Because I am a terrific guy.’ The absurd answer broke the ice. Aung San laughed out loud, his severe expression transformed in an instant. Dad must come again, he said. And so Dad went – several times over the next couple of

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years – to his home in Tower Lane, and to his office at the AFPFL headquarters on Churchill Road. Their relationship was too brief to ripen into friendship, if friendship were possible with such an impenetrably private and taciturn person. Their conversations were spirited, even if their interests did not always mesh. Aung San’s questions usually related to the problems of Dad’s native Kachin State. On the subject of transportation, Dad’s other area of expertise, however, he had little or nothing to say, drifting off whenever Dad got on his soapbox. A return to the present after a lapse into reverie would be presaged by a sharp intake of breath, like a hiss of pain. Except when fully absorbed, Aung San spoke jerkily, not hesitating to interrupt, contradict or abruptly change the subject. Dad reckoned the general found him flippant about most things, except on the subject of Communism, and then he thought him wrong. ‘Why are you always running down Communism?’ Aung San challenged. ‘There are many things I find appealing about Communism.’ Yet when Dad presented his brother with a copy of Das Kapital, Aung San seemed unaccountably annoyed. Aung San’s brother, Aung Than, happened to be the flatmate of one of Dad’s friends. This callow young man had engaged him one morning in conversation about whether he should become a Communist or a Socialist. When he confessed that he had never set eyes on the Communist Manifesto, Dad had ordered a copy from Calcutta and urged him to read it. Now Aung San’s response was downright waspish. ‘Leave him alone. Don’t you go and get mixed up,’ he snapped. An unfathomable man, Aung San. One day he surprised Dad by asking if he and his wife, Daw Khin Kyi, might meet Mrs Law-Yone. It was the first time he had ever brought up the subject of Dad’s family. Yet he himself was clearly a family man, often conducting business in his office with one or other of his children in his arms. On their way to tea at Tower Lane, Dad thought he should warn Mum that the general was apt to be moody or curt. He had a lot on his mind, Dad explained, and he might even be rude. Mum turned to

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her husband with a look of mock surprise that said, ‘Rude? Did you say rude? Coming from you, that’s rich!’ Aung San came outside to open the door of their car. He was dressed formally, in the traditional Burmese attire for men: a long silk pasoe knotted at the waist, a crisp white jacket and a gaung baung of pale silk on his head. Over tea, which he poured, he chatted easily and attentively, in a way Dad had never before witnessed. Then he brought out pictures of his children. As a parting gesture, he asked Daw Khin Kyi to go into the garden and fill a basket with vegetables for Mrs Law-Yone, then presented it to her like a trophy, with a little bow from the waist. The car had barely pulled out of the driveway when Mum pounced on Dad. ‘I can’t imagine why you spoke about him the way you did. He’s the most genteel person I have ever met. Unlike someone else we know.’ The general was not so genteel when Dad called again a few days later. He kept him waiting for twenty minutes, then shuffled downstairs, lifting his cotton longyi behind him like a peasant. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’ Dad said he didn’t want anything, but having heard that the general was going to England for an important conference, and knowing his propensity for unsuitable garb, he had bought him a shirt. Dad was already back in his car when the delayed reaction came: a big grin, and a jab of the forefinger instead of a wave. He went to hear Aung San address the mass rally of 1946 at the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. Aung San once told him that he liked writing in English; in fact he wrote letters to his own brothers in English. Dad was wondering if this long speech in English had been written out by Aung San himself, and if not who might have translated it, when the sound system broke down. Aung San turned from the microphone and, before a phalanx of yellow-robed monks, let out an exasperated ‘sauk thon ma kya bu!’(‘fucking useless!’). The monks seemed quietly sympathetic. But the speech Dad would remember best was the one in which Aung San berated his audience for being a nation of lazy and improvident

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wasters. The British, who had won a world war, he reminded them, were reduced to tightening their belts, whereas the Burmese were gorging themselves and throwing away what they could not eat. The task of rebuilding the country was going to take terrific effort. ‘You’ll have to work till you tear,’ as he put it, leaving no doubt which part of the anatomy would split under the necessary strain. The last time Dad saw Aung San was after the general strike that brought all government services – including the delivery of emergency rice to distressed northern regions – to a standstill. Dad had returned by then to his pre-war civilian duties with the Railways. As the new Chief Traffic Superintendent of the RTB, the Road Transport Board, he had negotiated with his truck drivers to resume their famine-relief runs. Now the strike had ended, and all heads of departments at the RTB had been summoned to a meeting with Aung San. The meeting lasted all of a few minutes. Aung San came in without a word of greeting. He lowered his eyes, hissed, and said, ‘Gentlemen, I’ve nothing to say to you. If you have any questions, you may ask them now.’ Dead silence followed the announcement, broken only once by a tentative question about the resumption of services, and the meeting was over. Everyone was exhausted. Afterwards, Dad walked up to Aung San’s car and invited him to lunch. Aung San shook his head as if to say, ‘Lunch? Who has time for lunch?’ But he remembered to ask, ‘Well, Terrific Guy, how’s the work?’ ‘Simply terrific,’ Dad answered. The car started to move and Dad ran alongside. ‘By the way, Bogyoke [General],’ he called out, ‘you’re paying me more than the Yanks did.’ Aung San turned back to shoot a bony finger in his direction. A few days later Dad was playing golf with the loud-laughing, harddrinking British Brigadier Denis Phelips, when a police officer came to call the brigadier away. Phelips had agreed to go on with a group of golfers to a Chinese restaurant after the game, and hoping he would join them there, the rest of the players, Dad included, delayed ordering. It was then that Dad noticed a man on the roof across the street clumsily putting up the Union flag.

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‘Hey, you fool,’ Dad yelled, ‘you’ve got the flag at half-mast!’ ‘More fool you!’ the man shouted back. ‘Don’t you know the bogyoke has been assassinated?’ The golfers all left the restaurant in silence, the meal uneaten. Aung San was dead.

General Aung San and Daw Khin Kyi

It wasn’t long before the suspects were picked up. Charged with masterminding the massacre was U Saw, a prominent politician and bitter rival of Aung San’s. To defend U Saw in the trial that followed, the British government, then still in charge of the country, sent a distinguished defence attorney. This was Frederick Henry (‘Derek’) Curtis-Bennett, best known for his defence of Britain’s most notorious wartime traitor, William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, whose highly publicised execution at Wandsworth Prison had taken place only the year before. Curtis-Bennett would go on to defend two other highprofile felons in Britain: the multiple-murderer John Christie (also executed) and the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs.

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In his defence of U Saw, Curtis-Bennett quoted Henry II. The king’s cry of frustration, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ was interpreted as a royal command by four knights who went on to assassinate an archbishop. In just such a spirit of misguided zeal, he argued, had U Saw’s ‘knights’ ridden out to their Canterbury (the Rangoon Secretariat) and done in the turbulent priest, General Aung San. In the closing days of the trial, Curtis-Bennett went to lunch at the Strand Hotel with a young Burmese journalist by the name of Ed Law-Yone. Law-Yone seemed sharp and well informed; moreover, he was acquainted with the accused. What did he think the verdict would be? the defence counsel wanted to know. Dad thought the answer was fairly obvious. An Indian officer had seen the gunmen’s jeep leave U Saw’s house on Ady Road. He saw it return there. When the house was later raided by government forces, when the nearby lake was dragged, the wealth of evidence uncovered was more than overwhelming. They found the jeep, with the paint still wet where the licence plate had been replaced. They found guns and ammunition. They found the remnants of burned uniforms. Dad said he was no lawyer, but he didn’t think Curtis-Bennett’s client had a cat in hell’s chance. ‘I was afraid you’d say that,’ said the glum QC, who left the country before the inevitable death sentence was handed down. The U Saw affair may have given the appearance of being an openand-shut case, but many loose ends were left hanging, leading to rumours of other participants in the assassination plot, and conspiracy theories would abound for decades to come. Some two years later, on 8 May 1948, Dad, now a stringer for British United Press, was covering the execution of U Saw at Insein Jail. BUP had sent Emily Brown, a senior reporter from London, as backup. The arrangement was for Emily to sit in the telegraph office in Rangoon and wait for Dad’s call from Insein, about a half-hour away, where the hanging was to take place. Luck, good and bad, was on Dad’s side. Good because the chief jailer, a Burmese of Portuguese

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descent called Victor de Rosario, turned out to be an old schoolmate from St Peter’s who let him through the wicket door into the prison yard to witness the hanging. Bad because despite this advantage, another news service managed to scoop the story. Earlier, while waiting to be let into the prison, Dad had struck up a conversation with an innocent-looking foreigner in khaki trousers. What exactly was going on? the stranger wanted to know, blinking earnestly as he tried to follow the facts. After the execution, when Dad emerged from the prison, the rubber-necking tourist was still there, begging to know what he had seen. Distracted and in a hurry to put in a call to Emily, Dad described briefly how U Saw had worshipped at one of the small shrines dotted about the compound, and then gone bravely to his death, refusing a hood over his face. He said he didn’t know the name of the hangman, but people referred to him as Gwin Ni, or Red Loop. Then he rushed to the Insein post office to ring Emily. The telephone line to the city was down. Again and again Dad tried, and failed, to get a connection. He gave up finally and returned to Rangoon by taxi. In the meantime, the nosy foreigner, a man named Kelly, had cabled his ‘eyewitness’ story to his bosses at the Associated Press. Dad had flubbed his first journalistic assignment for a wire service, but he didn’t as yet see himself as a bona fide journalist anyway. It was true he had left the civil service to work as an editor for Tin Tut’s paper, but his three-month probation on the New Times of Burma had ended on a sour note when the promised diplomatic posting never materialised. He had left Tin Tut in a temper, without knowing what he would do next. His stint as a stringer for British United Press was just a stopgap measure while the idea of starting his own newspaper percolated. And yet two months after his coverage of the U Saw execution, he could call himself owner, editor and publisher of his own Englishlanguage daily. * * *

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The first day’s issue of The Nation sold twenty copies. Dad had optimistically printed two thousand. The following days’ sales were no better. Within a week he was flat broke, and nobody had even heard of The Nation. The manager of the Gazette printing concern was sympathetic. His name was Frank Kirkham, and he too was an old schoolmate, another alumnus of St Peter’s. Frank suggested publicity. Even the old established papers ran cinema slides for publicity, he pointed out. But Dad was against the idea. Merit was what he would sell on, he declared loftily – or not sell at all. Then, less loftily, he asked how much credit Frank could allow, really. ‘A month is as far as I can go without risking the sack.’ ‘And what if I fail then?’ Frank was reassuring. ‘Oh, you won’t fail. At the rate you’re going you’ll drop dead on the job and we’ll write off the debt as irrecoverable.’ It was true that Dad had not been sleeping at all. His bed was a camp cot set up in the middle of the room. His baths were courtesy of his old landlord, owners of the Rangoon Gazette. But he wasn’t sleeping because he was doing everything himself. He needed help badly – and Providence sent him help in the person of Aung Nyunt. Baby-faced Aung Nyunt was a benign giant, six feet two inches tall. He hadn’t gone to the same school as Dad, but he did hail from Kachin State. A village schoolmaster with a hankering for the life of a reporter, he had come to Rangoon in pursuit of his dream. Of reporting he had no experience whatsoever, but he had a bicycle on which he’d been pedalling around for weeks, from newspaper to newspaper. The nearest he came to a job was at a two-page affair called the Mirror, but it ended badly when the editor borrowed his bicycle and never came back. So here was Aung Nyunt at The Nation, which he could see at a glance was not much better off than the Mirror, but the cheerful fellow said he didn’t care if wages were uncertain because he wasn’t used to eating regularly in any case. Hired!

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But now, with Aung Nyunt to help, it was time to pound the streets for new investors. One evening, weary and footsore, it occurred to The Nation’s editor that he hadn’t seen his family for a good month. He would go home and spend some time with the children. He would project a film for them! Of course they’d seen the film a hundred times: the reel had come with an old war-surplus projector that someone had given him. It was the only movie they ever saw: there was no money to take them to the pictures. The whole family was cosily huddled on the floor, mesmerised afresh by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, when who should come calling but Arthur Khin Maung, Dad’s old friend and boss in Myitkyina during the Japanese occupation. The film went on running while Dad and Arthur repaired to the next room for a lime and water. Arthur had news – and what news! He’d just been given his gratuity as an Imperial Service officer, to the whopping tune of Rs 100,000. He’d come to see if Dad might have any ideas on how to invest . . . Arthur didn’t finish the sentence. He left the house poorer by Rs 25,000, as Managing Director of The Nation. Still, the newspaper limped on in relative obscurity. Then, one day, Dad decided to take a potshot, in an editorial, at Foreign Office incompetence. Tin Tut, the foreign minister, replied heatedly – in not one but two editorials of his own. People who had never heard of The Nation now sat up and took notice. Circulation shot up suddenly – and stayed up, more or less, from then on. Dad bought a car and even an old flatbed printer. The printing press had become viable because electricity was now available. The Nation was on its way. Things were not so promising for the other nation, the new Union of Burma. Two months into independence, the Communists had taken up arms against the U Nu government, accusing it of having brokered a sham. By June 1948, a whole battalion of Burma Army troops had deserted to join the Communists. By July, the Socialists, in a panic,

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were resigning from the government en bloc. Within six months of independence, a bewildering array of armed groups and factions were threatening the central government. U Nu had offered to resign his posts as both prime minister and president of the AFPFL. But soon there was hardly any government to resign from. With the treasuries repeatedly looted, the economy in shambles and the coffers practically empty, the prime minister quipped that it was just as well so many civil servants were on strike, since he couldn’t afford to pay them their salaries. Law and order had broken down, and the administration’s efforts to maintain stability were as good as trying to collect frogs in a bag with a hole in it, as the saying went. In one of his moves to appease the Communists, U Nu agreed to the establishment of a Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute as a cornerstone of state policy. This immediately gave rise to British and American concerns that Burma had adopted Communism. In London, Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, called in the Burmese ambassador for an explanation. British policy in relation to Burma was predicated after all on the understanding that Burma was not a Communist state, or about to become one. U Nu wished he could allay Bevin’s fears. He knew the Foreign Secretary had been sympathetic to the cause of Burmese independence, and he had once tried to show his appreciation in a personal way, but the gesture had nearly backfired, so to speak. Bevin was known to suffer from haemorrhoids, and Nu was on the verge of sending a renowned Burmese folk doctor to London for a complimentary treatment when one of his advisers pointed out that the doctor’s remedy was fairly radical, involving, among other ingredients, arsenic. What if something went wrong? Think of the international incident! So the offer of treatment from a Burmese quack – an offer that Bevin had as good as accepted – had to be delicately withdrawn. In the end, nothing much came of U Nu’s call for leftist unity, or of the institute for the propagation of Marxism. The man who had been pitchforked into the role of prime minister by Aung San’s assassination was a reluctant head of government.

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U Nu had been ambivalent about a career in politics from his early days as a student leader when, with Aung San, he had organised the 1936 Rangoon University strike, the first mass demonstration against colonial rule. Following those protests, it was Aung San who goaded Nu into national politics, urging him to join the patriotic movement, the Dobama Asi-Ayone (We Burmans Association). Founded in 1930, the association conferred upon its members the prefix Thakin (‘Master’), signifying that they were the rightful masters of their land now, and not the colonial masters for whom, previously, the prefix had been reserved. U Nu said he had no stomach for a full-time political career. He

Dad (left) with U Nu, circa 1960

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said he preferred to act out of concern for a specific cause; then, the action done, ‘to withdraw into a corner, there to think, to dream, and to write a little’. ‘What are you prattling about?’ was Aung San’s exasperated response. ‘Is now the time to be dreaming and scribbling?’ This hit a raw nerve, for scribbling was Nu’s true passion, his dearest ambition. He didn’t want to be a politician: he wanted to be a playwright. During the Japanese occupation, when Prime Minster Ba Maw, his then boss, offered to train him for bigger and better things awaiting him in politics, Nu tried once again to make clear his interests. ‘And, pray, what does interest you?’ asked Dr Ba Maw. Nu said all he cared about was writing. ‘Oh, writing,’ Ba Maw laughed. ‘I thought for a moment it was something serious.’ Then he tried to impress upon Nu that writing was just a phase. It would pass. But it didn’t pass for Nu. Every time he contemplated a life without writing he thought about a man called Po Myaing from his father’s village. This man, hired by Nu’s father to guard his granary at night, had the bright idea of keeping himself awake during his sentry duties by taking up the pattaya, a bamboo xylophone. Po Myaing started out not knowing how to strike a single note, but it was love at first strike with the pattaya. Soon Po Myaing and his instrument could not be parted. Except for meals, sleep and visits to the toilet, all he ever did was run his little velvet hammer up and down the bamboo slats of the xylophone, until it drove everyone mad. One day Nu’s father decided it was time to put a stop to the annoyance, so he took away the instrument, which in any case he had bought for the nightwatchman as a perk, little dreaming of the trouble it would cause. The effect was devastating. Deprived of his beloved pattaya, Po Myaing went into a deep depression, locked himself in his room and refused to eat. When he began to rave in bed, U San Tun relented and returned the instrument to the lovesick fool. Nu was convinced that writing plays was to him what pattaya playing was to Po Myaing. In the event, he would never be prevented from writing for long, and in time would go on to pen numerous

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translations, stories and plays which, rather like Mao Tse-tung’s poetry, were guaranteed widespread circulation, if not acclaim. But for the time being, the prime minister had his hands full. The country was on the brink of chaos. For the country’s journalists it was the best and the worst of times. News-gathering, like nation-building, was an exciting, free-wheeling, no-holds-barred business. Daily dramas enlivened the political scene, and quite how each would play out was anybody’s guess. But journalists were often perceived as troublemaking scum, or bad-news messengers that deserved to be snuffed out. Reporters were stabbed in alleyways, or threatened with violence, or kidnapped and held for ransom. Thakin Tin, deputy prime minister, once rode past the Bama Khit newspaper in a Dodge command car, from which he let fly with a Tommy gun because he thought the paper had written a scurrilous article about him. Between marauding dacoits and murderous insurgents, between jittery politicians and trigger-happy vigilantes, all of them armed to the teeth, no one was safe. Carrying a gun was no longer just a stylish affectation, as it had seemed in Tin Tut’s airless office next door. At The Nation, it wasn’t just the editor who kept a revolver handy in the top drawer of his desk. The reporters sported firearms too. This led in later years to all sorts of awkward incidents. One reporter was rash enough to enter into a duel with a senior army officer, in a brothel no less. (Incredibly, both were such bad shots that they were left unscathed – by bullets, anyway.) Another Nation reporter climbed through a window of the Strand Hotel in order to crash a private party, then claimed immunity on the grounds that he worked for The Nation. It was said that between all the weapons left first by the Japanese and then by the Allies, the country was flooded with more guns than had ever been found throughout the century of British occupation. In vain did Prime Minister U Nu deplore the ‘cult of the gun’. In vain did he plead for peace and unity among his own supporters, the Commu-

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nists, the Socialists and the PVO. In vain did he try to persuade the Karens, the ethnic minority whose insurgents were theatening to take over the capital, to give up their demands for autonomy or independence. In the end, the tide did turn in favour of the central government – although what saved the Union of Burma was as much the disunity of its opponents as the unity of its own loyal adherents. The Karen rebels eventually ran out of ammunition, and whatever external help they may have expected failed to materialise. The predominantly Christian Karens, fighting for a homeland, were repelled by the kind of monolithic state espoused by the Communists. The Communists in any case had ‘taken sanctuary in the jungle’, as the Burmese say about going underground. And they too failed to drum up the support needed to capture Rangoon. Eventually, bolstered by support from foreign friends – a loan of six million pounds from the British, several arms shipments from India – the army, the civilian police and the Union Military Police were able to retake territory occupied by the insurgents. In June 1950, with things sufficiently under control (in Rangoon at least), the prime minister could take his first breather. ‘My friends,’ he announced to his cabinet ministers, ‘tomorrow I leave for the Meditation Centre. I have made a vow to attain a crucial stage in Buddhist meditation. Until then do not send for me, even if the whole country goes up in flames. If there are fires, you must put them out yourselves.’ Fortunately, no fires of any consequence flared up in the prime minister’s month-long absence. By the time the worst of the siege was over and the AFPFL government was more solidly back on its feet, The Nation had made a name for itself as a lively, scrappy deliverer of news and opinion. But now the newspaper was under suspicion of sympathising with the insurgents, and not just from the Communist camp. Other rumours suggested that The Nation’s editor was in the pay of the Americans; that his signed editorials were actually written by the urbane, Cambridge-educated Dr Ba Maw; that he was buying his secrets from government moles.

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The government placed a senior detective, a deputy superintendent by the name of Peng Hong, to keep a watch on Law-Yone’s comings and goings. But Law-Yone was constantly on the run, and Peng Hong found it easier to sit in a tea shop and pick up rumours of midnight meetings between Law-Yone and rebel representatives from the Karen and Mon ethnic armies. Detective Peng Hong was taken off the job after an unfortunate incident at the Rangoon Turf Club. There, on a hot Sunday afternoon, in full view of thousands of racegoers, Law-Yone approached Peng Hong, and putting his hands playfully (but clearly painfully) around his neck, demanded to know how he, a detective, could afford to breed a string of ponies on a monthly salary of 350 kyat (the equivalent of £50). Peng Hong was transferred to a provincial post. Some twenty years later, when U Nu and U Law-Yone found themselves in America and were reminiscing about the Peng Hong days, my mother asked U Nu why it was that relations between the prime minister and her husband were so hostile back then. And was it true, as some had averred, that they hated each other? ‘Nobody ever reported any such thing to me, Mrs Law-Yone,’ was U Nu’s mild reply. ‘But you have only to look at your husband to see how bad-mannered and offensive he is. In those days his manner was such that one disliked him on sight.’

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6 On the Green Couch

Dad was hardly ever at home in the evenings, but when he did stop by for an early dinner, it usually meant he was going back to work afterwards, not on to some ‘function’. Unhinged by the thought of keeping sahib waiting at the dining table, Ali, our cook, would flounder about the kitchen, managing in his agitation to grab neither his head nor his arse, as the saying went. Dripping with sweat, limping from his gammy leg, he would carry out the tray of steaming rice, pork curry, green mango halves with their dipping sauce of his home-made ngapi (fermented fish paste laced with crushed green chillies), and Dad’s favourite Kachin soup, a murky brew featuring one discoloured yam and a few smoked twigs. My father concentrated on eating the way he concentrated on reading, ignoring any and all distraction. He ate with his fingers, setting a bad example for us children in Mum’s book. To the first spoonful of rice on his plate was added a dollop of curry – just a dollop, not more, for starters. Then, swishing up a mouthful, he would shovel it in neatly with his thumb. Back went the hand now for another spoonful of rice, another dollop of curry, followed this time by a quick dip of the green mango into the ngapi, to round out the next mouthful. Still chewing, he would mix and mash with one hand, reach for the soup with his other, sprinkle half a spoonful onto his rice, and slurp down the other half with a hiss of appreciation. How surely and speedily those fingers worked, yet only their tips – already stained a dull yellow from cigarettes – would be soiled. His lips glistened with grease that left a mark on his water glass

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with every sip, but he didn’t stop to wipe his mouth, he didn’t stop for anything, until he had swiped the last grains of rice from his plate. Only then would he turn to wash his hand in the basin of lime-scented warm water set out for him. Only then would he pick up his napkin. His dinners were over and done with in ten minutes flat. This was the moment I had been waiting for. ‘Dad, can I go to the office with you?’ ‘Hmm. Better ask Mummy. She doesn’t like you staying up late.’ ‘Mummy says it’s OK,’ I would lie. ‘And anyway I won’t stay up. I’ll go to sleep in your office. Quietly.’ ‘On the big couch, eh?’ ‘On the big couch.’ ‘Come along then.’ I’d stick close to his side as he called out to my mother: ‘Darling? I’m off. Taking your daughter with me.’ Mum’s protests were always the same. ‘Edward! She has school tomorrow. She is eleven years old. She should be doing her maths, going to bed early. She’s failing, you know. She’s getting . . . zeros!’ ‘Goose egg in maths, eh?’ My father would regard me with a kind wonder, and my heart would plunge. ‘I thought my daughter would go to Oxford one day. Hmm. I suppose it will have to be the University of Lagos.’ The University of Lagos became the second most dreaded place on earth I could imagine – the first being that mysterious abyss known as the Black Hole of Calcutta. ‘She’ll be all right. My daughter will go to sleep early, like a good girl,’ he’d say finally, and I had to be careful not to jump up and down and rub Mum up the wrong way. ‘On the big green couch, eh?’ he would repeat absently, swinging my arm as we walked to the car. I remember the drive downtown at dusk, hurricane lamps flaring weakly under a darkening sky. The night-market vendors would be setting up their carts and stalls under swinging kerosene lanterns. Drinks hawkers would be cranking out sugar-cane juice through handturned presses, and shaving off blocks of ice for the tall frappés of red and green syrups doused with thick condensed milk. Dad would slow down to turn onto 40th Street, past pedestrians who

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took their sweet time to let us by. We’d stop right in front of no. 290, and the minute I stepped out of the car, the stench of sewage would make my gorge rise. But once I crossed the threshold of the front entrance, the smells of ink and lead and newsprint were rich and soothing. Someone – Aung Nyunt, the tall reporter, or one of the subeditors – would come and take me in hand, for yet another tour of the building. The tour always started on the ground floor, in the printing room, and ended on the top storey, where the typesetters lived. I knew the whole building by heart, but it would have been impolite to say so; and anyway, I liked the attention. Upstairs, in the compositors’ room, men and women sat over their trays of type as though absorbed in a board game. Soon one of the women would call me to her side and hand me a block of lead with a W on it. I had a whole row of these W blocks at home, but I tried my best to look surprised and pleased, as Mum always did when presented with a gift she already possessed. When the tour was over I was free to roam from floor to floor, and especially in and out of my uncle’s office. This uncle, the one young enough to be called Ko Ko, was The Nation’s accountant. Ko Ko would greet me with a big smile and a look of exaggerated surprise, as though I was the last person on earth he expected to see. He would open his desk drawers with their neatly arranged contents to find something that might interest me. Then he’d show me once again all his football trophies. When he ran out of things to amuse me with, he sent for a paratha kebob from Mogul Street. Soon one of the office boys would deliver a steaming parcel wrapped in banana leaf, which Ko Ko would unwrap with great delicacy, while I tried not to drool over the tender chunks of charred mutton, the raw onions and chillies, the paratha, flaky and greasy with ghee. My greed seemed a virtue in Ko Ko’s eyes. ‘Ha, Wendy, you really know how to eat!’ he would exclaim, as though I was performing a clever card trick. ‘Eat now, eat! Eat till you’re fat.’ The word for full in Burmese is the same word for fat. Dad just laughed whenever he dropped by and caught me. ‘Guffing again, are we?’ Despite his promise to Mum, he hardly ever insisted

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on my going to sleep early. He soon forgot about me altogether. But there would come a point when, running out of steam, I would head for the couch in his office. The green leather couch sat at the long end of an ‘L’, across the room from Dad’s desk. Wedged in between one end of the couch and the wall was a tall bookcase. Encyclopedias and dictionaries – big books with small print and no pictures – took up the top shelves. Down below were the magazines, pamphlets and newspapers in unreadable languages. More newspapers and books were piled on the green couch. These had to be moved onto the floor to clear a space for me. Tired as I was, I tried to put off lying down for fear of missing a crucial moment in the evening’s entertainment, as often happened at the pwè, the openair theatre that played through the night and into the early hours of dawn. There, the minute I shut my eyes or let my mind wander, a sudden clash of cymbals and frenzy of drums would return me to the drama onstage. But in the meantime a clown would have fallen on his face; the villain, crying for mercy only a moment ago with the hero’s foot on his chest, now had the hero by the neck; the snooty princess would be wailing her heart out . . . and I would have lost the plot completely. Dad’s office resembled another kind of theatre, a ‘yokthe pwè’ or puppet show. The figures that came and went – visitors, editors, reporters, copy boys – all seemed to be animated by him. From my front-row seat on the green couch, I admired his bold manipulations. Here was a puppeteer who didn’t need to hide behind a curtain; who liked being visible, even as he pulled the strings. ‘Tayauk la!’ he shouted out for an office boy. (‘Somebody, come!’) These boys had no names; they were just some bodies, any bodies. But when he called, these bodies came in a flash – sometimes two or three at a time. One of the somebodies had a nervous blink. He would go into a spasm of blinking while trying to memorise the food order he was charged with. Paratha kebob. Blink-blink. Biryani. Blink. Coffee. Blink. Tea. Blink. Cream Soda. Blink-blink-blink.

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The Nation editorial staff, 1960. Courtesy of Guy Slater.

When Dad held out a package for delivery, all three would spring forward to receive it. Then one by one they would back out of the room, as though from an altar or a throne. Other, older boys – university students – were almost as reverent in their arrivals and departures. Before they could even introduce themselves, Dad would fire off questions, hardly waiting for their answers before firing off more. Whenever the students talked at length, Dad’s eyes would dart from one to the other, impatient, distracted. But as soon as he opened his mouth, everyone fell silent. ‘Take this anyway. For now,’ he would say as they were leaving. He would pat his left trouser pocket, then his right trouser pocket, then his shirt pocket. He was forever patting his pockets – not just for university students but for Buddhist monks, Catholic nuns and priests, anyone with a cause they genuinely believed in. He patted his pockets for crackpots too, if he liked them. He looked relieved whenever he emptied his pockets, as though ridding himself of useless scraps. * * *

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Dad was never impatient when Daphne, his assistant editor, came in. Daphne was fair-skinned, short-haired and forbidding. She spoke in a low, husky voice, a cigarette dangling from her lips. ‘Very mannish,’ I heard people – women, usually – say about Daphne. ‘A bluestocking,’ Mum sniffed. ‘What’s a bluestocking, Ma?’ ‘A lady egghead.’ Something told me my father thought different. His behaviour towards her was not the same as his behaviour towards other women. When Daphne talked he seemed to sit up and take note. She spoke to him out of the side of her mouth, turning away to roll her eyes. ‘So?’ she often asked, enigmatically. ‘So? Dad always understood what she was saying, but he liked to tease her. ‘What so?’ ‘They’re up to their old tricks again.’ ‘Bloody bastards,’ Dad concurred. ‘Language, Mr Editor, language,’ said Daphne, looking at me. To one side of Dad’s desk with the big drawers and brass pulls was a metal table with a typewriter on it: a black Olivetti with a sheet of white paper all ready and waiting to roll. Dad would reach for the 555 cigarette box, lean back on his swivel chair and light up. Then, inhaling deeply, he would swing his feet up onto his desk and admire the smoke swirling up towards the ceiling. After a while he would set his cigarette on the heavy glass ashtray, swivel round to the typewriter, and attack the keys with two fingers. The bell on the carriage would ding and ding as he hit the return and the paper quickly filled with words, words, words. Sometimes he’d get up and walk to the window with his cigarette, gaze out at the street, puff onto the glass pane, walk back to his desk, walk back to the window, up and down, back and forth, smoking and thinking. He finished work at about three o’clock in the morning. My uncle, the accountant, said Dad wrote his editorials in twenty minutes flat – and it was always word perfect (he used the English phrase). But why shouldn’t he be able to finish his editorials in twenty minutes? I thought.

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After all, he was always practising writing, or thinking about writing, or actually writing – scribbling with his finger on tabletops, on his lap, on my arm or back when I sat on his lap. Still, the way he set upon the typewriter was so violent, so savage. Interrupting him would be like coming between a tiger and its kill. Sometimes I would be startled awake by what sounded like gunfire. Then I’d realise it was only Dad hammering away at his machine, and go back to sleep. The next thing I knew, he was lifting me off the couch and lugging me downstairs, into the car. When I woke up in the morning I didn’t even remember the ride home, or being carried into the house and put to bed. By 1951, the post-independence unrest was more or less under control. The Korean War had just begun. The Nation had paid its first dividend. Dad was off on his first junket – a three-month tour of America sponsored by the US government, on a grant for ‘Leaders & Specialists’. But there was another reason for Dad’s trip. The government of Burma had just put in a request for American aid. With some of his old OSS buddies now in positions of influence, Dad figured he could make a difference by appointing himself spokesman for the Burmese cause. Two of these old buddies had become high-powered lawyers; but lawyers in America apparently didn’t always practise law: they became business executives. Tommy Davis, Dad’s best friend in the OSS, was now vice president of the Kern County Land Company. Kern County, in south-central California, was where some of the largest oil fields in America were located. Dad’s other good friend, Manly Fleischmann, was head of his own profitable law firm in Buffalo, New York. But Manly’s main business seemed to be turning round, to even greater profit, big engineering firms in receivership. The official visit began with a briefing in Washington DC, ‘that dreary city with perhaps two bars’, where he witnessed ‘a gang of young Negroes disporting themselves breaking bottles on the road’. ‘It aroused in me,’ he wrote in a column describing his travels, ‘the same desire to wring their necks as did the sight of our urchins

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emptying their bowels in the drain outside my office in Rangoon.’ He went to Chicago, for a tour of the stockyards and the Swift Meat Packing Company, followed by a meeting with Colonel ‘Bertie’ McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, ‘The World’s Best Newspaper’. (‘It is not what it claims to be, of course,’ he sniffed, ‘but it is a very excellent paper in every respect except its editorials, which are rabidly anti-British and pro-isolationist in tone.’) He went to Boston, to visit, a little wistfully, the Harvard Business School, where he had very nearly gone to study on a fellowship offered him shortly after the war. Finally he went to Buffalo to see Manly Fleischmann. Dad brought Manly up to date on the Burmese economic scene and suggested that he, Manly, abandon his law practice to take charge of American aid to Burma. But Manly was on his way to becoming the head of a new Federal agency, so the timing was unfortunate. On to San Francisco next, to confide in Tommy Davis the same hopes and fears about Burma’s economic future. Tommy’s practical suggestion was to launch a PR campaign through radio broadcasts and meetings with civic groups. Not shy to seize the microphone, Dad held forth on Burma’s urgent needs, and was gratified to see men and women who had never heard of Burma before filling out telegraph blanks to tell their congressmen that the brave and wonderful people of Burma rated a high priority in the aid programme. For a journalist to act as political and economic plenipotentiary was unusual, to say the least. But nobody thought to challenge or question the brash young Burmese newspaperman. As far as he was concerned, an important job needed to be done to get the country on its feet, and he was the best person to do it. That he was having the time of his life while discharging his duty was no impediment to his zeal. He lounged by the swimming pools of Californian aristocracy – heirs to the Quaker Oats fortune, ‘citrus kings’ and their shapely blonde wives – with a tall, cool drink in his hand. He hobnobbed at Hollywood parties with movie directors and producers, oil tycoons (including an Arab sheikh), starlets, elderly millionaires with their young wives, and the swashbuckling Errol Flynn.

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He was smitten with Joan Fontaine. Joan had grown up somewhat since Rebecca, and was ravishing in a brown-and-green dress, even without a trace of make-up on her face. Kneeling at Dad’s feet, she discussed Somerset Maugham with great earnestness. The next day he was at Joan’s poolside, playing gin rummy. Now it was his turn to sit at her feet. Another guest – jealous, no doubt – remarked that gin rummy was for people who had nothing to say to one another. ‘Oh, we have plenty to say,’ Joan murmured, with a sidelong look at Dad. ‘Only we daren’t say them.’ He promised to call her if ever he returned to America. ‘Sayonara then,’ said Joan soulfully. ( Joan was born in Japan.) Returning to San Francisco in a dead faint of fatigue, Dad made more speeches, dined with more politicians and academics, and addressed the San Francisco Press Club – a rousing evening that ended with the club bard bringing out his guitar and serenading their esteemed Burmese speaker with a creaky attempt at occasional verse, to the tune of Oley Speaks’s ‘Road to Mandalay’. Arriving in New York at the end of his long tour, Dad was determined to see no more newspapers or think about them, but to enjoy his last week as a free agent. This he did in the company of two charming and well-heeled sisters called Helene and Emily, utter strangers who took him to Jones Beach and Hyde Park and insisted on paying for everything, even though the $210 left over from his expense account was burning a hole in his pocket. LEADER OF THE NATION RETURNS, read the headlines in his newspaper the day after he got back. Below the photograph of the leader and his large family at Mingaladon airport was a brief news item saying that Nation staff and other journalist friends were among the welcoming committee; but ‘ignoring The Nation’s jeep, he rode away in the plush station wagon of the US Embassy’. My father had orchestrated his ‘goodwill’ visit to America, then publicised it. He had thrown himself into the role of economic emissary, and come home confident of having preached to the converted. But once the American Economic Cooperation for Aid (ECA) package

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was delivered, he was the first to expose the ‘white elephants’ spawned by the aid package. That corruption was already endemic in Burma was no new revelation. The distinguished Dr Ba Maw, first Burmese prime minister prior to independence, had been quoted in the same vein. ‘Power means private armies, and guns, and subsidies, and the whole state treasury, and rules and decisions of your own making; and all these added together mean votes, and votes mean fresh power. And so the great democratic foolery goes round in a circle.’ Voicing his own contempt, Dad wrote: ‘If our corrupt politicians, in spite of being corrupt, were building museums, correcting infant mortality, cleaning Rangoon, or tackling any one of the other thousand things that need to be done, the whole community would be behind them. But since they do none of these things they are merely dissipating energy and getting in the way of those who really do want to do a constructive job. Their aims and their politics are mere piffle, and their mass meetings and howlings effect nothing. But they consider themselves leaders. The curious thing is that an unthinking public considers them to be leaders too. Yet human progress owed nothing at all to gasbags of that type.’ Criticising waste and inefficiency – even parliamentary procedure – was one thing. But when the Nation began levelling corruption charges at senior ministers using words like ‘thief ’ and ‘crook’, the cabinet as a whole decided it was time the arrogant editor’s guns were spiked. The official most directly impugned in The Nation was U Hla Maung, secretary of Finance and National Planning, who sat on some twentyfive boards and corporations. Thus it was he who charged The Nation’s editor with defamation, or criminal libel. The government would pay his legal expenses. Facing a likely jail sentence, as well as the prospect of losing his paper through heavy indemnity, Dad sought out the formidable Dr Ba Maw (who as head of state during the Japanese occupation had ordered Dad’s removal from office as unauthorised deputy commissioner of Myitkyina). Dad had long been an admirer of this powerful

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orator and skilled performer at the podium. Ba Maw agreed to take on the case pro bono, but as the court day drew near he had second thoughts, mainly because the chief prosecution counsel, the brilliant Dr Ba Han, happened to be his older brother. Shrugging off the risk of having a fool for a client, Dad decided to represent himself. As president of the Burma Journalists Association, he had kept a wary eye on the law of libel, so he knew something of what he was up against. He bought a copy of Law of Crimes, the bible of the 1860 Indian Penal Code (the British system of justice was still in effect), and studied it from A to Z. Then he went to call on Dr E Maung, acting chief justice of the Supreme Court. E Maung had fallen out with Prime Minster U Nu and was about to be retired, so he happily gave Dad a crash course in criminal law, gratis, with emphasis on Section 500 of the Penal Code. Dad began his defence by calling the secretaries of various government departments as witnesses. They, however, refused to testify. One after another they took the stand only to claim privilege and remain silent. The single exception was U Thant, future UN secretary general, then information secretary in U Nu’s cabinet. Thant told the judge that on publication of one of the offending editorials in The Nation, he had personally questioned the editor and satisfied himself that the unnamed government official criticised in the editorial was not in fact U Hla Maung. But Hla Maung was a Muslim, the prosecution pointed out. And Law-Yone in his editorial had likened a minister to Ali Baba. Wasn’t he implying that Hla Maung was a thief ? Not at all, said Law-Yone. Ali Baba wasn’t himself a thief. He was just a lucky guy who made away with the loot from thieves. The case took a startling turn when the defendant called the complainant to the stand. Dad demanded a full moral accounting of Hla Maung’s responsibilities, denouncing at the same time the entire aid administration. His questions led Dr Ba Han, counsel for the complainant, to object: ‘again and again my learned friend insists on going against the laws of relevancy. Is this a case of wrongful dismissal or is it a defamation case?’

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Ba Han produced and read out the offending Nation articles and editorials with emphases, inflections and nuances of tone that made them out to be as fully damaging as the author had intended. When Dad started to name the foreign subcontractors involved in Hla Maung’s projects (‘Do you recall the name of a Hans Braunsberg? No? Then what about the name of Hill Brown Ltd of London?’), Ba Han’s dry aside was ‘Are they tailors?’ The case was argued in English, which the inexperienced judge did not always follow, especially when the exchanges became heated. But daily transcripts of the proceedings appeared in The Nation’s pages – accompanied by a notice that ‘Owing to the great length of the Court proceedings on this page, we have not been able to find space for local news stories and the editorial. We apologise to our readers, especially those who are not interested in the defamation case.’ The transcript revealed, among other unusual tactics, the defendant’s frequent use of leading questions. Q: Has it ever occurred to you to suggest to the cabinet that there is a conflict of interest and duty between the two offices which you are asked to hold? A: I do not admit that there is a conflict. Q: Or is it that it suits your purpose to go on holding the two offices? A: That is absolutely untrue. Q: From such study as you had made, would you agree that the proposal [made by Roy Farrell, an entrepreneur] was one for the total exploitation of Burma’s resources? A: I agree that the proposal was for the total development of all of Burma’s mineral resources, and that is why I considered it to be fantastic . . . and formed a poor opinion of Farrell. Q: And yet you were prepared to receive this man and have discussions with him? I suggest that Roy Farrell made proposals to take over the economy of Burma for the next 25 years. I suggest you were trying to sell Burma to Roy Farrell Associates for 50 million dollars. Dad’s closing arguments were as unorthodox as his cross-examination. ‘Throughout my investigations of ECA, and the part that U Hla Maung

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played in it,’ he opined, ‘I have met with nothing but suspicious circumstances . . . From such facts as I had in my possession I felt justified in expressing my suspicions about U Hla Maung. But I have not tried to hide the fact that in my opinion, as expressed in the editorial column, U Hla Maung is not only unfit to hold the positions which he does, but that he is a menace to the country. ‘I have always been suspicious,’ he went on, ‘and I am still suspicious, of the cotton spinning mill [equipped with machinery unsuitable for Burmese cotton], of second-hand, refitted gunboats, and of the Dove airplanes from the de Havilland Co. In the case of the Doves, I suspect there was gross irregularity in their purchase, because as far as I know, no commission of discount has accrued to the government over their purchase. Furthermore, when a Dove plane crashed and killed everyone on board, the man who bought the aircraft, Mr Holroyd-Smith, wrote a very slipshod report to cover up the company . . . In the case of the gunboats bought from England, I have never stopped saying that they were bought as junk from the Admiralty, refitted in one of the shipyards, and sold to us for the price of new vessels.’ The trial, which lasted three months, ended with a sentence of ‘one month in prison, fine of three thousand kyat, and bound down to keep the peace and be of good behaviour’. On appeal to the High Court, the prison sentence was struck down, and the fine reduced to a token. Jubilant members of the Burma Journalists Association rushed up to place garlands around the defendant’s neck before the court was adjourned, and they weren’t even reprimanded. Afterwards, Dr E Maung, former chief justice and Dad’s unofficial counsel, was restrained in his congratulations. ‘Any jury would have acquitted you,’ he said serenely. But Dr Ba Maw was exuberant. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know you had so many facts. They were splendid facts.’ Dad’s father would have been proud. He wanted a lawyer son.

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7 Steppe by Steppe

While Dad was cutting a swathe as gadfly, stinging and goading his public along, Mum in her domain preached reticence. ‘Never go out of your way to draw attention to yourself,’ she would say to me. Or: ‘Why create a stir unnecessarily?’ And: ‘He’s just like the Pope, your father – always speaking ex cathedra.’ For a long time I misheard this phrase as ex cathedral, and took it to mean that Dad’s pronouncements came from a sacred place, like the grounds of a cathedral. It wasn’t the Pope’s infallibility that I had to worry about: it was my parents’. Mum made predictions that turned out with scary regularity to come true. ‘As you make your bed . . .’ was all she had to say to remind me of the iron law of cause and effect, and my palms would turn sweaty with foreboding. Dad issued his own sweeping judgements that went unchallenged, often on subjects about which he knew nothing. ‘The modern art I saw in the United States – as elsewhere – was plainly nonsensical,’ he pronounced. And ‘Picasso, who can draw a pigeon when he wants to, was clearly out to hoax a gullible public when he gave it bits of an African totem pole as masterpieces of abstract art’. Robert Frost, for reasons I never fathomed, was written off with a single epithet. ‘The guy is a cow,’ Dad remarked in Burmese. I never understood what he meant by that, and dared not ask. I probably nodded sagely. My father often assumed I knew more than I did as a child, and the last thing I wanted to disabuse him of was this flattering misconception. But I was left with a lingering impression

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of the great poet as a ruminant, his large New England jaw endlessly chewing the cud. The difference between Mum and Dad was that Mum was acutely mindful of what people thought, while Dad didn’t give a damn. Once in a while, however, even he couldn’t ignore Mum’s tight-lipped censure of his overbearing ways. ‘My long-suffering wife,’ he would tease, nuzzling her neck and feigning contrition. Mum, encased in ice, feigned indifference. ‘Long-suffering,’ he persisted, chuckling and nuzzling. Occasionally, he would bring about a sudden thaw as she broke down and laughed weakly, fighting it all the way. But he knew when not to push his luck with his long-suffering wife. After all, her position was even more ex cathedral than his. Out in the wide world, however, he threw his weight around unchecked. And his world was getting wider and wider, what with international conferences, press junkets and goodwill missions to cover. One year it was the Geneva Conference. The next year it was Bandung. The year after that it was the Soviet Union. In Bandung for the first major conference of newly independent Asian and African nations, Dad was pacing the corridors, increasingly irritated to be kept out of the official conference rooms, when a student volunteer, mistaking him for a delegate, asked if he would like to join a tour of Mount Tangkuban Perahu, the famous ‘upside-down boat’ volcano. This invitation coincided with the appearance in the lobby of one of the Burmese delegates, the Kachin minister, Duwa Zau Lawn. The duwa (chief ) did not particularly want to see volcanoes, even if they resembled upturned boats, but Dad was persuasive. The duwa had no English, he pointed out; why stay for proceedings that would only bore him to tears? The duwa had to agree with him; and just as he stepped into the limousine that bore him off to the famous hot spot, Dad plucked the rosette badge from the duwa’s jacket and pinned it to his own. Then he walked purposefully into the conference hall and joined the Burmese delegation in their stall. He knew every single one of the members – well enough to feel confident that they wouldn’t turn him in. They didn’t; but Prime Minister U Nu’s gimlet eye bore into him as he took his seat. Dad overheard him say in an expression-

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Bandung Conference, 1955

less tone of voice, ‘It solves one problem anyway. Now we don’t have to be pestered by him afterwards.’ In the USSR, the Tass man in charge of the six Burmese journalists covering their prime minister’s state visit was one Alexius Pronin, a veteran press officer. Pronin had his work cut out for him: the journalists showed scant interest in the industrial and agricultural exhibitions selected for their benefit – or in the side trips to collective farms. Their schedule had to be altered at every turn. Dinners had to be cut short to forestall the bizarre Burmese after-dinner speeches. But they did brighten wherever there was music and dancing – not just at the Bolshoi for Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, or at La Traviata in Alma-Ata, but at schools and conservatoires from Moscow to Leningrad. ‘Some more! Tell him to sing one more!’ the prime minister cried out, after a particularly rousing aria from Fidelio performed at the Hermitage by a leading tenor of the Leningrad State Opera. One of the journalists was so moved that he proclaimed Fidelio his favourite Beethoven opera. Informed that it was Beethoven’s only opera, he insisted it was still his favourite.

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The prime minister was considerably more refined than his unruly press corps. His interest in art and sculpture seemed sincere, whereas theirs was non-existent. At the Hermitage, a particular canvas portraying Bathsheba attended by a Nubian slave caught the rapt attention of U Sein, one of the journalists. A museum docent stepped forward to explain that Bathsheba was the wife of a Hittite general called Uriah. ‘It’s not absentee husbands I’m thinking of,’ muttered this journalist to his brethren in Burmese. ‘But what is the Negress doing obstructing the view?’ Instead of tailing their prime minister as one would expect them to, the journalists seemed to be steering clear of him whenever possible. But then the Prime Minister was indefatigable, up early while they overslept. The newsmen slouched around, standing vacantly in front of posters and exhibits until it was time to leave, then making an unseemly dash for the car. They had a terror of the cold, even though it was still only October, and they were swaddled in heavy coats, gloves and fur balaclavas several sizes too big, making them look like an uncommon species of beetle. Eager for their visit to the Palace of Workers in the outskirts of Moscow to end, they scurried ahead into their press vehicle, a sevenseater ZIM, and sat waiting for the prime minister to emerge. When he did, only to turn round and re-enter the building for another spate of baby-kissing, they let out a collective groan. Law-Yone of The Nation tapped impatiently on the glass partition of the window in their car. The driver took not the slightest notice, so the rear window had to be rolled down to draw the attention of a black-coated official. Yes? What was the problem? The journalists in the car mimed their impatience to leave. ‘But the Honourable U Nu –’ the official remonstrated. ‘Never mind him. In our country, we always go first.’ There was a hasty consultation, followed by heavy shrugs among the black coats. Finally the driver of the ZIM caught the spirit of haste and gunned his engine with a roar. The motorcycle escorts preceded them halfway into Moscow before receiving orders to turn back.

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Pronin looked ready to tear his hair out. He asked for, and was sent, reinforcement. A young man called Olec arrived. Together Pronin and Olec struggled to keep their wards in line. The lazy fellows were chronically late, and heedless of protocol. Nothing was more annoying, however, than their insistent demands for baths. ‘But you had one yesterday,’ Pronin would point out. ‘At home we bathe twice a day,’ they claimed, to which was added in Burmese a muttered, ‘What’s the matter? Water shortage or something?’ The Burmese found genuine welcome on the faces of people in the street, and warm handshakes wherever they went. They couldn’t help being impressed by the orderliness and discipline induced by Communism. Dad was for fraternising with the populace, but it wasn’t easy with a Russian vocabulary of two words. One was spasiba (thank you), and the other was a Burmese word that only sounded Russian. Pronin adjured him never, ever, to use the latter in the presence of Russians. Dad explained that he was merely addressing his fellow newspapermen as ‘comrade’ in Burmese. Comrade was all right, said Pronin; it was even all right to address Nikita Khrushchev as comrade, or tovarisch. But that Burmese word for ‘comrade’, yebaw, was a no-no. But why? Pronin put on a stern demeanour. ‘In Russian, yebaw is what man does to woman.’ Onward to Yalta, where Mr and Mrs Khrushchev awaited U Nu. The journalists were kept out of the way, in one of the tsar’s palaces. They bathed in the Black Sea, and were taken on a tour of a famous sanatorium. There, one of the doctors, on noticing Dad’s chainsmoking, performed a simple demonstration. He dangled a cigarette over a cup, and explained that he had merely to feed its nicotine content to a dog for it to die. He gave Dad a long, searching look. ‘Do you believe this?’ Dad said the doctor was a man of science, and that he firmly believed. ‘Then what is your reaction to this demonstration?’ Dad’s reply was that he was jolly glad he wasn’t a dog. Years later,

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whenever he felt in danger of coughing his lungs out, he remembered the sad-faced Russian doctor shaking his head at him reprovingly. At Samarkand, Dad remembered how as a boy he had once asked his mother about the Burmese king known as the Tayok Pyay Min (literally ‘Chinese-running-king’). Was the king so called because he had run before, or after, the Chinese? he enquired. That was when his mother had first recounted stories of Genghis Khan that stirred his imagination. Now here was the fabled city through which the mounted marauders had passed, with its mosques and minarets, and its tomb of Tamerlane . . . And there was Pronin urging him to hurry because there was a plane to catch. At the airport, black bread and a tin of sardines had been set out for the newspapermen and would have suited them just fine, but Pronin made the mistake of taking them for one last stroll to the other end of the hangar, where they spied a sumptuous spread all laid out for the official party. It so happened that U Nu’s Ilyushin 12 had just landed, disgorging the VIPs, so the Burmese journalists simply mucked in with the diplomats. Pronin, realising he had brought his party where they did not belong, rushed to rectify his error, but no Burmese editor in his right senses was going to pass up fried chicken, roast tongue, caviar and chocolate for black bread and tinned sardines. ‘Keep your heads down, boys,’ Dad urged. ‘Eat hearty and don’t forget to steal an extra sweet for our Pronin. It looks as though he’s going to need it.’ The Soviet Foreign Office types whom the greedy Burmese had displaced would most probably take it out on poor Pronin, but at that point they were past caring. The journalists were to remain in Moscow for October Revolution Day, and to go on to Warsaw afterwards, but Dad decided he’d had enough. He wanted to head off to London instead, to do some archival research on a matter that was troubling him. Standing two feet away from him at the Bandung Conference, the Chinese prime minister, Chou En-lai, had declared, ‘We’re a big and powerful nation, and it is natural that the smaller nations should fear us. It’s also possible that troops from our large armies should inadvert-

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ently cross the line somewhere. When that happens let us know and we’ll pull them back.’ Dad knew where the dividing line was between China and Burma, not least because he was born close to that divide. But the Foreign Office officials in Rangoon had no concept of the area, nor did it occur to them to consult records or read up on history to enlighten themselves. Burma’s traditional borders, never easy to define, had assumed their modern contours in the colonial era. As Alastair Lamb, one of the world’s leading authorities on the boundaries of Asia, put it, ‘the British did something in Burma which all the king’s men could not do for Humpty-Dumpty’. In other words, they took a kingdom fragmented over the course of several dynasties and put it together again. ‘Indeed, they did more: they gave Burma all sorts of bits and pieces which is it extremely unlikely it had ever held before with any firmness.’ In the case of the 1,500-mile border shared with China, boundary lines had been fixed during the British annexation of Upper Burma in 1886, and the subsequent colonial rivalry with the French. These lines were in dispute between the British and the Chinese from the very beginning, and repeated negotiations over the next two decades were inconclusive, leaving close to half of the Sino-Burmese borderline undefined. When in 1937 a Joint Boundary Commission appointed by the League of Nations finally completed its survey, the commissioner, Colonel Frederic Iselin, offered an unorthodox solution: two boundaries instead of one – a physical (official) treaty line, and a political line extending further west into China, thereby ceding a large chunk of the Wa States in Burma to Chinese territory. The Iselin Commission’s findings failed to satisfy either party; but before negotiations could be resumed, the Japanese invaded China, putting on hold the border issue. Once the Second World War was over, however, clashes between the border patrols of independent Burma and Communist China broke out anew. Although Burma was the first non-Socialist country to recognise the People’s Republic of China, her biggest and most powerful neigh-

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bour, relations between the two nations were tentative at best. Border disputes aside, there was the matter of China’s support of Burmese Communists who had taken up arms against the Nu government. From the Chinese side came accusations that the Burmese authorities were turning a blind eye to the presence of KMT Chinese irregulars operating within Burma, where they posed the threat of launching an attack on the PRC in Yunnan across the border. But the Nu government was committed to a strict policy of neutrality with regard to both capitalist and Communist blocs, and reciprocal state visits made by Prime Ministers Nu and Chou En-lai signalled a mood of SinoBurmese pauk phaw (‘brotherly’) friendship. That mood had now been compromised by the incursion of Communist Chinese units into Burmese territory on the pretext of a border dispute. With the situation in the north heating up, and in the face of such ignorance among Burma’s political leaders as to exactly where and what these border disputes were about, The Nation would have to start educating its readers on the histories and customs of the peoples of those regions. In preparation, some maps and documents in London’s colonial archives would need examining. But London turned out to be a merry-go-round of meetings and reunions, and a week went by without any research being done. Dad couldn’t have stayed longer if he’d wanted to, because by then he’d run out of money. Before leaving the Soviet Union, he had exchanged traveller’s cheques for £1 notes belonging to the other journalists, but these notes, when he declared them at Heathrow, had been seized. A law was in effect prohibiting foreigners from bringing into Britain more than £10 at a time. He could rest assured, he was told, that his money would be sent on to Beirut, his next destination. And that was that. In Beirut, each morning was spent fondling pieces of brocade he might take home to Mum, followed by a visit to the Pan Am offices, to pester the authorities for the money he was expecting. In desperation – by now he was eating roasted chestnuts in the street – Dad went to the post office and burst in on the postmaster himself. Putting

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aside his teacup and donning his fez in a hurry, that worthy ransacked the counters with Dad breathing down his neck, but no, there was nothing for him. A week later, back in Rangoon and hammering away at his series, ‘Steppe by Steppe in the Soviet Union’, a brown paper envelope arrived which, on being torn open, disgorged all the one-pound notes Dad had been parted from since London. I longed to travel the way my father travelled – the way everyone else in the family had done. As a teenager, Byron had gone on a Boy Scouts jamboree in Copenhagen. He had come back somewhat green around the gills, but with a new guitar and several Danish phrases, which turned out to be English phrases pronounced in a convincing Danish accent. Byron was a genius at imitating foreign languages. Alban, four years older, had not yet had his turn abroad, but he was well travelled in his way, forever setting out on mysterious missions to parts of the country that none of us had ever seen. Hubert and Marlaine were the pioneers. They had been to America, even lived in America. First Hubert went to study at Stanford University in California. Then Marlaine went to Mills College, also in California, for a master’s degree in English. Mills was not far from Stanford, but Hubert and Marlaine’s paths crossed only briefly. Marlaine wasn’t alone in America for long, however. Her fiancé, Ko Tin Nyo, already an America-returned, as the Burmese called any graduate of an American university, followed Marlaine back to the States and took up a United Nations fellowship at Stanford while waiting for her to finish her studies. For this was the 1950s, a time when journalists, politicians, prospective leaders and promising students in emerging Third World nations were being courted with scholarships, study tours, technical training and other educational grants in the Western world. With multiple degrees under their belts, Marlaine and Ko Tin Nyo were married in San Francisco, on their way home to Burma. Dad was too busy to take time off, so Mum went alone for the wedding. Then she joined the newly-weds on their honeymoon in Lake Tahoe.

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(‘Why not?’ she would shrug coquettishly, when teased about the highly irregular intrusion. ‘My son-in-law and I get along like a house on fire.’) Part of Mum’s journey home, from New York to Portsmouth, was on a ship called the Hollandia, where she made glamorous new friends. One was ‘a short little chap, ugly as sin, but such a personality’. This was Akim Tamiroff, the Hollywood film star of Russian descent whose film credits included For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Topkapi. She danced the foxtrot with Tamiroff. ‘What is it about my wife and these old roués?’ Dad teased. ‘Akim Tamiroff better not show up at the Rose Ball like that scoundrel Ladejinsky.’ Wolf Ladejinsky was an American agronomist who had cut up the floor with Mum at the annual charity gala, the Rose Ball. (Ladejinsky, I later learned, was a survivor of the McCarthy witchhunts, having been branded a Communist on the strength of his expertise in land reform in Asia.) Akim Tamiroff was not my mother’s only shipboard conquest. She also charmed the D’Alboras of Cocoa Beach, Florida. The D’Alboras were something called Orange Millionaires. They owned, I was told, acres of citrus groves too vast to imagine. But of all Mum’s new friends, the one I most admired was Mr Kahn. Gustav H. Kahn read the engraving on the elegant sky-blue stationery addressed to my mother. Mr Kahn was a retired banker from New York, ‘a very proper, very sweet old man with a bald head, shaped like an egg’, as Mum described him. Seeing my interest in any envelopes with foreign stamps that came her way, Mum said, ‘Would you like to be my social secretary?’ ‘What does a social secretary have to do?’ I asked. ‘Start by writing to Mr Kahn.’ I thanked Mr Kahn for his kind letter, and apologised for my mother’s busy schedule which prevented a personal reply. When Mr Kahn wrote back, his letter was addressed to me. In his long, looping hand he enquired about my interests and activities. I read a lot of books, I claimed in one letter, which was not strictly true. Or even remotely true. I played volleyball, I wrote, when I had

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only played a couple of times. The only genuine statement I made in my letters to Mr Kahn was that I found my school extremely boring. But this one truth led to a stream of half-truths and outright lies that swept me into the sort of river that my brother Alban often sang about: a river of no return. ‘What have you been telling Mr Kahn about school?’ Mum demanded out of the blue, about a year into our correspondence. ‘Nothing. Why?’ ‘Well, you must have been moaning and groaning. Mr Kahn has written me a very interesting letter. He’s offering to pay your way to a boarding school in Switzerland.’ Switzerland! I knew all about Switzerland from Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. Switzerland was so familiar to me that I could feel my mouth water whenever I thought about Heidi’s first supper in the mountains. I could practically taste the cheese that her old grandfather speared on a long iron fork, then held over the fire till it crisped, finally sliding the golden mass onto a thick slice of bread. ‘But does Mr Kahn mean it?’ I asked, breathless. ‘Can I really go to Switzerland?’ ‘Maybe next year. We’ll have to see.’ Mr Kahn never mentioned his idea to me. Nor did I dare bring up the subject with him. But at school I took my classmates Molly and Jenny into my confidence – and, increasingly, into my fabrications – about the Swiss boarding school I was bound for. The details I fed them were spliced together from two separate sources: Heidi, for the Alpine setting; and a comic book set in an English boarding school where three jolly girls set out to solve a mystery concerning a minor theft. Combining the two books, I constructed an idyll in the Alps, right down to the hot chocolate, the cosy dormitories, the snow in winter and the wild flowers in summer, the secret passages, the funloving teachers, the frisky mountain goats for pets . . . Molly and Jenny groaned and sighed with envy. This bothered me after a while. If I could go to school in Switzerland, I thought, why couldn’t they? It wasn’t fair. Molly might need a few smiling lessons, and Jenny might need to wash, but there was no reason why they

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shouldn’t go to a Swiss boarding school as well. Apart from the fact that Jenny’s family didn’t have a pot to piss in, as she put it. ‘And don’t think I’m exaggerating,’ she added darkly, swiping her runny nose with her finger, then wiping it on her uniform, to leave yet another crusty streak on the navy-blue cotton. Jenny came from a large family, half Irish, half Burmese. Being the eldest of seven kids, she was kept hopping with housework and childminding the minute she got home from school. As a result, she came to class tired and untidy, with her homework unfinished. Molly’s parents were not poor but they were Chin; and the Chin were an ethnic minority known to be inordinately proud. Molly herself was hard to impress. She refused to believe that Switzerland – or any other place in the world – could be better than her home in Chin State. Why, in the very forest right near where she lived there were leopards and bears and a kind of deer as small as a rat. There were camellias as big as sunflowers and orchids that never wilted. And the lakes were so clear you could see all the way down to where giant fish slept. The solution, I thought, was simple. Mr Kahn would pay my school fees, and my father would pay Molly’s and Jenny’s. Dad wouldn’t mind: he had plenty of money. He was always reaching into his pockets and handing out the contents. A spendthrift, Mum called him. All I had to do, I told my friends, was ask my father, and he would pay their away. He would talk to their parents first, of course. Molly and Jenny were more sceptical about getting their parents to agree to such a plan than about my father’s largesse. Oh, but they didn’t know my father, I said. Nobody refused him. They would see. The problem was that Dad was hardly ever at home, and when he was it was never the right time to approach him. I could ask Mum to ask him, of course, but that seemed like a bad idea. She was much too careful with money. Once, when she accidentally dropped a hundred-kyat note from the window of our Lewis Street flat, and it landed somewhere on the mountain of rubbish that filled the gap between our building and the one next to it, she made Byron go down and climb all over the rotting food and broken glass to look for it. (And the genius found it.) By now Molly and Jenny had come round to my scheme, and

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pestered me daily. Had I talked to my father? When would I do so? Finally, to reassure them, I lied. I told them that yes, he had agreed to everything, as I said he would. And soon he would start making the necessary arrangements. Now my friends were greedy for specifics. When were we leaving? How would we get to Switzerland? Their curiosity about everything from air travel to mountain climbing was beginning to wear me out. I had to do something to move things along. Casually, I asked my mother whether I shouldn’t write to Mr Kahn and thank him properly for his offer. Mum looked blank for a long moment. Then it sank in, and she shook her head. ‘Do you really think your father and I would let some stranger pay for your schooling?’ she asked, exasperated. Mr Kahn was not some stranger: he was my pen pal; besides, he and Mum were friends. But I couldn’t worry about the finer points of our relationship now. ‘Then will you and Dad pay?’ ‘Absolutely not.’ ‘But why?’ ‘You’re far too young.’ ‘But some kids are sent to boarding school when they’re babies!’ ‘You heard me. No is no.’ ‘But you said –’ ‘I don’t want to hear another word on the subject.’ It was the last week of school before the summer holidays. I had to break the news to Molly and Jenny that the whole thing was off; that none of us were going to Switzerland. I had made up a plausible excuse for why they couldn’t go: my father wasn’t able to obtain passports for anyone other than members of his own family. I didn’t have to make up an excuse for why I myself wouldn’t be going. I could tell them the truth. My mother had quashed the idea. Arriving at our usual lunch spot – behind the grotto with the statue of Our Lady of Fatima – I blurted out the bad news before unpacking the parcel of fried rice that I brought every day to share with them. Jenny stared at me as I went through the prepared excuses, with an intensity that made me look away.

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‘Who cares?’ she said when I had finished. ‘I never believed you anyway.’ She started to whistle as she walked off. ‘What about lunch?’ I called after her. ‘I’m not hungry.’ Molly bent over her fried rice and ate slowly, in silence. I started to say, ‘Molly –’ but she put up her hand. Very sternly she said, ‘I forgive you.’ But then Molly came from a devout Christian family. The summer was almost over when I received an airmail package from Mr Kahn: a box of expensive-looking stationery. The thick sheets of creamy paper had matching envelopes, with my name and address engraved in gold, just like his. I wanted to cry. We were getting ready to move to a new house! Mum, running around trying to take care of a hundred things at once, ordered me to get on with the packing. About the outdated stationery that sent me into mourning, all she had to say was, ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth.’

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8 Muckraker, Kingmaker

One person who didn’t read Dad’s newspaper – or said he didn’t – was the prime minister of Burma. Nu claimed not to read any newspapers at all, for fear they would influence his better judgement. Best to leave the sordid business of the broadsheet to his staff. But ‘Bo Law’ (‘Comrade Hasty’, his nickname for Dad) was one newspaperman he had grown to like – even if he preferred to take him in small doses. Nu was into his second term of office as head of government. He had gone through something of a transformation and increasingly it was religious rather than political concerns that preoccupied him. Distracted and abstemious, he chose to live in the modest annex of a wooden house on Pyidaungsu Lane, off Goodliffe Road, where his wife and children remained. The annex was a brick structure the size of a one-car garage. This arrangement allowed him to observe the vow of celibacy he had taken in order to become a true disciple of the Buddha. Once, when U Thant was in Burma briefly to consider whether he should give up his post as secretary general of the United Nations to return to his old job as Nu’s private secretary, Dad said, ‘Prime Minister, do you know that our friend here has learned to drink?’ Nu eyed Thant with new interest, causing him to blush before admitting that he occasionally took a glass of wine at social gatherings, but had not by any means formed the habit and did not drink at home. ‘So, you see,’ said Dad, ‘an occasional drink has never harmed anybody.’ ‘It harmed somebody in my town,’ Nu shot back, naming the

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individual. ‘The man never learned to drink, or gamble, or prevaricate, or womanise. Then he met a fellow like you who said to him what you’ve just said. He took that occasional drink, went on the town and did everything.’ The prime minister may have looked askance at The Nation editor’s profane ways, but he recognised his talents in casting not just aspersions but votes. In March 1958, mass arrests were authorised by Nu in response, it was said, to the inflammatory charges of corruption that had been levelled against his government, and to the army’s complaints that his supporters were being given political protection even as they went about ‘murdering, raping and kidnapping’. But Nu’s rivals, Kyaw Nyein and his followers, were convinced that the arrests were in fact aimed at undermining their ranks. (Kyaw Nyein was the intimidating Socialist thinker and general secretary of the AFPFL.) The Nation summed up the situation in its 11 April edition: ‘There is a strong belief that the arrests are not merely a purge of bad elements but an elimination contest between warring factions of the AFPFL in a secret struggle to the death.’ The AFPFL split on 22 April, bringing about the ‘Clean’ faction led by Nu, and the ‘Stable’ faction led by Kyaw Nyein and ‘Tiger’ Ba Swe, leader of the Socialist Party and Nu’s deputy. In June, thirteen ministers resigned from the government and tabled a motion of no confidence against Nu in parliament. But the real clash was between Nu and Kyaw Nyein. With violence mounting in the run-up to the elections, with the murders of politicians from both Clean and Stable factions being reported in increasing numbers, Nu was doing his best to keep on an even keel, but the strain was showing. Then one night the unexpected happened, distinctly improving his chances of survival. Dad was about to turn in after a long day at the office when two Chin ministers came to call: U Zahre Lian and U Lum Pum. Dad’s relationship with Zahre Lian had been forged at a news conference some years earlier, when Dad asked the prime minister why he opposed the appointment of Zahre Lian to the Chin Affairs

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Mum & Dad with U Thant (far right), 1959

Council. Didn’t the prime minister have to abide by the popular will? Nu’s dismissive answer was that Zahre Lian was thirty-three years old – too young for the job. Perhaps the prime minister had forgotten, Dad countered, how old William Pitt the Younger was when he became the man entrusted with running an empire over which the sun never set? And who had entrusted U Law-Yone with pleading the Chin cause? the prime minister wanted to know. Yet not long afterwards, he had given the young Zahre Lian his due. Zahre had come now to seek his old champion’s advice on how the Chins should vote in the no-confidence motion. The next day, Dad went to see Nu. How secure would the prime minister feel if he were given the majority of Chin votes? ‘Then I’ve won,’ Nu said, his face suffused with pleasure. On Monday, 9 June, the day of the vote, the city of Rangoon was in a state of alert, with army, navy, and air force units surrounding the parliament compound. One by one the legislators entered the building,

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each with his own bodyguard provided by the government. Pulling out all the stops, the Clean faction had released two deputies from the proCommunist National United Front from jail. Excluded from the previous session of parliament, they were now allowed to take part in the balloting. With last-minute defections taking place in both Clean and Stable blocs, the outcome of the vote was still in doubt. All over the city, people tuned into their radios to follow the pre-vote debates, which began at eleven in the morning and lasted until seven in the evening. Except for the usual Burmese humour that held nothing sacred, the proceedings for the most part were surprisingly mild. By the time parliament convened for the crucial vote, the press gallery was so jammed that Dad was unable to get in. But he was shown straight into the well of the House, where he witnessed the final vote: 127–119 in favour of Nu. He had won – but by a mere eight votes. Nu was still the popular hero, but his influence had clearly ebbed. He had lost his majority, and his position remained precarious. To set about broadening his base, he began releasing political detainees by the hundreds, opening new negotiations with the Communists, and stumping across the country in anticipation of elections which he had announced, then cancelled, then announced again. Ever since the AFPFL split, the army’s growing nervousness about Nu’s conciliatory gestures towards the Communists had resulted in a visible shift in its support for Kyaw Nyein’s Stable faction. There was every possibility that Kyaw Nyein could still take power. On the afternoon of 22 September, Nu returned from a tour of Kachin State and was met by his Home Minister, who informed him of exactly that possibility: an impending coup. An airplane was in readiness, he said, in case the prime minister wanted to flee. The prime minister did not want to flee. He wanted – had in fact announced his intention – to retire to a monastery for rest and meditation. Instead, within two hours of his return, he was convening a cabinet meeting. There he announced that parliament would be dissolved on 29 September, that the budget would be proclaimed by ordinance the next day, and that elections would be held in November.

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This move was designed to stave off a coup, but it was uncertain whether the measures were too little, too late. By the time Nu returned to his official residence on Windermere Road, paramilitary units of the Union Military Police were stationed outside. Inside the compound he found Captain Hla Myint, his security officer, busy directing a digging operation. Nu asked what they were digging. A bunker, he was told. A bunker? What on earth for? To shoot from, said the captain, when the tanks rolled in. Nu asked how many men were at the ready to stem the invasion. A platoon. So: thirty troops. And with what guns? The captain said he’d just been issued a Browning machine gun. Right. And when the tank smashed it to smithereens? ‘Do not worry, Mr Prime Minister. We will hide you elsewhere,’ the loyal captain assured him, crestfallen at being ordered to stop the digging. Two days later, Brigadiers Aung Gyi and Maung Maung, senior military commanders, arrived for an emergency meeting with Nu, and expressed deep concern over ‘the deteriorating security situation in the country’. All army units had been alerted, they said, in response to rumours of a plot to assassinate the top echelon of the army. In that case, Nu asked solicitously, did they know of anyone to whom he might hand over power long enough to restore law and order until elections could be held? The brigadiers looked at each other. As a matter of fact, they did: General Ne Win. ‘Then I think you should call off your coup,’ Nu told them. Despite the trappings of a gentlemanly contract, he was being told in no uncertain terms that the army was taking over. On 26 September, the city was ringed in concentric circles of army and Union Military Police forces as Nu made his announcement. He had asked General Ne Win, commander-in-chief of Burma’s armed forces, to form a caretaker government in order to prepare the country for free and fair elections. * * *

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On 28 October 1958, the day of the official transfer of authority, my father was invited to ride with Ne Win to Government House. The general seemed agitated. Several times he made as though to impart a confidence, but changed his mind at the last moment. ‘What is it?’ Dad asked finally. ‘What’s bothering you?’ Ne Win grimaced. ‘It’s this thing.’ He produced from his breast pocket a solid gold pendant attached to a ribbon – the Thadoe Thiri Thudhamma Award, the second highest order or decoration in Burma. He said he wondered if he was fit to wear it. At the time of Aung San’s death, Ne Win was among the more obscure of the independence heroes known as the Thirty Comrades, and there was nothing in the record to suggest that General Aung San ever intended for him to hold more than an officer’s rank in the army. Aung San had not included any of his former comrades – in fact had made it quite clear that there was no role for them – in the government he planned for independent Burma. The business of running the country was to fall to civilians: specifically, the Socialist politicians who called themselves the AFPFL. But as events unfolded, the Socialist Party, in disarray from the concentrated attack by insurgents of every conceivable political persuasion, favoured Ne Win as the devil-inuniform they knew. Ne Win’s consolidation of power had been gradual, scarcely noticeable, as he assumed total command of the armed forces. But now, ten years after independence, with the government in such a mess that the prime minister himself likened the rot in his administration to the work of ‘white ants and maggots’, Ne Win had stepped forward to set things right. Who was to say the army might not succeed where the politicians had failed? ‘You won it in honour,’ Dad said of the medal. ‘Wear it.’ Dad stood by his side while Ne Win took the oath of office to honour and defend the constitution, then signed a declaration to that effect. After the ceremonies, they repaired to the Ne Win residence where Katie, the new first lady, was already celebrating. She had invited some of her friends – Europeans mostly – to coffee and cakes. In front of the cheering company, she demurely proffered her cheek to Dad.

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‘Little Eva Peron,’ Dad whispered in her ear. Katie and he were old friends. He had known her longer than he had known Ne Win. Katie was something of a hell-raiser, managing at an early age to acquire a past. Her father, a distinguished surgeon, had sent her to England to study nursing, but that course was soon abandoned when she took up with a bit player in the post-war theatrical hit, The Teahouse of the August Moon. The liaison ended when the Burmese representative in London cabled her father in Rangoon to bid him call his daughter home. Katie returned to Burma and married a young medical intern, with whom she had a child before the marriage ended in divorce. Her next husband was General Ne Win. Dad had met Ne Win for the first time shortly after independence, at the home of Tran Van Luan, a Vietnamese diplomat. His first impression was of a tall, shy loner, somewhat cynical and ill at ease with himself. But as Ne Win engaged in conversation with Tran Van Luan, his expression softened; he loosened up and become a different person, eager and animated. In later years, Dad would remember this about-face, so to speak, as a preview of Ne Win’s unpredictable moods and attitudes, when bottled-up rage would explode for no apparent reason, or when good humour was feigned in situations calling for quite contrary emotions. A provincial postal clerk before joining the army, Ne Win had upheld the moral code of the Thirty Comrades, at least to the extent of keeping the comrades’ vow never to wed until the country was independent. But in the aftermath of victory he made up for lost time, beginning with his trip to Europe in search of arms and ammunition. Dad had done a bit of digging into that period of Ne Win’s past and come up with some interesting dirt. In Italy, a firm called SANE, headed by one Giuseppe Gigante, had rolled out the red carpet for Ne Win. This included a femme fatale by the name of Corice de Sevigny. The Italians held out an additional sweetener: a standard sub-machine gun to be named after the Burmese general. When, after unconscionable delay, the Ne Win Sten was produced, it became the standard machine gun of the Burmese armed forces, even though

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the design was based on a defunct Italian model and prone to jamming. Ne Win signed a secret agreement with SANE for the construction of an arms factory in Rangoon, and Corice was flown out, to be set up in style as the general’s mistress. But no sooner had she returned to Italy for a brief visit than her picture was splashed across the front page of the tabloids. A bank employee had stolen funds and made off on a spree with his girlfriend. Then he had put a bullet through his head, leaving the girlfriend stranded. This girlfriend, identified as Maria Minnelli, a part-time model, was none other than Corice. The general threw several fits, one for each of his shifting emotions, and the experience was said to have so soured him that he mistrusted foreign entrepreneurs ever after, believing that any attempt to open up the country through private enterprise would be bound to fail. Two years later, with the army reaping much of the credit for beating back the insurgents, a sadder and presumably wiser Ne Win was ready to put the whole Italian debacle behind him and enter into a romance with the much younger Katie. One day a Nation reporter came to work with a broken arm. He had just been in a motorcycle accident. Dad took him straight to hospital. Finding no surgeon on duty that inspired any confidence, he left the reporter in Emergency and made for the chief surgeon’s residence in the hospital compound. Dr Ba Than was Katie’s father; he was also an old friend of Dad’s, so he sometimes dropped by for impromptu visits. The front door was shut but not bolted. Dad pushed it open and went in. Canoodling on a couch in the living room was the army chief of staff and, in dishabille, the chief surgeon’s daughter. Katie was the only one who kept her composure. ‘I believe you two have met,’ she said, deftly rearranging herself. In Burma, most newspaper offices were closed on public holidays; but not The Nation’s, especially not when so important an event as the wedding of a scandal-prone army chief impended. The editor took it upon himself to case the joint in advance, measuring the distance between a strategically situated tree and the door to Ba Than’s

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house. He aimed his Leica, fixed the settings and left Noel Lazaro, one of his senior reporters, to press the button and run. When the bride and bridegroom made their appearance at the appointed time, the shutter did click as programmed. But Lazaro wasn’t fast enough on his feet. The next thing he knew, Ne Win had him by the throat. Lazaro escaped with difficulty, badly shaken and drained of all colour when Dad found him. The precious film, however, was intact. The wedding story ran on the front page of The Nation, and uproar immediately ensued. Dad was assailed in his office not by Ne Win’s colonels but by his former wife. What kind of editor, this irate woman wanted to know, could justify calling a public disgrace a wedding? She was Ne Win’s lawful wedded wife and the mother of his children. She would settle for nothing less than a retraction in the paper. Dad said he could not print a retraction but he would gladly publish a letter to the editor in which the lady could set out her claim. In pacifying one spouse, Dad was bound to antagonise another. Katie vowed never, ever speak to him again. But the scandal blew over soon enough, and the army closed ranks behind their general: polygamy was not the worst charge that could be brought against a patriotic Burmese leader. By the time of the caretaker regime, Dad and Katie had long since made up. Dad was still hammering away at the government of which Ne Win was now a pivot, and at the same time getting to know the general and learning that most of the stories about him were simply not true. It was not true that he spent his days in idleness and his nights with the bottle. Far from it. He drank moderately and went to bed early. He was alert and informed, discussing political and economic affairs with sufficient background knowledge to show he had wrestled with them. The only rumour that proved true was in regard to his temper. Dad had seen him come unstuck once or twice, but the general had never blown up at him. On the contrary, Ne Win seemed to consider him a restraining influence, and to respect his judgement on politics

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Dad in black tie, General Ne Win in dark suit, with Katie next to Dad, 1960

and aesthetics alike. When he showed Dad the ornate gilt headpiece of carved birds on his bed and Dad pronounced it rather loud, he changed it. When he sat on the stairs, transfixed by a poison pen letter, and Dad just laughed, telling him to toss it aside, it was of no consequence, he did so and said he felt better for it. Ne Win was a man who wore his bulletproof vest like a second skin, who could never be induced to dine informally at any table but his own – a man scarred by innumerable betrayals and slights. But while the fear of poisoning kept him from eating in other people’s homes, he had no qualms about sharing Dad’s lunches, even if they came from street vendors outside the racecourse. He invited Dad home for quiet games of chess and Scrabble, showed him favours denied his own colonels, fed him inside information on racketeering and corruption, so that he might expose the wrongdoers. Dad, in short, was flattered. Meanwhile, having vowed to tackle the mess left by Nu’s civilian government, the army was doing so with a vengeance. Spared the burden of having to answer to any political party, or to worry about votes, the army could get things done, and in record time. It mobilised

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teams of government workers to sweep streets, wash pavements, scrub walls, unclog latrines and drains, dig up layers of offal rotting in the alleys, and haul away the garbage of decades. The army removed beggars, vagrants, lepers and other indigents from the streets in one clean sweep. It exterminated stray dogs and marauding crows by the thousands – by scattering chunks of poisoned meat in their path. (As a staunch Buddhist, U Nu simply couldn’t bring himself to order the killing of animals, even if they were a plague.) It tore down old shanty towns and relocated the homeless to new satellite towns. The citizens of Rangoon were impressed. So too were foreign observers. Ne Win was called ‘the constitutional soldier’ by the New Statesman, on account of his restraint in passing laws by ordinance (unlike his predecessor, U Nu, who seemed to have had no qualms about passing the budget by presidential decree). Dad had grown closer to the Ne Wins in another sense: the general’s official residence was now on Ady Road. That made the Ne Wins our neighbours, for we too had moved once more – to a house on the same road. I had just been given my first pair of roller skates, and was practising out on the street. The road had been recently resurfaced, the cement still scored with deep grooves that set my teeth chattering as I hurtled along on my clunky wheels. I had yet to master the art of braking: I knew how to stop only by diving onto the nearest grassy verge. My great fear was of falling on my face just as the general’s motorcade went past. The black limousine with the motorcycle escorts in front and the jeep to the rear would always slow down long enough for Uncle General Ne Win to lean forward in his seat and wave. Still flailing about as I fought to stay upright, I would try to wave back with some semblance of dignity. Being neighbours of the Ne Wins posed another nuisance. I now had to invite the general’s daughters to my birthday parties. ‘It won’t hurt, will it, to include them?’ my mother reasoned, as though anything short of hurting had to be tolerated when it came to social obligations.

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‘But they won’t know anyone,’ I argued. The Ne Win girls came, polite and phlegmatic, bearing a tiny velvet box. ‘Hmm, a sapphire,’ said Mum, examining it later. I didn’t know whether she was offended or impressed. ‘I don’t think they had fun,’ I said. ‘They didn’t say a word.’ ‘Shy girls,’ Mum said. ‘Too backward to go forward.’ In all other respects, the Ady Road house was a dream. A hundred yards down the street was a stretch of water so secluded it might as well have been our own. Alban and I were the ones who colonised it. Dad was hardly ever at home; Mum was only ever at home, but she was afraid of water. Hubert had come home from his studies in America but had turned round and gone to Israel, on a scholarship to study architecture. Marlaine lived in a separate house nearby, but was married with two small children. Little Jo Jo was a strong swimmer, but preferred splashing around with her friends in the chlorinated waters of the Kokine Swimming Club. The only one who might have frequented the lake as much as we did was Byron. But Byron was at medical school, busy cutting up cadavers and swotting for exams; besides, he and I were feuding. I was playing on our old baby grand one evening, minding my own business as I saw it, when he sat down to eat at the dining table a few feet away. He was probably out of sorts after a long day with corpses; either that or Mendelssohn’s Venetian Boat Song no. 2 was making him sick; in any event he ordered me sharply to stop playing. I didn’t like the tone of his voice and said he should try asking nicely. I went on playing. Byron asked again, but even less nicely than before. I stepped on the loud pedal and was thumping away when he got up from the table, came over to the piano, plucked the Smallwood’s Piano Tutor from the stand, and threw it across the floor. So now it was war. I went straight to the telephone. Mum and Dad were attending some official banquet, but they had left a phone number for emergencies. If this wasn’t an emergency I didn’t know what was. I dialled the number and asked to speak to U Law-Yone. ‘Yes? What is it?’ The impatience in Dad’s voice brought me back

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to my senses, and from shaking with rage at my brother’s temper, I now shook with fear in anticipation of my father’s. But it was too late to turn back. ‘I was just playing the piano by myself,’ I said in my most martyred voice, ‘and Byron came and ripped my music book away and flung it on the floor.’ I could have sworn what I heard for the next few seconds was the sound of my father biting his tongue to contain his fury. ‘Put him on the phone,’ he growled. I held out the receiver like a war trophy in Byron’s direction. ‘Dad wants to talk to you.’ Byron took the phone from me and listened in silence as Dad tore into him as only Dad could, for what seemed like an eternity. Byron was twenty years old, and of all my brothers was the one who had most successfully steered clear of Dad’s volatility. Pleasing Dad, we all knew, was beyond human ken; but the next best thing was trying to avoid displeasing him. ‘You’re a bloody little idiot and you need to be slapped,’ Alban said later, when I went to him for sympathy, even though I took his side whenever he was in trouble, covering up for his endless misdemeanours and – what was even more tiresome – listening to his half-baked schemes. Alban was now going through what my mother called his Jules Verne phase, with an emphasis on deep-sea exploration. This called for the endless testing of snorkels, goggles, flippers and air tanks. We would set up camp in a shady spot by the lake, where my job was to lay out Alban’s paraphernalia on a towel, and pass each item to him as he suited up for his dive. Then I would have to sit and watch his practice session – practice for what exactly, I couldn’t say. I didn’t care. I sat for hours, my skin darkening and crisping in the blazing sun. The world was divinely deserted, and charged with an excitement I couldn’t name. Once I thought I saw a baboon swoop through the mangroves in the distance, but it was only a trick of cloud and shadow and wind. There was a bend in the lake beyond which lay mystery and suspense. Anything could come drifting round that bend: a raft with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, maybe. Or a canoe full of Red Indians. Or a ceremonial barge in the shape of a golden hintha,

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the mythical bird – like the ones that dominated the Water Festival pageants. At last my brother the frogman would emerge. Offloading his gear, he would catch his breath for a few minutes before plunging back in with me. Beneath its warm skin the lake was deliciously cool and the bottom creepily squishy. Sometimes we brought along an old khaki water-mattress and two tyres, and lashed them all together: the mattress in the middle, a tyre on either side. Then we’d hand-paddle our way downstream, Alban belting out ‘The Banana Boat Song’ like Harry Belafonte, with me joining in for the chorus. At home, things were not quite so tranquil. Mum was running herself ragged with house guests. Dad had persuaded Ne Win to invite Tommy Davis, his old OSS buddy from California, to come to Burma for a few months to study the economic situation and give advice on how things should be run. At first Tommy and his wife Marian were housed in the guest suite of Government House. Everyone seemed to hit it off beautifully: Tommy with the general, Marian with Katie, Tommy with Katie, Marian with Ne Win. Dad, the go-between, was everybody’s favourite. But after the initial round of merrymaking at private parties, the Turf Club and the golf course, the atmosphere at Government House began to be strained. Marian, though glamorous, was not nearly as charming or gracious as Tommy, who looked like Gary Cooper in one of his Western roles. Hard-smoking and straight-talking, Marian was easily bored and made no effort to hide it, cutting short a conversation to go off and sunbathe for hours in the scantiest of clothing. She could match the general drink for drink, but soon tired of Katie’s double entendres and coy mannerisms. At the Mingaladon Golf Club, Marian scandalised everyone by going barefoot and, worse, scolding the general between greens for stationing riflemen in the rough at every sand trap. ‘With all these damned guns pointed at my toes,’ she roared, ‘how do you expect me to play?’ Things came to a head between Ne Win and the Davises when Ne Win returned from a state visit to Egypt. Before leaving he had

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let Marian know that she and Tommy were expected for dinner on the day of his return. Marian proved herself to be the worst kind of guest – what the Burmese call ‘the guest who brings along a dog’, literally, in her case. Marian, an animal lover, was apparently unaware that the general, to put it mildly, was not. His inborn aversion to dogs was said to have taken a violent turn ever since his little son had been bitten by a stray and subjected to one of those painful stomach injections against rabies. Now, Marian in the general’s absence had adopted a pariah, which she named – appropriately, as it turned out – U Pi. The dog had a weak bladder. When the general, upon returning from Egypt, appeared for dinner, she was about to tell him of her new pet when who should come tripping up the stairs but U Pi himself. In a trice Ne Win went bounding into his bedroom, to emerge with a loaded rifle. Katie reacted swiftly, throwing herself at her husband’s midriff to restrain him. Marian’s instinct was to pull off her shoe and aim it at the general’s head in threat, which had Tommy yelling, ‘Marian! For God’s sake! You don’t do that here in Burma!’ U Pi escaped with his life, but the Davises were now personae non gratae. They left the Ne Wins and moved in with us for the rest of their stay. Mum was her usual hospitable self, but behind closed doors complained bitterly. Why did these rich American have such bad habits? They only played with their food – which people had gone to great lengths to prepare – but they cherished their drink. They stayed up too late, filling the ashtrays to overflowing, going through every clean glass in the house, keeping everyone awake with their loud voices. Then they slept in till noon, making it difficult for the rest of the household to go about their normal business. The Davises finally left. Peace at last. But not for long: it was time to move again. My parents had found a house that promised to surpass all others to date. This one was on University Avenue and boasted a front porch with a marble floor, a split-level garden, a tennis court and its very own inlet of Inya Lake. Dad’s fame, meanwhile, was spreading far and wide. He won a prize for journalism that required him to fly to Manila. I had never

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heard of the Magsaysay Award, but someone said it was the Asian Nobel Prize. ‘What will Dad get for the Noble Asian Prize?’ I asked my mother. ‘Not Noble, No-bel,’ she corrected. ‘And it’s not the No-bel, it’s the Mog-sai-sai.’ She was proud of having learned the correct pronunciation of the Filipino name. ‘It’s a great honour, this prize. He’ll be sharing it with the Dalai Lama.’ ‘Yes, but what will he actually get?’ ‘A big medal, I expect. And a lot of money.’ My mother sighed. ‘Which he’ll immediately spend or give away.’ But not everyone thought The Nation was going from strength to strength. Dr Hla Myint, rector of Rangoon University, said sadly, ‘Your paper has lost its sting. It has become too respectable.’ The caretaker government came to an end in early 1960, when elections were held and Nu won by a landslide. Ne Win had ruled for six months longer than the agreed-upon tenure, and distinguished himself as few military strongmen do when he handed power back to the elected government and stepped down. Having returned to office on a wave of popularity, Nu was full of good intentions. He cut all ties to the moribund AFPFL and formed a new party, the Pyidaungsu, or Union League Party. But before long, this entity too was riven with discord. Meanwhile, much of the ground gained by the military in social and economic reforms had been lost. Even before Nu was officially reinstalled as prime minister, Ne Win’s fund of personal grudges and misgivings had been growing. Some of these he had confided to Dad in his more trusting moments, but increasingly Dad too came under suspicion as the general cast a resentful eye on his relationship with Nu. ‘What’s this thing between you and U Nu?’ he demanded. ‘What has he ever done for you? Don’t you realise he tried to harm you, ruin you financially and send you off to jail?’ He was referring, presumably, to the libel case brought against him by the Nu regime. Dad replied that U Nu was the only politician he had ever known who was not interested in improving his own financial status while

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in office, and for that reason alone, whatever wrong he had done him in the past Dad had long forgotten. ‘You must realise, General,’ he added. ‘however great or powerful he might have been at one time, today he is the underdog.’ Ne Win muttered that Nu had obviously been clever enough to dupe him. At four o’clock in the morning on 2 March 1962, the telephone rang at home and woke Dad from a deep sleep. It was Aung Nyunt, The Nation’s veteran reporter. The government had been overthrown, he said, and the army had seized the president, the prime minister and every member of the cabinet. Dad was suddenly wide awake. It was eerily quiet. Only a few hours before, he’d been driving home when his car had been stopped at the Kamayut Circle and searched. He had joked with the uniformed men, who of course knew him, assuring them that he wasn’t carrying any grenades in his boot that night. Dad got dressed, opened a cigarette tin, and lay on the living-room couch, the telephone beside him. It rang every half-hour or so, as one reporter after another called to check in. He turned on the radio. At 8.40 a.m. General Ne Win came on the air to announce his takeover and explain that it was for the sake of keeping the country safe and the Union from disintegrating. Dad got in his car and drove to the office, finding neither alarm nor despondency on the faces of the people in the street. His own staff were going about their business as usual. He surmised that no one would be speaking to the press that day, and decided that the announcement of the coup d’état was story enough for the next morning’s paper. It was late by the time he drove home. The streets were so empty, it was as if a curfew was in place. At eight o’clock the next morning, Katie’s car pulled up outside. She bounded up the front steps, threw her arms around Dad, and shouted, ‘Aung-bi kwa!’ (‘We’ve won, man!’) Then she froze. Standing in the open doorway of the bedroom was Mum, still in her dressing gown. On her face was a look of theatrical disapproval. ‘If indeed you are now first lady,’ said that look, ‘should you really go about yelling, Aung-bi kwa!?’

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Katie’s exuberance was genuine; the coup had come as a complete surprise, not only to her but to everyone else surrounding her husband – his closest associate, the vice chief of staff, included. Ne Win had taken nobody, but nobody, into his confidence. U Nu was the first to be arrested. When soldiers stormed into his private bungalow on Pyidaungsu Lane, his first thought was that he was in the hands of rebels, that the army had been deposed. He asked the young officer with the service revolver what he was supposed to do. ‘You are to come with me,’ was the clipped answer. U Nu got up, put on a jacket and opened the door to the bathroom. ‘What are you doing?’ the officer asked. ‘I am going to pass urine,’ U Nu answered. He wasn’t allowed to. On his way out the door, he enquired whether General Ne Win was safe. By way of answer, one of his captors rasped into his walkie-talkie: ‘We’ve got the maggot.’ They kept repeating, ‘We’ve got the maggot,’ until it dawned on U Nu that that was the code word assigned him. Four months later, in early July 1962, a 2,000-strong student demonstration ended with the military opening fire and killing about a hundred people. The next day, the Rangoon University students’ union building, the site of historic anti-colonial protests both before and after the war, was razed to the ground in a bomb blast. The Nation called for an investigation, pointing out that such excessive force demanded a court of inquiry. Looking back years later, Dad figured that was probably the first nail in The Nation’s coffin. No immediate death sentence was forthcoming, however, for Ne Win had done a disappearing act. He had gone to see a psychiatrist – in Vienna. The general’s antisocial behaviour was increasingly problematic. He had recently got out of his car in rage, to take a running kick at the owner of a vehicle blocking the passageway at the Turf Club. That the owner was Andy Kerr, the US chargé d’affaires, made not the slightest difference. Even more alarmingly, Ne Win had attacked, with his no. 6 iron, a man on the golf course whom he suspected of having an affair with Katie.

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Of course, such incidents went unreported in the press – The Nation included. Nor did anyone dare mention the name of Dr Hans Hoff, the general’s Viennese psychiatrist. The first sign that Ne Win was zeroing in on The Nation came with a telephone call from Mr Wilson, the manager of Grindlay’s Bank. Army officers had come to close his account, said Wilson. What should he do? Dad instructed him to hand over to the officers every kyat in his account. Wilson proved himself a friend in need when he rang back later to say, ‘When the time comes to pay your staff you can count on an overdraft.’ Since the military had been seizing the bank deposits of business firms and private customers alike, Dad was not exactly unprepared. He had withdrawn all his funds from another account in the Ava (Army) Bank, to disburse to his staff as their savings and provident fund. He had given bonuses left and right. He had two life insurance policies due to mature in a few days and a cash reserve in his desk of thousands of kyat. That afternoon, Dad went to see Ne Win. The general had been playing tennis. He put down his tennis racket, ordered a whisky and soda for Dad, a fresh lime for himself, and after a few awkward attempts at chit-chat, asked what was on his mind. Dad went through the motions of bringing him up to date on the raid on his bank account. Ne Win expressed astonishment. ‘And you expect me to believe that my assets would be frozen without your consent?’ Dad challenged. Ne Win insisted he would never contemplate such a thing. Switching to English, the general intoned, ‘I am not going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.’ Whatever that meant, Dad figured he was safe for a while. No one would dare touch the goose unless Ne Win himself gave the word.

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9 No Return

They came for him almost three weeks later. Always a light sleeper, Mum was the first to hear them. She looked out the window. ‘Edward!’ She shook him by the shoulder. ‘Edward, there’s an army car outside.’ Dad, half asleep, fumbled with the lock on the expanded metal gate enclosing the front porch to let in the young captain standing outside. Then he slumped into a chair, rubbing his eyes and trying to wake up. ‘Uncle,’ said the captain, ‘let’s go. And don’t touch the telephone please.’ Dad looked at his watch. 3 a.m. He said he would be out in a minute, and went to brush his teeth. He changed his clothes, stuck his toothbrush into the pocket of his jacket, and in a few sentences instructed Mum on what she should do. He handed her the key to the safe in his office. Marlaine would know where to find it. (My sister had started work as an assistant editor at The Nation.) Marlaine should also prepare for the newspaper to be shut down. Then he gave Mum a perfunctory kiss and went outside where the captain was waiting. Mum could see then that the house was surrounded. A truckload of troops with automatic weapons. A jeep. A VW station wagon. In this wagon they took Dad away. Later, when it was light, I was the first up and found Mum at the dining table, fully dressed as if expecting guests. ‘Mum, what’s wrong?’ ‘It’s Daddy.’ She took a ragged breath. ‘He’s been arrested.’ ‘Arrested? For what?’ ‘For political reasons, I suppose.’ Something in the pit of my

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stomach twisted. All the hundreds of prisoners taken in for political reasons since Ne Win came to power were still in jail. Nobody ever seemed to come out of jail. ‘But when did it happen?’ ‘In the middle of the night.’ ‘And you’ve been sitting here all by yourself ? Why didn’t you wake me?’ ‘There was nothing to be done,’ Mum said, with a faraway look. Then, snapping back to the present, she was intent on going over every detail of those last minutes with Dad. How he jumped out of bed, how he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, what he said to her about the cash in the safe, about telling Marlaine to expect the paper to be shut down. Her face looked very young and sincere as she stopped to correct herself over small details, as though to make sure she remembered everything precisely. ‘So he turns before he leaves to hug me,’ she said, turning in demonstration, ‘and he’s afraid I’m going to cry, so he says . . .’ Now she was biting down hard on her lip. ‘He says, “Come on, darling, remember your father’s a soldier . . .”’ I didn’t want my mother to start crying, and to keep her talking I said, ‘Is that all he said?’ ‘No.’ Her voice cracked. ‘He reminded me that we always knew something like this would happen.’ What did that mean? I wondered. Was Dad saying that sooner or later misfortune came to everyone? Or did he mean something else, something he and Mum knew that I didn’t? It didn’t seem the right time to ask. Soon the phone started ringing. First Mrs Kyaw Nyein, then Mrs Ba Swe, wives of the prime minister’s AFPFL rivals, called to say that their husbands too had been arrested. Where they had been taken to, though, was anybody’s guess. Looking back years later, Mum would speak of the weeks following Dad’s arrest as a daily cycle of see-saw emotions: disbelief, on waking, at what had happened; prayers for the courage to get through another day; the self-forgetful relief of domestic routine; the solace from

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friends; the distraction of her children; the sickening emptiness at the close of another day without answers; the summoning of courage and hope through more prayers and rosaries; the act of will required to shut out the ultimate fear – that her husband might not even be alive. Eight months went by before we received word that Dad was being held ‘in protective custody’. The official notice stated that he would be allowed to write one letter home every other week. On alternating weeks he could receive one letter from home. No letter should exceed two handwritten pages. Protective custody. It didn’t sound so bad to me. At least, I thought, my father wasn’t going mad in some horrible little cell. Now I was free to imagine him otherwise: languishing in a guest house tucked away somewhere in the countryside – like one of those dak bungalows with teak floors and wobbly ceiling fans that the British had built for officials on tour in the provinces. But my own private fantasy of protective custody was not so easy to sell to my little sister Jo Jo. Mum had thought it best to withhold the mention of imprisonment from the baby of the family for as long as possible. But this baby was eleven years old, and she was asking me point-blank if our father was in jail. ‘In jail! Who told you that? Why would he be in jail?’ I said. ‘Then where is he?’ Jo Jo demanded, head cocked, nostrils flaring suspiciously. ‘They’re keeping him protected.’ ‘But where?’ ‘In a big fancy building.’ The dak bungalow wouldn’t wash somehow. ‘What kind of building?’ ‘A dome,’ I said, with sudden inspiration. ‘A dome? What kind of dome?’ ‘A geodesic dome.’ That shut her up for a while. In Dad’s absence the family regrouped. Hubert, the eldest, was still in Israel, now married and teaching architecture at the Technion in

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Haifa. Through diplomat friends acting as secret couriers, Mum wrote to let him know that coming back to Burma was illadvised; best to stay where he was. But Marlaine, Ko Tin Nyo and their children (there were three by now) moved in with the rest of the family, into a new extension that Dad, with a kind of prescience, had arranged to have built at the back of the house. With all of us under one roof, there was a sense of uplift and communal goodWendy, age 16 will, as after a death in the family, or a natural disaster, when survivors thrown together are said to be at their tribal best. But all the while a private anxiety preyed on me. For Dad’s arrest had come on the eve of what was to be the beginning of a new life. I had worked hard to reach this crossroads. I had found a way to shave off at least a year of school by switching from the national curriculum to the British GCE system. I had graduated ahead of schedule, at fifteen, and under the private tutelage of Miss Sarah de Souza, my piano teacher, I was being groomed for a career in music. I had been accepted to Mills College, my sister’s alma mater, in Oakland, California. Mills was a women’s college renowned for its music department, whose head was Darius Milhaud. All I knew about Milhaud was that Dave Brubeck had studied under him, and Brubeck was one of my brother Hubert’s favourite jazz musicians, so that was good enough for me. To get me through my Grade VIII piano exams, Teacher Sarah neglected her other students shamelessly, practically moving into our house for days at a time to sit by my side as I went through Hanon’s Virtuoso Pianist to limber up for the exam repertoire: Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, Chopin’s Etudes and Rachmaninov’s Prelude in G Minor. With Dad’s arrest everything had ground to a halt, but as days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, I fretted about my future.

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What was to become of me? I gathered up the nerve finally to broach the subject. ‘Mum, what about my passport?’ ‘What about it?’ ‘You know. We need to get my passport so I can leave.’ ‘Leave? Leave for where? A passport for what?’ My mother’s feigned obtuseness was enough to drive a person to distraction. ‘Mum! Remember? I’m supposed to go to America?’ ‘America?’ She sneered. ‘Your father’s in jail, at least we hope he’s in jail, and you want to go to America?’ It was just as I feared: the Swiss boarding school all over again. ‘But what good am I to Dad or anyone if I stay?’ I argued. ‘Dad would want me to go.’ ‘And you are that selfish?’ ‘Yes!’ I cried. ‘I am that selfish.’ My mother ended our stand-off with one of her edicts. ‘You’re not going. And that’s that.’ Then, seized by an immense sorrow of which I sensed I was only a small part, she broke down and sobbed long and bitterly. Tears like that from her were so rare as to be earth-shaking to me. Locked in my own fear and misery, I comforted her with an awkward embrace, at a loss as to whether to hold my ground, or hurl myself into her ocean of sadness, most likely to drown and die. I didn’t cry then; I couldn’t. But afterwards, alone in my room, I kicked the feet of my Yamaha upright piano so hard that pain shot through my foot and brought tears to my eyes. A few months later, I had accepted a compromise. Following Mum’s advice to ‘make the best of things’, I went to register at Rangoon University. But halfway through the first semester, in the midst of a political science course examining the theories of Jean Bodin, the sixteenth-century French thinker – theories that swirled past me, cloudlike, too formless to fathom – I was summoned to the rector’s office. This was the new rector – not Dad’s old friend Dr Hla Myint who had preceded him. I couldn’t imagine what I was being called in for, but when I was shown into his office and found Mum there, I knew it was something serious.

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The rector shuffled the papers on his desk without looking me in the eye. Then, addressing my mother, he said, ‘What I have to tell you is that you are not permitted to study at this university,’ as though she was the student he was expelling. Reliving this scene afterwards, I thought how strange it was that neither of us asked what he meant, or why I was being denied a university education despite my eligibility. Somehow we both knew. I looked at my mother. She was having trouble with her lower lip. I hoped with all my heart that she would deny the rector the satisfaction of seeing her cry. Then she brought out her handkerchief and I shot her a pitiless look that said, ‘See? What did I tell you? And you wanted me to stay.’ Speechless, we walked out of that teak-panelled office, and speechless we remained in the car. Once home, I was almost elated with self-righteous anger. Every door was slamming shut in my face, so now I had the licence to mope and sulk with a vengeance. I locked myself in my room, emerging only for meals. My bed was a pullout sofa that I never bothered to pull out, sleeping uncomfortably on the narrow seat, my bed of nails. I fell into the habit of sleeping fully clothed, prepared to jump up at a moment’s notice and flee. I stopped playing the piano altogether – another act of protest which, maddeningly, no one seemed to notice. No one, that is, but a stricken Teacher Sarah, who had begged me not to give up (‘Nil carborundum illegitimi, my girl,’ she pleaded, in vain). The music I listened to now, the same handful of LPs I played on my portable record player, was Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Eartha Kitt’s C’est Si Bon, a Segovia album in a jacket so frayed that the title was no longer legible. After hours of blank inertia, I would drag myself out of the deep pit of self-pity and ennui, and venture outside – to where the rest of the household was going about its business with staggering complacency. The dining room was never empty: one or other of my siblings would be sitting with one or more of their friends around the big Queen Anne table, laughing at the same old jokes and retelling the same tired stories. The worst of it was that I couldn’t help joining in. Eventually, thanks to Alban, I found something to lift me out of

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116B University Avenue, Rangoon, 1965

my doldrums. Alban had acquired a new girlfriend, the daughter of an East German engineer sent to Burma to work on a hydroelectric project. Christa had inspired Alban to take a German-language course, and Alban in turn had urged me to join him. But my brother’s attention span being what it was, by the time I was launched on a totalimmersion course at the Institute of Foreign Languages he had dropped out in favour of private lessons with Christa. Late one night I heard a tapping at my window. I assumed it was one of my keyless brothers, but when I looked out it was Christa, alone in the dark. I went to let her in and she tiptoed after me into my room. But once I’d shut the door, hysteria took hold. Laughing and crying, she spewed out her story. Her parents had gone out for the night, she said, so she figured it was safe for Alban to come over. They thought they had a whole evening ahead and were lolling in bed when they heard the front door open. They were back! Muti and Vati were back! Vati started pounding on her door. ‘Open up! I know what’s going on!’

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Before they could think what to do, Vati kicked down the door. He marched straight to the bedroom window, pulled down the curtain rod and brought it down hard on Alban’s naked back. Or tried to. But Alban had rolled off the bed. He had landed on all fours and was starting to crawl off when – ‘Gott! Gott!’ Christa wailed. ‘Vati . . .’ ‘Shh! Quiet! My mother!’ I pleaded. It was useless. ‘Vati!’ she shrieked. ‘He bend down, like so . . . and then he bite off . . .’ She covered her face. ‘Oh my God, Christa, what did he bite off ?’ ‘This!’ She reached out to give my ear a savage tug. Pop-eyed and red-faced, she began to laugh. Jesus. But Alban! Where was Alban? I asked. She didn’t know. She just ran, she said, pumping her arms to demonstrate. Stark naked she ran – out of the house, and down the street. Fortunately it was dark, and the street was deserted. She knocked at the first house with lights on. The Burmese woman who came to the door hadn’t wanted to let her in. The sight of a babbling white woman without a stitch on, roaming the street at midnight, alarmed her for some reason. She indicated that she did not wish to know the nature of the trouble, but hurriedly gave her a set of clothes to put on before pushing her out the door. Christa had run all the way to our house to see if Alban had come home. ‘Who’s that? What’s going on?’ It was Mum, worrying at the latch on my locked door. ‘Don’t say a word,’ I whispered to Christa. ‘Let me do the talking.’ Mum’s disapproval of Christa probably stemmed from the same root cause underlying Christa’s parents’ disapproval of Alban. For although she could easily have passed for a woman ten years older, Christa was only sixteen; and Alban, who could easily have passed for a boy of seventeen, and certainly behaved like one, was twenty-seven. Mum was in her dressing gown, bleary-eyed but wide awake. ‘Christa! Why are you here? Is something wrong?’ Then, ‘Where is Alban?’ ‘It’s nothing –’ I began, but Christa cut in. ‘My Vati . . .’ She was

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leaning into Mum’s face, eyes ablaze, impatient to recount the disaster anew, when I turned round and slapped her. I had never slapped anyone across the face before, and it was oddly satisfying, especially since it stopped Christa dead. Mum gasped. ‘Christa,’ I carried on with a composure I didn’t know I possessed, ‘has had a fight with her father. He started to beat her, so she ran away.’ I felt obscurely pleased with my half-truthful lie. Christa was staring into space, nodding in meek corroboration. ‘But where is Alban?’ Mum repeated. I didn’t know, I said. We were waiting for him. My mother trained one of her searchlight looks on me. It was impossible not to flinch or look away. She could always tell when I was lying or trying to hide something. But I held my ground. She would find out the truth soon enough; she always did. It was better that she have it in small doses. I was afraid the whole truth might be too much for her. I didn’t know which I found more terrifying: my invincible mother or my defenceless mother. ‘You need to go home and sort things out with your parents,’ she said to Christa. ‘I’m sure they’re very worried.’ ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Whoever comes home first, Alban or Byron, can drive her home. But go back to bed, Mum. There’s nothing you can do.’ Surprisingly, she obeyed. I pulled out the sofa bed for the first time in months, so that Christa and I could both lie down. She was snoring within minutes, and I was probably doing the same soon after. It was raining torrents when I woke up. Christa was gone and Alban was having a cigarette by himself at the dining table. Clamped onto one side of his head was what looked like half a white headset. I peered at the bandage and shuddered. ‘Was it the whole ear?’ ‘Naw. Just a chunk. But never fear. I picked up the piece that the mad dog spat out, and Byron sewed it back on.’ Thank God for Byron. I felt a rush of admiration for my coolheaded, competent brother, even if he was my sworn enemy. Two years had passed since the piano incident, but we still weren’t speaking to each other. The feud bothered me deeply, but every tentative wave

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of an olive branch only met with a cold rebuff from him. Secretly, I longed for his friendship. I admired his wit, his cleverness, his ability to make people roar with laughter, his skill as a master of trompe l’oeil, as evidenced by the number of people who would reach for the matchbox lying on a white sheet of paper, only to find that the matchbox, like the ant beside it, wasn’t real but painted by Byron. Now I had to admit that Byron was everything that Alban wasn’t: reserved, self-possessed, smart enough to stay out of trouble. But then again, would he have had the presence of mind in the same circumstances to retrieve his severed ear? When the bandage finally came off, we all marvelled at Byron’s surgical handiwork. But for a missing morsel of cartilage that left a small dent at the top of Alban’s ear, the damage was scarcely noticeable. When Dad came home, he probably wouldn’t have to be told a thing about it. Dad’s letters from jail were not anything like what I had expected. They were not profound, or clever, or bitter, or revealing in any satisfactory way. The lack of specificity was what bothered me. I knew of course that he was limited in what he could say. His letters, though addressed to Mum, had to speak to all of us, his wife and children. And no matter how bland he tried to keep his messages, the pages would arrive with rectangular cavities where words like jail, or government, or plans, had been neatly excised by the censor’s blade. But after I had savoured his letters for the second and third time, and admired his precise, symmetrical script, I couldn’t help wishing for a clue to what he was really thinking and feeling, as opposed to the blithe optimism he went on espousing. ‘Don’t let my being cooped up here trouble you in the least,’ he wrote. ‘In the film The Big Pond, they gave Maurice Chevalier a rough time in America. His comment was, “but this is not work. It is plaisir.”’ But what did Maurice Chevalier have to do, really, with life in Insein Jail? (By this time, word had got out that the protective custody was simply a euphemism for the infamous jail.) And did he really expect us to believe that jail was plaisir?

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In my brief Rangoon University stint, on the lookout for prison literature, I had come across the Prison Letters of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist revolutionary. I knew nothing of the historical background to Gramsci’s life, but as I flipped through his letters to Tania, a sister-inlaw he seemed to rely on for all kinds of help, I was struck by how peevishly he told her off for sending him things he had asked her not to, for misunderstanding the nature of the prison he was in, and so on. If only my father’s letters were half as candid and informative! But then I went on to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and saw how his imprisonment had been one long death-agony: his teeth fell out, his stomach was in shreds, he vomited blood and had convulsions, and his headaches were so bad that he had to beat his head against the wall. That was the end of my brief compare-and-contrast exercise pitting Dad’s letters against Antonio Gramsci’s. Still, I couldn’t help wishing for a bit of grit and punch in my father’s correspondence. In school scarcely a year went by without our being called upon to write an essay showing how the pen was mightier than the sword. What had happened to my father’s mighty pen? I wondered, as I studied his letters with lingering disappointment. Something had to be done. Somebody had to write something. I started writing to the general myself. After several false starts in Burmese, I always ended up in English. Apart from the fact that my written English was now superior to my written Burmese, I thought the general would probably take it amiss if someone in my family, a family of fluent English speakers, wrote to him in Burmese. Why, did we think he couldn’t read English? Did we have such a poor opinion of his education that we had to condescend to Burmese? I remembered the laughs we got from Dad’s stories about Ne Win’s bumbling efforts to learn English. Dear General Ne Win . . . The door would open a crack. ‘You’re keeping everyone awake with your typing,’ Mum would scold. ‘Don’t you know what time it is?’ ‘Sorry, Ma. I’m almost done.’ ‘What are you writing now?’

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‘Just another petition.’ My mother would look as though she was about to cry, but she often looked that way when she was exhausted. The next morning I would hand her the sealed letter, and we would go through the same little ritual. Glancing at the unaddressed envelope, she would turn it over and say, ‘I’ll send it through the proper channels.’ The fact that she never asked to see what was inside wasn’t lost on me. I knew she doubted it would ever be read. But I wasn’t going to let this deter me. Dear General Ne Win, Do you remember how every afternoon, when you drove home in your black limousine, with the motorcycle escorts in front, and the jeep at back, how your car would slow down, the whole motorcade would slow down, just so you could wave to me? Pathetic! As if a man like him would be so easily moved to pity. Tearing up my heavy-handed attempts, I reached for subtlety. I still had the box of stationery my old pen pal Gustav Kahn had sent me just as we were moving from our previous house – the house where I had waved to the general on my roller skates. I took out a sheet and drew a line through the address embossed at the top of the page: 14A Ady Road, Rangoon, Burma. This, I thought, would create two favourable impressions. One would show me to be a frugal citizen, reluctant to let old notepaper go to waste, even if it did bear an outdated address. The second would call attention to the address itself, and remind the general of the time when our families had been friends. Yes, the address would say it all. Dear General Ne Win, Please excuse this unusual request, but I am writing to ask if you will allow me to join my father in protective custody. I am prepared to accept the same conditions under which he is living. Thank you for your consideration. Yours sincerely, Wendy Law-Yone

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Ten years earlier, Prime Minister Nu had hazarded the view that the last war on earth wouldn’t be the one predicted by the Marxists: a war between capitalists and the proletariat. Rather, he said, it would be a battle between the masses who wanted democracy, and the despots who sought to reduce them to castrated beasts. It seemed now, under our military dictatorship, that the despots had won. All opposition had been silenced. No voices or fists were raised in protest – in the streets or in print. All foreign residents had been thrown out. All private enterprise had been nationalised: banks seized and renamed People’s Banks, shops turned into People’s Shops and stripped bare by quotas and shortages. Rice exports had dwindled, foreign exchange had dried up, and no foreign imports were let into the country. Jobs were scarce, money was scarce, and most alarming of all, even rice was becoming scarce. Surpassing the economic distress was the abject fear of the secret police: the ever-vigilant MIS. But under the bell jar of life at 116B University Avenue, day followed day in the selfsame pattern. Friends came and went at all hours. Our Muslim cook, Eddie Polo, was kept hopping (and the poor man, like his predecessor Ali, already had a gammy leg). My little nieces and nephews entertained us with their antics. Now and then Byron would bring home for dinner an indefinably peculiar guest who turned out to be one of his patients from the Tatagale Mental Hospital. We were unkind to one another. When I took up sewing and fashioned a cape out of a piece of fabric in a dramatic green-and-gold Aztec print, Marlaine stared at the result, speechless. The next morning, she said, ‘Did I have a nightmare last night, or were you wearing an Aztec cape?’ When Jo Jo cleared off our twelve-foot-long coffee table for use as a catwalk to model her creations, I told her that if she ever wore in public a bolero like the one she was modelling, I would deny under torture that she was related to me. One evening in September 1965, now aged eighteen, I was invited to attend a piano recital at the Goethe Institute. The USIS, the British Council and the Alliance Française had already pulled up stakes and

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left the country, hounded out by a xenophobic regime. But the Germans soldiered on in their cultural mission, somehow continuing to bring in visiting artists, musicians, poets and the like. That evening the Hungarian-born pianist, Julian von Károlyi, was performing. Enraptured by his Chopin, I was still glued to my seat after Károlyi retired for the interval, when an American diplomat I knew slightly appeared at my side, wanting to introduce me to someone. He turned to a dark-haired man with a high forehead and intense, unblinking eyes. ‘This is Sterling Seagrave,’ he said. ‘The son of Gordon Seagrave, the Burma Surgeon. You know the Burma Surgeon?’ I did indeed. Who in Burma did not? Gordon Seagrave was the famous medical missionary who had built a huge hospital complex up in the Shan States, and had later marched out with his nurses in the epic trek to India led by General Stilwell during the Second World War. Even more heroically, the Burma Surgeon had saved my mother’s life. I’d heard the story all through my childhood: of the good doctor’s cholera shot at Myitkyina airfield that had magically put our crippled mother back on her feet until she was able to see a specialist. And there was the fateful follow-up to that story. Years later, after the war, Seagrave had found himself in a Rangoon jail, charged with treason for giving medical aid to the leaders of a Kachin rebellion in the north. After a long, politically fraught trial – reported daily in The Nation – Seagrave was acquitted. But would he be deported back to America? Or allowed to return to his home in the Shan States? When The Nation ran the headline SEND SEAGRAVE HOME, the US consulate panicked. Had the Burmese people really given up on their beloved American ‘Daddy’? But the editorial revealed that what was meant by ‘home’ was Seagrave’s beloved Namkham in north-east Burma, where he had lived and worked for most of his life. The Burma Surgeon did end up back at his hospital in the hills, but his health had gradually failed him. Now his youngest son, Sterling, had come all the way from America because his father was dying. He had just arrived in Rangoon and was flying out the next day to see the old man.

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We talked for all of twenty minutes, Sterling and I, then Károlyi was back for the second half of the concert. Six months later, I was launched on a secret long-distance romance. For the next year and a half, Sterling and I wrote to each other daily. The mail being censored, we resorted to ‘pigeons’. This was our code word for the letters that bypassed the normal postal channels, by means of the diplomatic pouches of half a dozen embassies, thanks to a few friends – and often complete strangers – sympathetic to our predicament. Once, Sterling sent a toy to the son of friends with an APO (Army Post Office) address, an American couple in Rangoon. Hidden inside the toy was a ring for me. Such mailings were known as ‘stuffed pigeons’. For the first time in a long while I was no longer fixated on escape and flight. I was too busy composing letters that I hoped would impress Sterling, a journalist by profession, and the last word, it seemed to me, in epistolary savoir faire. The fact that I scarcely remembered what he looked like was neither here nor there. ‘Perhaps this may sound a bit incredible and rude,’ I confessed in a later stage of intimacy, ‘but I didn’t pay much attention to your face.’ For hours I sat at my old Smith Corona, a Collins English Dictionary by my side, a wheel-and-brush eraser to hand, typing and erasing, retyping and frequently tearing the onion-skin stationery that quickly turned purple from my laboured prose. But there comes a point in every romance when pigeons are not enough. Tuesday 4 April 1967 Dearest Daddy, I have never regretted so much as now the fact that I have not been able to write to you all this time. What I wish to tell you is simply that I want to get married. The man whom I wish to marry will not be a total stranger to you: his name is Sterling and he is Doctor Seagrave’s son. He is thirty years old, a writer, and a brilliant man. We met two years ago when he came to visit his

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father shortly before he died. He was unable to remain in Burma . . . but we started corresponding, and since then our daily letters to each other have accumulated to book-length. We are both convinced that we will be very happy together for the rest of our lives . . . Sterling hopes to come back on 30 April, but because he cannot obtain anything more than a 24-hour visa, and because he may not be able to come back later, we want to be married on that very same day. After that, I may not be able to leave with him immediately, but as soon as I get the permission I would like to join him and without losing a single moment, start studying in earnest. I am more determined than ever to make up for the time that has been lost since I left school. This is what I want more than anything else in life, and my heart and soul are set upon it. If you give me your blessing, I will be the happiest person in the world. Your loving daughter, Wendy 14 April 1967 My darling daughter, This is not the way I had planned and dreamed for you, but this is the way you want it, and I want you to know that Mummy and I will not fail you, now or ever. Everything is going to be extremely difficult for you at a time when one has a right to be happy. But I know you have the grit and determination to suffer delays, setbacks and inconveniences and, hamstrung as I am, I can only hope and pray that you will be spared unnecessary pain and hardship. I have asked Mummy to put in a request for my presence at the wedding. If it is not allowed you just go right ahead and be assured that I am there in spirit and you have my love and blessing. You are your father’s daughter and will know how to draw on inner resources of faith, of love and courage. Daddy

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Coming awake on my wedding day, I reached for my forehead. The spiky fringe was a reminder that I had gone and done something very stupid. I had cut my hair in a style that was beyond repair. I had gone to the home of a friend whose cousin was a retired hairdresser. This cousin had promised me the haircut of my dreams, so I showed her an old Vogue magazine. The retired hairdresser looked at the picture, looked at me, looked at the picture for a long time. ‘Are you sure?’ The model in the picture looked Egyptian, in the way that Elizabeth Taylor’s female attendants in Cleopatra looked Egyptian. She had large, wide-set, dramatically pencilled eyes, high cheekbones, straight blueblack hair and a fringe so narrow it looked like a separate hairpiece. My friend’s cousin saw that I did not look Egyptian. My eyes were not Egyptian eyes, and no amount of pencilling would make them so. My cheeks were not Egyptian cheeks. But the next day was my wedding, so my wish was her command. She gave me the cut I wanted: a fringe almost as short as new-hair growth, in an arc from ear to ear. I fingered the bristling hairline and wondered if my fiancé would like it. Then I wondered if my father would notice it. We were not supposed to count on his release, but we counted on it nonetheless. Three separate families had been cooking for days. My mother and her two cousins and Eddie Polo were one team; the wives of my uncles, the two Ko Kos, were another; my best friend Merrylin’s cooks were the third. Together they had covered the whole gamut of my father’s favourite dishes. It was a feast for three weddings, not one. For once, Sterling’s flight landed right on schedule. We drove straight to the Municipal Building, where the witnesses – my mother, Merrylin and Auntie Lillian, Merrylin’s mum – were already waiting. The courthouse ceremony was plain and perfunctory. Then we drove home, where my aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews were all waiting – but not just for the bride and groom. Nobody uttered Dad’s name; but each time a car pulled up, or the doorbell buzzed, or the telephone rang, everybody froze in unison. Then – false alarm! – back we went to whatever it was we were doing,

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as if nothing had happened, as if we hadn’t been holding our breaths all day. It was getting late. Sterling’s plane would be leaving in a few hours. The sit-down dinner was over, the toasts and congratulations were over, the quiet after-dinner chat on the couch with my mother was just about over. Now it was close to ten o’clock, and we could no longer pretend that Dad might, just might, show up. ‘You’d better go,’ my mother said, standing up abruptly. I gave her a quick hug, Sterling said his goodbyes, and we were almost in the car when an awful wail stopped us in our tracks. ‘No, he’s not coming! He’s not coming!’ Marlaine was shouting and crying in the next room. A babble of voices rose to console her. The effect was of a subdued keening. ‘Go,’ Mum said grimly, pushing me towards the car. ‘Just go.’ Over the next two weeks, Sterling flew in and out of the country on a series of twenty-four-hour visas, while I petitioned in vain for a passport. It was clear now that my chances of leaving the country were no better for having married an American; if anything, they were worse. All Americans were potential CIA agents in the eyes of the MIS. It was time, we decided during one of Sterling’s twenty-four-hour visits, to take the ‘back door’ – the underground route to Thailand favoured by smugglers, petty criminals and insurgents. Early one morning in late May, I boarded a train with my brother Alban. I had taken him into our confidence about my escape plans, and he had insisted at the last minute on going with me. Our guide and fixer was a gem smuggler by the name of Tin Maung who had promised to lead us through the jungle, to a safe crossing at the border with Thailand. We never made it that far. At the river port of Moulmein, on the very first leg of our journey, we were picked up by the secret police, and brought back on the train – in handcuffs – to Rangoon. From the station we were taken not to Insein Jail but to MIS headquarters, where Alban and I were locked in separate rooms.

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My interrogations lasted from nine at night to nine the next morning, the inquisitors working in teams of four, and changing shifts at 3 a.m. Exactly what they were hoping to find out was difficult to pinpoint. Again and again I laid out my reasons for wanting to leave the country, and why I had gone about things the way I had. I saw no reason for concealing the facts. It made no difference. Who was my husband, really? they wanted to know. What was his connection to my father? Had I heard of the CIA? The colonel in charge maintained an even, casual tone to his questions. He might have been inviting harmless gossip. Yet he had the names of almost every foreigner I had ever met, and reminded me of the precise details of each and every meeting. What could I tell him about any of these foreign friends? ‘But, Colonel,’ I said at one point, ‘don’t you already know everything about everyone in the country?’ I was careful to appear sincere and not sarcastic. ‘We are not God,’ he replied, apparently flattered. ‘We cannot know everything.’ For the next ten days, the routine was unvarying: every night, a few minutes before nine o’clock, a guard would unlock the door to lead me downstairs, where I sat across a table from my interrogators. Twelve hours later, I would be led back to the windowless room that was my cell, and locked in once more. I would throw myself onto the bed – an army cot – unable to sleep or think straight. Some days the shakes and the sweats would last so long that I wondered if I had contracted malaria. ‘What gives you the idea,’ the senior officer had said with a pleasant smile, when I asked for the umpteenth time when I was going to be released, ‘that you’re ever going to be released?’ I was doomed, I now knew. Just as my father was doomed. I was never going to get out of jail. Nor was he. One Christmas we had received a card from an organisation called Amnesty International, assuring us that our father, the ‘prisoner of conscience’, was not forgotten. Another card from a Solveig Husevaag in Oslo, Norway,

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and addressed to ‘U Law Yone, Newspaper Editor, Prison Unknown, c/o The Minister of Justice, Burma’, wished him freedom in the new year. For weeks Mum allowed herself to hope that important people outside the country were busy engineering her husband’s release. But nothing had come of that. I saw now that nothing could come of any effort of mine, either. I knew now what protective custody meant. It meant you could be locked up one day just like that, and remain locked up till God alone knew when – and not a thing in the world could be done about it. I stared straight into the light of the fluorescent tube in the ceiling, till my sockets burned and my eyes clenched shut. With the ambient after-image flaring behind my lids, I made a vow. If, by some miracle, I ever got out of jail and managed to leave the country, I would never, but never, come back to live in such a vicious, lawless, pitiless place again. It was true after all: my childhood premonition about the end of the world. For some reason the words of our national anthem came back to me. Kaba makyay Bama-pyay . . . Till the end of the world The nation of Burma . . . That world without end had ended for me. On the tenth day of our imprisonment, without warning or explanation, my brother and I were rushed out of our rooms and down to the main hall to await the arrival of an important personage. The VIP turned out to be Colonel Chit Khin, the MIS chief himself, who came bounding up the stairs in high spirits. ‘Anyone for tennis?’ he asked jovially, swinging an imaginary racket. He was reminding me, apparently, of a tennis match I had played in his presence. Now he was informing me that my brother and I were free to leave. Not only that:

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I was at liberty to leave the country if I still wished. My exit papers would be issued within ten days. Precisely nine days later, violent anti-Chinese riots broke out across Rangoon. Thought to be a spillover from the Cultural Revolution in China, the riots brought the city to a standstill. Offices and schools remained shut. Martial law was declared. ‘I absolutely refuse to sink into total despair at this point,’ I wrote to Sterling, even as I sank into despair. ‘Those whom the gods wish to bless they first drive mad,’ he wrote back in encouragement. I was overdue, I thought, for a blessing. Early one morning a government courier cycled up to our front door and handed me my ticket to freedom. I stared at it in disbelief: my Certificate of Identity, my stateless person’s passport. On the night of 15 July 1967, I drove to Mingaladon airport in the spooky atmosphere of a wartime blackout. Not a car, not a soul, roamed the streets. Because a curfew was still in effect, no one was allowed to accompany me, but our driver, Maung Thein Tun, tried in his quiet way to make up for the lonely send-off. He had brought me a small paperback of Burmese recipes as a going-away present. Whenever I felt homesick, he said, maybe I could cook one of those dishes. Then maybe I would think of him a little too. From the back seat I could see his Adam’s apple working to swallow his tears. For years one of my secret joys had been to drive out to the airport, to sit and watch the planes landing and taking off, to visualise the day when I might be on one of those flights. But now that my day had finally arrived, Mingaladon airport turned out to be the quietest, the emptiest, I had ever seen it. A flight attendant was expecting me. She led me to the ticket counter, waited for me to check in, and before I knew it I was being escorted aboard Thai International Flight TG 304. It was my first time on a jet, and I was gripped by a sudden fear – not the fear of flying, but the fear of flying back. In the terminal, while waiting to check in, I eavesdropped on a conversation between two members of the ground crew. No point of no-return, one of them

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had said, laughing. Something about how on a flight as short as the one before us (Rangoon to Bangkok), there was no point of no-return. No point of no-return! But what did that mean? That the plane could be ordered to turn back at any time, right up to the verge of landing? Perish the thought! And now, as we took off, I noticed for the first time my eerie status on the plane: I was the only passenger on board. I was still pondering the paradox of no-return when the plane landed at Don Muang International Airport, the wheels skipping a little before coming to a full stop. Out on the tarmac, two strangers were waving to me. One of them, I realised with a start, was my husband.

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10 When the Show Opens in Earnest

In Bangkok my freedom was widely celebrated. All over the city – in restaurants, hotel lobbies, department stores, street markets – radio and television commercials announced my liberation. FREE! FREE! FREE! the adverts flashed and screamed. I had done it – I had made it past the point of no return. The world was my oyster now. The sky was the limit. And my persistent nausea was not just a case of delayed nerves: I was pregnant. There was a small problem of how we were going to live, for we had no money. Sterling had quit his job with a San Francisco television station to ‘spirit’ me, as he put it, out of Burma. Our expensive honeymoon – the endless loop of twenty-four-hour transit visas, from Bangkok to Rangoon to Calcutta to Rangoon to Bangkok, etc. – had left him flat broke. But we were rich, we felt, in other ways. And soon we would be rich in the usual way too, for a producer with MGM Studios was ‘wildly excited’ about a movie script Sterling had written. So for Hollywood we headed. The spacious one-bedroom we were lucky to find in West Hollywood was nowhere near the MGM studios, but it turned out that Daryl, the wildly excited producer, preferred to meet at our place anyway. He would arrive breathless and bucktoothed, a fretful Mickey Rooney, looking over his shoulder to see if he was being followed before darting through our front door. A man of many fears, Daryl especially dreaded the ‘ChiCom menace’. Perhaps he saw Sterling’s script as a form of aversion therapy, for it touched on the inner workings of the secret police of the People’s Republic of China. Once he

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had satisfied himself that the coast was clear, however – that no bugs had been installed in our apartment since his last visit – he would settle in for a long bull session underneath our spreading plastic tree. This imperishable centrepiece grew out of an immovable pot and took up a third of the living room, but it was good for hanging things on: clothes, towels, papers, news clippings. Into the crotch of a branch we wedged our new mascot: an orange velveteen mouse with oversized ears that Sterling had spotted on a drugstore shelf. Mousey Tung, we called it – in Daryl’s honour. It was Mousey Tung I clutched to my belly when the cramps began one night. I cursed the Kraft’s Green Goddess salad dressing I had poured a little too liberally on my iceberg lettuce, but soon realised that something other than indigestion was at work. The pain let up finally around midnight, and the next day I felt fine – until late evening, when the cramps returned, lasting this time most of the night. Poor Mousey Tung’s wire ears were irreparably bent out of shape by morning. On the third night, when the contractions started on cue, Sterling borrowed a friend’s car to drive me to hospital. The soft-spoken young resident at Los Angeles County Hospital examined me and said, ‘You’re trying to abort.’ ‘No, I’m not!’ I snapped, mistaking diagnosis for accusation. He gave me an injection and sent me home to rest. I crawled into the back seat of the car and lay down. Sterling pulled out of the hospital parking lot and proceeded through a number of intersections where bands of multicoloured lights from flashing signs and incandescent billboards strobed through the window and onto my prone self, like some gamma-ray treatment of last resort. Yet this was the very effulgence I recognised from my teenaged daydreams, when America appeared as a neon-lit fairyland of possibility and choice. The car speeded up; the lights streamed past; and now the pain was a monster with its fangs in my gut, biting hard and deep, choking off all breath. In panic I screamed for Sterling to stop, for God’s sake, and do something, but we were on one of the great freeways of southern California, on an infinite stretch between exits; and when he screamed back, ‘What do you want me to DO?’ I feared a head-on

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collision and went back to moaning and writhing and clawing the air. ‘We’re almost home, almost home,’ he kept saying, and I had ceased to believe him when, abruptly, we were in front of our building. And, just as abruptly, the pain stopped too. The shock of such radical relief left me trembling. I got out of the car and was halfway to the front door when I was stopped by a gush between my legs that told me it was all over, there was nothing to be done about it. Once in bed I was almost euphoric. The pain was gone. And I was alive. Things happen for a reason, I told myself, seizing on the first platitude that came to mind. The pregnancy was clearly ill-fated. Or maybe I was simply paying the price of freedom, a kind of crossing fee. Soothed by philosophy, I felt calm and wise. Then I felt weak with hunger. I had a craving for Mum’s chicken stew. One thing I could say about my mother: no matter how busy she was, or how annoyed at me, I could always count on her chicken stew to speed up my recovery from any malaise. I remembered now a story she’d told me about losing a baby – and suddenly it was as if she was sitting on the edge of my bed, with that faraway look of resigned melancholy. ‘Alban was just a baby when his little brother was born. January the 31st, I still remember the day. We named him John. When he was eight months old he suddenly got very sick and broke out in sores. When the doctor arrived, he stood at the door, took one look at the baby, and wouldn’t come any closer. “Take him to hospital straight away,” was all he would say. ‘There was a smallpox epidemic going on at the time. I suppose I knew that at the back of my mind, but I refused to let myself think about it. In the hospital, of course, there was no escaping the horror. All around us people were dying and being carried away. I stayed with the baby day and night for I don’t know how many days. I overheard someone say that human saliva was known to cure those sores, so I kept on licking John’s hot little body all over, praying and praying for a miracle. ‘I don’t know how they managed to get me away when he died, how I was able to leave him there. But I remember coming home and the

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dog going wild. It just knew. It kept jumping all over me, licking me, and making crying noises. I remember sitting in the living room and staring at nothing for a long, long time, just like that. Daddy brought me some ice cream, but I couldn’t touch it, I couldn’t look at it.’ When Sterling came to kneel by the bedside and comfort me, saying, ‘We’ll have another; it will be all right,’ I didn’t know how to tell him that what I wanted at the moment was not to have another child – it was to go home and tell my mother I was sorry. Three months later, our Hollywood dreams were dust. Daryl, our movie mogul, turned out to be a fantasist facing bankruptcy. His only tangible connection to the MGM Studios was the stationery he had stolen with their letterhead on it. We packed up and moved to New York where, after outstaying our welcome at the homes of various friends, we found a room to rent by the month in a midtown hotel. Hotel Stacey’s dimly lit corridors were suffused with the smell of boiled cabbage. At the end of our hallway was a room from which I once saw emerge a tiny rabbi with a towering black woman in shorts, fishnet stockings and high-heeled silver boots. While Sterling worked on a proposal for a new television script, I went through the classified pages in the employment section of the New York Times. One of the first ads I circled was for the position of bilingual secretary at BASF, the German chemical firm. When I showed up for my interview, Herr Gruenwald, the manager, was so taken aback by a German-speaking Burmese that he hired me on the spot. The pay only just covered our rent, but there were hidden benefits. The BASF coffee room was well stocked with Saltines crackers, Twinings tea bags, and packets of instant Nescafé, Carnation hot chocolate and powdered milk – any of which I could take home with impunity. And my immediate boss, Mr Eugene Koch, would sometimes treat me to a hamburger at the corner eatery, where we devoured, standing up, our $1.25 burgers in a thick fog of onion fumes. I celebrated my first White Christmas with a perfectly symmetrical – and still fragrant – Douglas fir tree that someone had thrown out

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on the street. I hadn’t yet bumped into Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvior, whom I half expected to find smoking and drinking at a table in one of the chic cafes I passed on my way to and from the office. But back in California I had spied Julie Christie in a tiny boutique in Sausalito – and this only weeks after watching Doctor Zhivago on the big screen of a UCLA movie theatre. I hadn’t yet been to Carnegie Hall, either, where Sviatoslav Richter would surely perform before long for my benefit (didn’t every great star come to Carnegie Hall?). But the wealthy mother of a friend of Sterling’s had two extra tickets to a Metropolitan Opera performance, and there I slept soundly through the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, while Birgit Nilsson sang Brünnhilde and Herbert von Karajan conducted. Back home in Rangoon, a fitful amnesty was taking place. Political prisoners were being released in batches, but there was no telling whose turn was next. ‘I rush to the mirror,’ my mother wrote, ‘which normally I scarcely look at, and comb my hair oftener than I have ever done in my life. I sweep the floor and dust the furniture because I am sure I am growing mad . . . We are still sitting on the doorstep, at least I am doing just that, waiting for a car to drive up and deliver Daddy . . .’ So nothing had changed really, or – I thought bleakly – was likely to change. Looking down from the plate-glass window of our Upper West Side apartment, which we had moved to from our midtown hotel with its hidden cabbage-soup kitchen, I stared for long hours at the traffic on the Hudson. We were up so high that what I saw were minuscule barges dodging miniature tankers and freighters on the surface of a narrow little freshet. At a certain point everything below me – all movement, all traffic on the river – would lose its definition, reduced like the revolutions of a ceiling fan to a single, solid blur. It was only a spell, a temporary skewing of vision, but I saw in it an omen of what was happening, or not happening, at home. Nothing was moving here on the Hudson – just like nothing was moving back in Burma. One evening Sterling and I returned from a walk in Central Park to find that our apartment had been broken into. Gone was the old

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black-and-white television set left behind by a previous tenant. And gone was the Pan Am flight bag containing everything of value I owned: the few pieces of jewellery that my mother had given me just before I left – a pearl necklace, a jade bracelet, a pair of sapphire earrings – and a loose stack of family photographs. I had heard of course of the city’s reputation for crime, but to be robbed – and with such surgical precision, of only my most precious possessions – seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. For a time I imagined opening the front door to find the stolen Pan Am bag, left by a conscience-stricken thief who had taken the jewellery but decided to return the photos. But Sterling put paid to such fantasies. ‘The jerk probably just took the jewellery and threw the pictures into the Hudson,’ he said. Once I latched onto the idea that my photographs had ended up in the Hudson, I felt oddly relieved. Somewhere at the back of my mind I had been expecting just such a loss, and now that the worst had come to pass I could stop worrying. My load had been lightened. I was free now of excess baggage. Loss was freedom, I reasoned, like the good Buddhist I wasn’t. In spring of the following year, I was pregnant again. One day, queasy from morning sickness, I went into work dragging my feet but soon perked up when dear Mr Koch came in bearing a tray with a mug of hot chocolate on it – along with a packet of mail that had been forwarded to me from one past address to another. I tore open the envelope addressed in the unmistakable hand that made my heart race. 116B University Ave Rangoon 4 March 1968 My darling daughter, As soon as I came home we dashed off a cable to you. You must be footloose somewhere because you have not yet responded. But

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everything here reminds me of you: even this typewriter which was clogged up with your eraser shavings . . . Wars and rumours of war; men withering away in expectation of what shall befall them. There has been no change since I went in. . . . You are old enough and sensible enough to know that my imprisonment has been a blessing in disguise. We have all recovered from the ordeal. Other families lose the head at one fell swoop – in our case there was a dress rehearsal to prepare everyone for the day when the show opens in earnest. Daddy

By the end of that summer we were back in Bangkok. For months Sterling had been trying to sell one of the big networks on the idea of a documentary series on opium, and at last a provisional contract had come through. Bangkok was the obvious base for the project, and Bangkok would place us nearer the family in Rangoon. Now that my father was free, maybe there was a chance we’d be allowed in to see him. Bangkok was also where Marlaine and her family were now living, having left Burma soon after me. We found a house by a mosquito-ridden klong that we hoped would be big enough for our growing family. For not only had we brought along Gordon, Sterling’s five-year-old son by a previous marriage, to live with us: we were expecting sextuplets. ‘Extraordinary,’ muttered Dr Ettinger, removing her stethoscope after a good long listen – and looking, I thought, a lot like Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister. Austrian by birth, Dr Ettinger had spent the better part of her life delivering babies in rural China. ‘We can’t be sure, of course,’ she was saying, ‘until we can take an X-ray, and that we cannot do safely until about week twenty-eight, which is, let me see, six weeks from now. But I believe I can hear six heartbeats.’ ‘Does that mean,’ I said stupidly, ‘six babies?’ Dr Ettinger’s eyes puckered in amusement. ‘That’s what it usually means. But for now we must concentrate on your anaemia. Your last tests show a very low blood count. I want you to see a haematologist.’

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I waited to get home before wringing my hands. ‘What are we going to do?’ I bleated. Sterling seemed unfazed. ‘We’ll appear on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post,’ he grinned. ‘The Seagrave Sextuplets, I can see it now. There’ll be government subsidies, gifts and donations from all over the world. We’ll be sitting pretty.’ ‘But won’t some of them die, like cats in a litter?’ ‘Not our babies. They’ll be strapping lads and lasses, every one of them. Remember the telegram I sent to propose to you? WILL YOU MARRY ME AND HAVE LOTS OF BABIES? You thought I was kidding.’ ‘But not all at once!’

My first office job at the Bangkok World newspaper, 1969

When my parents found out that not only was I likely to have sextuplets, but that I was suffering from a rare blood disorder, they responded predictably. My mother sent solicitous missiles (her malapropism for missives). My father sent money. From jail he had written to me in America to reflect on money’s insignificance (probably because he sensed we had none): ‘We have been both rich and poor in our lives. Money, when we had it, has meant less than what it means to others. And when we didn’t have it we didn’t miss it much.’

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But now it seemed money did matter. ‘This is not the time when you have to be squeamish,’ he wrote. ‘We sold your piano . . . because it was gathering dust and we mean to get you a new one anyway. We are not destitute and do not intend that our grandchildren should lack for anything.’ At last it was deemed safe for me to have an X-ray, and the good news was that the six heartbeats Dr Ettinger had heard were in fact echoes of two: I was only going to have twins. On the heels of this reassuring news came a startling missile from my parents, sent through a diplomat friend. ‘We are planning,’ Dad announced, ‘. . . to come to you. We will of course spend as much time as possible in Bangkok before transferring ourselves to Britain . . . But coming we are. After the twins have arrived and are ready to stand we will think of going away together where we can set up a new home. Burma will always be our country and we will all come back here when we can do so with honour and with pride . . . We are not going to sit idly like morons and bemoan our fate.’ I thought how happy Alban in particular would be made by this decision. My brother’s letters to me had been increasingly gloomy. ‘It has been raining like mad and alles ist Scheisse. Can’t go anywhere. I don’t have much to do now-a-days except think of when I shall receive my passport. I get so damn mad sometimes that I want to run through the jungle. But alas, even that costs money of which I am quite empty. And crossing the damn border is a bloody stupid thing.’ Dad made no secret of his plans to leave the country. When friends asked what he had in mind for the future, he said he was going abroad to organise a revolt against Ne Win. ‘Edward! Shh!’ Mum hissed. ‘Stop making jokes like that.’ But it wasn’t a joke. Dad was now meeting regularly with a group of former cabinet ministers. One night a car drove up to the rear entrance of our house, and a young captain sent by former Prime Minister U Nu jumped out with a roast duck and a pair of slippers as a gift. He had been sent to enquire if U Nu might pay Dad a visit. (Nu had been keeping a low profile ever since his own release two years earlier.)

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When Nu came to the house, Dad led him into the study (my former bedroom) and turned on the noisy air conditioner so they could talk – a necessary precaution against wiretaps or bugs. The plan they came up with was simple but daring: they would test the waters to see what sort of support Nu could expect – by organising a flood-relief campaign. The Arakan State in the west had just been hit hard by a cyclone, leaving many dead and many more homeless. The campaign would kick off at the Kaba Aye Pagoda, where the organisers would meet every morning, form a procession, and strike out into the streets to collect donations for the Arakan Flood Relief Fund. Meanwhile, religious and political leaders would continue to make speeches – ostensibly appeals for the relief campaign – in front of the pagoda. What was risky about the plan was that without official permission it would be violating the rule of ‘unlawful assembly’ (a gathering of four persons or more). A crackdown was not only possible but likely. In the event, the campaign went through unobstructed. The processions turned into festive affairs with musicians beating drums, gongs and percussion instruments, with women chanting Pali verses and loudspeakers blaring out appeals for the smallest coins. U Nu walked through the crowds with a bamboo cylinder slung over one shoulder. Into this bamboo the crowds dropped their coins. They had been asked to limit their contributions to one kyat each. No sooner was each bamboo filled to the brim when a volunteer would replace it with a fresh container. The procession reached all the way to the satellite towns, by which time close to 400,000 kyat had been raised for the flood victims. The overwhelming support was clear evidence that whatever Nu may have lost as a political leader, it wasn’t popular appeal. The question now was how to ride the momentum. On seizing power, Ne Win had imprisoned every likely opponent to his regime, but there were still a few Burman (as opposed to minority) dissident groups that had gone underground to Thailand and were operating out of their Bangkok bases and jungle camps

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along the border. Nu declared that he was for taking his chances and slipping out into the jungle to join them, disguised as a peasant. What did Bo Law (Comrade Hasty) think of that idea? Not much, said Dad. He had a better idea. He was going to write to Ne Win and request an interview. If he succeeded, U Nu should follow suit. Ne Win’s response to this unusual request came almost by return post. The interview was granted. Dad drove himself to the once familiar address, and as instructed pulled into the private entrance of Government House. There he was met by an army official and shown into the living room, where a silver cigarette case lay open. He had hardly lit up when the door opened and the general strode in, arms outstretched. He seized Dad in a long bear hug before leading him into his private office. ‘I tried to call you,’ he said, once they were seated. Dad said, ‘I think you know how to reach me.’ ‘My face is hot,’ Ne Win blurted out (meaning he was deeply embarrassed). ‘Not on my account, surely,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve been arrested before. Jail is an occupational hazard for newspapermen.’ Ne Win bit his lip. He looked as if he might break down. But – Dad went on – there was one thing he couldn’t get over. And that was the way his daughter had been arrested and grilled. (He didn’t mention his son, for some reason.) Upon his word, Ne Win protested, that was done without his knowledge. The minute he was made aware, he had ordered ‘little Wendy’s’ release. Again Ne Win looked crestfallen. It was his intention, he said now, to apologise to each of the leaders who had been imprisoned. Excellent idea, said Dad. But something in his tone set off a change in Ne Win’s mood. Now the general grew petulant. All people ever did was find fault, he said. He had had it up to here with the whispers and the grumbles about whether he had the people’s mandate. After all he’d done to earn it. He had half a mind to hand the blasted job back and tell the world to go hang.

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Dad shifted in his seat. The moment of truth had come. ‘If you’re wondering why I’m here,’ he said, ‘it’s because I want passports for myself and my family. We want to go to Thailand, and from there to England.’ England! The general’s face lit up. What a good idea! Did he need a job in England? He was sure he could think of something for him to do in England. No, said Dad, he was past the age of job-hunting. Come to think of it, weren’t they both at a stage when a man should be leading a quiet life, fishing maybe? Ignoring the last question, Ne Win said if passports were what Ko (Older Brother) Law-Yone wanted, then passports would be issued to him. Not a problem. He would order them straight away. But he was still curious about what he was going to do for a living in England. ‘Oh, I expect I’ll open a Burmese restaurant.’ ‘Uncle George!’ exclaimed the general. ‘That’s the man you must contact.’ He meant George Ba Oh, the Burmese trade commissioner in London. ‘He is passionately fond of cooking. The two of you should join forces.’ Dad promised to look up Uncle George. Now came the delicate subject of Katie. It was well known that Katie was very ill. How was she? Dad enquired. Not well, said her husband glumly. Not at all well. Her urine had to be weighed daily. That bad? That bad. But if Ko Law-Yone wished to see her, her room was just down the hall . . . No, no. There was no need to disturb her. But if he could send flowers before leaving the country? By all means. By all means. ‘Have you,’ asked Ne Win suddenly, ‘read “The Burmese Way to Socialism”?’ ‘I bought dozens of copies in jail,’ Dad said truthfully. What he didn’t say was that he’d bought them off the jailers for kindling, when he and his mates were trying to get the illegal cook fires in their cell blocks going. Nor did he repeat what Thakin Pe Htay, the old Communist

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leader, had thought about the manifesto. Pe Htay had been in and out of jail since the start of the Communist rebellion – once for a twelve-year stretch. Not long after Ne Win had imprisoned most of the Nu government, two Nation reporters had gone to interview Pe Htay, to ask what he, a great Socialist, thought of Ne Win’s programme. Would his socialism prevail and bear fruit? The crippled old Bolshevik struggled to lean forward in his seat. ‘Listen carefully to me,’ he said. ‘If you don’t print my words exactly as spoken you come to me again at your peril. Now quote me as saying, “I, Thakin Pe Htay, do hereby announce that if I entered Ne Win through the anus it would be more likely for him to conceive and be with child than for his asinine policies to amount to socialism.”’ Dad was still at large when the report was brought to him. But even he did not have the gumption to print it. ‘Take this,’ the general was saying now, as he handed him a specially bound copy in blue leather. It was time to leave, but Dad still had a few more points to raise. ‘I want you to know I am selling my house and cars and that I am going to smuggle the money out through various embassies,’ he said. Ne Win’s expression did not change except to take on a slight tinge of ‘How else do you imagine you’re going to get your funds out of the country?’ Dad’s final request was in regard to his son Byron. As a recent graduate of medical school, he would not ordinarily be permitted to leave. Young doctors in Burma were so scarce that when a couple of Byron’s classmates applied for passports, they had ended up with postings to ‘punishment stations’ in remote provinces. Could he be assured that this would not happen in Byron’s case? The general snorted. Of course not. Byron would have his papers too. Dad stood up to leave; fortunately, there was not another bear hug to contend with. From Government House he drove straight to Nu’s. ‘I’ve just seen Ne Win,’ he said. ‘He’s promised me my passport. Now you too, Prime Minister, must demand a passport and bring your family out.’ When he got home, he found Mum praying for his safety before

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a lighted candle. She wasn’t sure whether she’d see him again. ‘Start the packing, darling,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving Burma.’ On the night of 8 September 1968, Sterling and I were up late, wondering what to do with ourselves. The twins were a week overdue, I had been on bed-rest for some three months, and we were both climbing the walls. ‘Oh, what the hell, let’s just go and see a movie,’ Sterling said. Seldom had I heard a better idea. ‘What shall we see?’ ‘A rerun of For Whom the Bell Tolls is playing.’ ‘Let’s go! What’s it about?’ All I knew about the film was that Akim Tamiroff – Mum’s shipboard dance partner – was in it. ‘I’ll tell you in the taxi.’ Ingrid Bergman had finally kissed Gary Cooper, after claiming not to know how to kiss (‘Where do the noses go?’), but Gary Cooper had not yet blown up the bridge, when I whispered to Sterling, ‘We have to go now. Right now.’ Six hours later, Sterling was leaning over my bed at the Bangkok Nursing Home and telling me that we had a boy and a girl. ‘Yeccch!’ I replied. The nurses tittered in amusement at my unsentimental response. I was still nauseated from the gas I’d been given to ease what was expected to be a long delivery – but wasn’t, as Mr Dr Ettinger informed me triumphantly. This Herr Doktor Ettinger, the husband of my obstetrician, was himself a dermatologist, but had participated for some reason in the delivery. ‘A boy and a girl,’ Sterling repeated. ‘Think of that.’ Tinker and Sean were less than two months old when the family finally arrived in Bangkok: the whole mishpocha, as my brother Hubert would call them – Mum, Dad, Alban, Byron and Jo Jo. By coincidence the bigger house next door to ours in Bangkok had just been vacated. Into this house the new arrivals moved. There was a lot of catching up to do, a lot of ground to cover now that we were all together for the first time in years. Mum had filled Dad in on my ‘escapade’ with Alban ending in MIS headquarters, but

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when I asked her to what extent, she confessed that she had downplayed the whole business, so as not to upset him unduly. I found myself taking the cue from her when it was my turn to regale Dad with my version.

Mum & Dad with the twins, 1968

Over the years I had learned to tailor my stories for his consumption. As children we had all learned that the only way to our father’s ear was through an entertaining anecdote or performance. So I told him only about the comic aspects of my time in jail – not about the nightly interrogations, for example, but about the hunger strike: how when the jailer brought breakfast one morning (a cup of tea and a slice of bread and margarine) I had told him to take it away, saying I was on a hunger strike. But there he was again at lunchtime, the same boy with his wretched tray. ‘I told you I’m fasting!’ I snapped. ‘Oh, but look!’ He was thrusting it at me – the tray with the plate of rice and the small bowl of curry on it. ‘It’s Friday. Chicken curry.’ Once I looked I was lost. ‘Just leave it here,’ I said, in my best nonchalant manner, pretending not to notice how he frowned from the effort of trying not to smile.

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Everyone else in the family had found the story of my three-hour hunger strike hilarious, but not Dad. His expression darkened. I wasn’t going to fool him with my jokey, offhand account of a brush with the MIS. But his own account of prison life was hardly less offhand in his many retellings. When they came to take him away that night in March, he had held his breath as the calvacade went down Inya Road. If it turned left at Boundary Road, it most likely meant they were taking him to the red-brick headquarters of the MIS. But no, they were turning right. Hurrah! It was the Central Jail they were headed for, not the MIS building. Anything was better than that. For the next seven nights, he slept on the cement floor of a 4’ x 7’ cell, with rain beating in through a gap in the wall. Then they moved him to the convicted prisoners’ ward, where the food was surprisingly decent. Finally they took him to Insein Jail, some ten miles away, to spend the next two years in solitary confinement. For a while he was allowed to keep a few books and a transistor radio that Mum had received permission to send him, so he was able to read, and to listen to the BBC World Service. But when he took to singing hymns in Latin while polishing the floor of his cell by shuffling back and forth with wet towels wrapped around his feet, he was yanked out of solitary to share a cell with one U Kyi Chai. Here he complained loudly, for U Kyi Chai was a consumptive. When his complaints got him nowhere, he demanded to see the captain in charge. A blanket was thrown over his head while he was led downstairs into the sanctum of the secret police. ‘Uncle,’ said the captain, ‘you are a grown man, there is no need for tantrums. We have already reported your grievance to the higherups and we will move you as soon as we get the word. But in the meantime, Uncle, why don’t you act your age?’ Uncle said, ‘I’m telling you that you had better get me or U Kyi Chai out of there by tomorrow.’ ‘And if we don’t?’ the captain mocked.

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‘Then I’ll squeeze his neck till the poor bugger croaks.’ That very evening carpenters arrived to build a partition between the blood-spitting U Kyi Chai and the nail-spitting U Law-Yone. The next day, U Kyi Chai was taken to hospital. The next move was more benign – to a larger cell shared with seven others, two of whom happened to be old St Peter’s boys: U Tin Maung Maung, deputy inspector general of police, and his brother, U Khin Maung Maung, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Now for the first time there was scope for fun and games. They made playing cards out of cigarette packets, brewed liquor from unrefined sugar lumps of jaggery that had gone rancid, built a miniature billiard table with planking from the isolation ward, extracted the old nails from it and sharpened the nails into knives. The knives were for cooking, not for jail breaks. The British had used pyinkadoe instead of iron for the bars of Insein Jail – and pyinkadoe was a wood so hard that it would have taken a lot more than homemade knives to saw through it. In the cell directly below were thirty-three Communist students for whom Dad devised an English-language course. Every morning the inch-wide blank strip of newsprint at the bottom of the Working People’s Daily was rolled up and stuffed into an empty matchbox. On that thin white band Dad wrote out sentences showing the different ways in which a particular English word or phrase could be used. The matchbox was thrown to the cell below, usually landing close enough to the bars to be retrieved with a broom. The grateful students tossed him fresh or dried vegetables – gourds, okra, an occasional aubergine – sent to them by their relatives. Dad bribed the prison guards with luxuries like soap and cake that Mum was permitted to send on occasion. In return, the guards brought him ingredients for his illegal culinary experiments. An outgoing prisoner bequeathed to him a rectangular Klim powdered-milk can, and this became his stove. For fuel he used DDT and castor oil – the DDT obtained by complaining of bedbugs, rats and other vermin; the castor oil by complaining of piles. For kindling he relied on government publications like ‘The New Order’ and ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’. He had an old blanket, heavily singed, for casting over the stove

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during surprise inspections by senior wardens. He had everything he needed to rustle up meals for his cell mates and block mates. After much trial and error, some of these meals were nearly edible. On lucky days, he would throw in a protein treat: a lizard, a mouse, or a DDT-poisoned pigeon. The Communist students were less preoccupied with food. There was always one or two among them too damaged by torture to be able to eat anyway. They preferred to focus their energy on staging subversive plays – a pastime that invariably led to the main actors being beaten and placed in solitary. One day The Thirty, as the students called themselves, sent a message to Dad that they would be staging a hunger strike. They took it for granted that he would join, but would he also persuade the other elders to participate? The ‘elders’ were politicians of a generation that wanted no truck with Communist protest tactics. But by the time Dad finished relaying the appeal, Justice Chan Htoon himself – chief justice of the Supreme Court who had written the constitution of Burma – said yes, they could count him in. On Christmas Eve the Communist students showed their appreciation by sending up a tree for their teacher Uncle U Law-Yone, whom they knew to be a Christian. The tree was actually a roselle branch, decorated with red light bulbs the size of berries. Then they sang ‘Silent Night’, which they had been quietly practising. Afterwards, they shouted, ‘Uncle! Together we will fight Ne Win! Then, when he is gone, we’ll fight you!’ ‘You’ve had it now, Uncle,’ they teased, whenever they heard that some international body was protesting on U Law-Yone’s behalf – that Amnesty International had made a pitch for him, or that the General Assembly of the International Press Institute meeting in New Delhi had passed a resolution demanding his release or his trial. ‘Now you’re in for keeps.’ He made a pact with the students. The first person to be allowed out of jail must dance his way along the catwalk leading out of the prison yard – dance like a lupyek, a clown.

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And that was why, when the gates to Dad’s cell were opened on 28 February 1968, he crossed the bridge dancing like a fool, towards the team of army officers waiting to sign him out. Mum had been telephoned in advance with instructions to pick up her husband at the prison gates. She arrived to find him with one foot on a stool, a cigar in his mouth, carrying on what appeared to be a relaxed conversation with the officers. He was discussing, she later learned, the fine print of the release documents they wanted him to sign. At last he stepped past the prison gates to meet her, the wife he hadn’t seen in five years. He was carrying two plastic carrier bags, one in each hand, containing all his belongings. At the bottom of one bag, wrapped in newspaper, were six exercise books, each numbered and titled My Life.

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part 2 Outside

Dad inspecting a rebel camp on the Thai border, 1970

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11 Man of La Mancha

In the first year of my father’s imprisonment, before we were allowed to write to him or hear from him, my greatest fear was that I would never see him again. My second greatest fear was that in jail – aptly named Insein Prison – he would slowly lose his mind. Even after his letters started coming – the anodyne, upbeat letters exhorting us to be of good cheer and assuring us of his well-being – I wondered how long it would take to turn him into a frothing lunatic behind bars. What a relief, then, to find him not just intact but revitalised from the long incarceration. Dad was still Dad, only more so – more gregarious, more expansive than ever. What was five years for a fighter like him? Not much, to hear him tell it between gales of laughter. But jail was already part of a distant, inadmissible past now that he’d finagled his way out of Burma. There was no time for morbid reflection; there was time only for action. He had come ahead to Thailand to pave the way for U Nu who, if all went according to plan, would soon be arriving by a separate route. This required first and foremost access to key members of the Thai government, and for that he turned to another Burmese exile with connections. Air Commander Tommy Clift had been a member of Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council but had fallen foul of the general and been forced out of the country. In Bangkok, he had been taken under the protective wing of his opposite number in the Thai military, Air Chief Marshal Dawee Chullasapya. Dawee, like Dad, had served with the OSS in Kandy, but under the

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snappier pseudonym of Dicky Stone. Dicky, or Dawee, had cornered the US Military’s R&R (rest & recreation) racket at the height of the Vietnam War. Tommy’s Tours, run by Tommy Clift, was owned by Dawee. Through Tommy’s intervention, Dawee was persuaded to deliver to the prime minister of Thailand a letter from the prime minister of Burma (written by Dad, on a blank sheet of stationery that U Nu had signed). The official response was prompt and gracious: the prime minister of Thailand looked with favour on Nu’s request for permanent residency in Thailand. Back in Rangoon, Nu’s ploy of feigning grave illness through a series of fainting spells in public had achieved the desired result. Indira Gandhi, whose father, Jawaharlal Nehru, had been a stalwart ally of Nu’s, appealed to General Ne Win to allow the deposed prime minister to receive medical treatment in India. The general had consented, and after a few nerve-racking delays, Nu and his family had finally left for India. Meanwhile, through a separate ruse, another fellow dissident, ‘Comrade’ Bo Let Ya, one of the original Thirty Comrades and former Minister of Defence, had managed to leave Burma and join Nu in India. Thus it was a party of eight – U Nu with his wife, his four children, his aide-de-camp and Bo Let Ya – that landed at Bangkok’s Don Muang airport in the spring of 1969. They were met in style by Air Chief Marshal Dawee. Dad came to the airport separately, chauffeured by his new assistant, another Anglo-Burmese exile by the name of Brian Marcar. Brian had worked for the Netherlands Bank in Rangoon, but was selling Johnson’s wax products to Thai supermarkets when he was roped into the resistance. With the help of Tommy Clift’s wife Kay, Dad had found and furnished a suitable house for U Nu and his contingent on Soi 31, Sukhumvit. In this house the prime minister of Burma was installed – as the personal guest of the prime minister of Thailand. Nu’s first order of business was to pay his respects to his host, Prime Minister and Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn. Thanom extended a warm welcome, assuring Nu that there was no need ever

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to stand on ceremony. He should feel free to visit Thanom at any time, without prior notice. Next, Nu went to call on General Prasert Ruchirawongse, the chief of police. With a 75,000-strong police force at his command, to say nothing of close ties with the business and banking community, Prasert seemed like a good man to know. The police general was not one to stand on ceremony either. He greeted his Burmese guests in his living room while putting on his trousers and nibbling on sweetmeats, vowed eternal support and friendship, and pressed on them little bundles of durian preserves to take home. Last but not least on Nu’s list of officials worth cultivating was the Grand Poohbah of Thailand, General Praphas Charusathien, deputy prime minister and commander-in-chief of the Royal Thai Army. Praphas presented Nu with an 800-year-old image of the Buddha, but rather spoiled things by scolding his Burmese brother for having been such a ‘soft’ prime minister. Why, every time he visited Rangoon, he said, Nu’s house had been surrounded by demonstrators. Nu smiled enigmatically but made no attempt to defend himself. Dad remembered that smile a few years later, when both Praphas and Prime Minister Thanom were driven out of office and into exile after a bloody crackdown on demonstrators protesting their harsh military rule backfired. By this time two other dissident groups had arrived in Bangkok to rally around Nu – one from the interior of Burma, the other from the jungles of the Thai-Burmese border, where rebel camps had been operating since the early days of the Ne Win takeover. United by the desire to restore democracy to Burma, these groups joined to form the Parliamentary Democracy Party, with Nu as president, Let Ya as vice president and Law-Yone as secretary general. In forming the PDP, the group was also declaring itself a government in exile, and in this capacity Nu, as the constitutionally elected prime minister, retained his office; Let Ya was appointed finance minister, Tommy Clift defence minister and Law-Yone foreign minister. With their bona fides and pecking order established, it was time for the PDP to spread their message to the world. Dad as foreign

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Exiles: Dad & Bo Let Ya in PDP Executive Committee meeting, 1971

minister would accompany U Nu on his first international tour as prime minister of the Burmese government in exile. Their first stop was London, where a suite had been reserved for Nu and his aide-de-camp, Captain Moe Gyaw, and a small room for Dad, at the White House Hotel near Regent’s Park. But Nu, with the perversity he often showed in such situations, moved his bags into the single room, leaving the more luxurious suite to be shared by Moe Gyaw and Dad. It was summertime in Britain, but Moe Gyaw was shivering. To keep himself from freezing to death, he had insisted on running the electric heater full blast through the night. To keep himself from suffocating, Dad had left the window open a crack. The next morning he was on the telephone, absorbed in the day’s logistics, when a strong breeze blew through the open window, draping the curtain over an exposed filament in the heater. The next thing he knew, the room was in flames. Management had been swift in putting out the fire, and Dad was taking it out on Moe Gyaw, when Nu came into the room, gently fanning the smoke away from his face, to enquire how big the blaze

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had been. Big, said Dad. Very big. The curtains, the carpet, the upholstery – all had been on fire. Nu seemed obscurely pleased. ‘A good omen,’ he smiled. They called a press conference and the turnout was excellent, with most of the wire services present. Nu was on top form answering questions about how he reconciled his Buddhist belief with contingent bloodletting on the battlefields of Burma. The BBC and The Times gave them fair coverage. So too did the state-controlled press in Burma. One cartoon in the official Working People’s Daily featured U Law-Yone as a bespectacled Sancho Panza, with U Nu as Don Quixote on a PDP donkey, tilting at a windmill with a big blunt dah, a Burmese knife. An MIS agent must have spotted the two emerging from a West End theatre, after a performance of the musical, Man of La Mancha. On their walk back to the hotel, Nu – who had read his Cervantes, and greatly enjoyed the show – was dilating on how much better it was to think good rather than evil of others, when a rather obvious denizen of the side streets of Soho sidled up with a chirpy ‘Hello, darling!’ Nu beamed. ‘You see,’ he said, walking on regally. ‘They recognise me.’ It was never easy to tell whether Nu’s naivety was genuine or affected. At the moment it didn’t matter. They were in London, and they were on a roll. They visited, and were visited, by old Burmese friends, and a few unknown exiles, some of whom discreetly slipped them small cash donations. They were invited to lunch at Broadlands, the country estate of Earl Mountbatten of Burma. There, after the kind of meal that precluded anything as crass as a discussion of politics, Nu planted a ceremonial sapling in the palatial grounds. Just a few yards away was a sapling recently planted by the King of Denmark. For newly minted rebels, they weren’t doing badly. The reception in America was no less heartening. Arriving in New York, they were met by the press and a committee of friends and well-wishers. U Thant, presumably busy with his official duties at the UN, sent his son-in-law to assist them throughout their stay. The truth was that the Prime Minister’s arrival in New York had put Thant in

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a difficult position. What his compatriots did outside his bailiwick as Secretary General of the United Nations was their business, just so long as they didn’t expect him to enter the fray. Instead they caused considerable embarrassment by holding a press conference at the United Nations without consulting him. A few days later, they went to Thant’s house for dinner, where it soon became clear that the usual bonhomie between old friends was missing. Thant still behaved as though he was Nu’s press secretary, with ‘Yes, Wungyigyoke [Prime Minister]’ and ‘No, Wungyigyoke’, but the mood was strained. Thant was telling Dad how he kept fit by swimming in his pool every day when Nu got up abruptly and announced they were leaving. As Thant reached out to shake Dad’s hand, he slipped an envelope into his jacket. Dad opened it in his hotel room and found one thousand dollars in crisp hundred-dollar notes. An unofficial donation, perhaps. Or a token of secret solidarity. On a previous trip to New York, while waiting for U Nu to make his escape from Burma, Dad had briefed U Thant on their plans to oust Ne Win. Thant seemed uncertain about whether he was having his leg pulled, but when he realised Dad was in earnest he began in his measured way to voice his many misgivings – until it became obvious that he might as well be talking to himself. Next on the itinerary was Washington DC – for another round of interviews and press conferences. Nu took on the dinner parties and official tours, the museums and the zoo. Dad handled the breakfasts with senators and congressmen on Capitol Hill, the lunches with State Department types. Their one unscheduled visit was to southern California, as guests of Howard Hughes. That at least was what they had been led to believe by Alan Moore, the middleman who had arranged the visit. Moore had contacted the PDP earlier in Bangkok, before the ink on their mimeographed constitution was properly dry, to propose a capital-raising scheme. If as legitimate prime minister of Burma Nu was willing to grant Moore’s principals future offshore exploration rights in his country, several million dollars would be made

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available to his cause as quid pro quo. When asked what there was in it for him, Moore had said truthfully, ‘A finder’s fee.’ But who did Moore work for? Dad had pressed. ‘Howard Hughes’ came the modest reply. Now, at Los Angeles International Airport, Moore was waiting with two chauffeured limousines. The vehicles at least looked as if they might belong to Hughes. At the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach, a three-room suite awaited U Nu, with a smaller suite each for Dad and Captain Moe Kyaw. Colour TV in every room; refrigerators bulging with champagne – home was never like this! ‘I smell a rat,’ Dad said to Nu the minute they were alone. Nu made a face to indicate that he smelled one too. He thought it was time to send to Washington DC for their adviser Louis Walinsky, respected economist, friend of Burma and astute judge of character. Meanwhile he, Nu, would duck out of sight and get some rest, leaving Dad to break the ice with Moore. ‘Well,’ Dad began. ‘What’s the story? Where do we go from here?’ The story, which would unfold in its entirety only a year later, was that the limousines did in fact belong to Howard Hughes – or at least to an offshoot of his empire. It seemed that after Alan Moore met Dad in Bangkok he went to his Santa Barbara business associate, a man by the name of Arlan Hand, to boast that he had the prime minister of Burma in his pocket. The problem was that neither Moore nor Hand had any money. The two of them together would be hard pressed to entertain the lowliest peon of the Burmese prime minister, let alone the prime minister himself. What they needed was a frontman to woo the Burmese in some style. The only person remotely connected with Hughes that Moore and Hand happened to know was someone who did business with the Hughes factory selling oil-drilling equipment. Her name was Nadine Henley. Miss Henley was sufficiently interested in the scheme to put up the money for an exploratory powwow with the Burmese. She borrowed two limousines stabled in the garage she owned and operated, and rented a chauffeur’s uniform for one of its drivers, a friend

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of Arlan Hand’s by the name of Lester Hahn. She also picked up the tab at Balboa Bay Club. None of this was as yet known to the Burmese, who were caught for the moment in an obscure waiting game. Nor had they ever heard of Ahmad Kamal, the other character that Miss Henley now brought into the act. Kamal’s affiliations were opaque, but he made passing references to adventures in China in the Second World War, and afterwards in Algeria. His career in fact covered quite a bit more ground than that. Born Cimarron Hathaway in 1915, in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, Ahmad Kamal (the name change was recorded in a Hollywood court in 1938) was the son of an American mother and, he claimed, a Uyghur from Turkestan. Much of Kamal’s alleged exploits as a Central Asian adventurer are described in his 1940 publication, Land Without Laughter, ostensibly a travel book. Following his Turkic escapades, Kamal settled in Los Angeles, where he published three more books before converting to Islam and working freelance for US intelligence in the 1950s – first in Munich, then in Indonesia. By the time the Burmese cause came along to catch his eye, Kamal was back in California, living in relative anonymity, and no doubt bored silly. Unaware of – or perhaps simply uninterested in – Kamal’s multilayered credentials, Dad’s pressing concern was to find out why the prime minister was being made to take in the ocean breeze when all he wanted was a chat with a billionaire called Hughes. Still denied access to Nu – who insisted that Dad do all the talking – Kamal remained tight-lipped. To Miss Henley, Kamal confided that these Burmese characters were most likely what they claimed to be. Still in his opinion they were not the best security risks. Miss Henley’s enthusiasm began to wane. She was shelling out thousands of dollars to entertain two former political prisoners from an obscure Asian country. It was time to cut bait. The deal was off, she announced briskly to Moore, Hand and Hahn. It was a downcast Alan Moore who came to inform Dad that he was fading out of the picture. He was only sorry that he had failed

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to secure support for such a worthy cause. In the end, the closest Nu and company came to the great man who might have financed their movement was up in the skies above Los Angeles. The airline was reportedly owned by Howard Hughes at one time. Empty-handed but ever optimistic, the party flew to Hong Kong, their last stop – so they thought – before Bangkok. Hong Kong was home to a number of wealthy Burmese exiles. Dad went to dinner with one of them, the Tiger Balm heiress, Sally Aw Sian, whose family had made its fortune in Burma. Miss Aw was now publisher of the Hong Kong Standard and she was careful to keep the evening at the level of a convivial dinner with a fellow publisher – nothing more. But Miss Aw had brought along her ageing mother, who had lived much of her life in Burma, so Dad tried turning his charm on her. But no fat cheque was forthcoming. For that they would have to thank another Chinese entrepreneur with Burmese roots. ‘YH’ Kwong was among the many thousands of naturalised Chinese citizens who had long considered Burma to be their true homeland, only to be dispossessed and expelled by the xenophobic Ne Win. The fact that Katie, Ne Win’s wife, had been close friends with YH, cavorting at many a poolside party in his Rangoon mansion, had done him no good when the chips were down. Now here was YH, writing out a cheque for $10,000 – the largest single donation to date. Not to be outdone, members of the Burmese-Indian community who had suffered similarly at the hands of the military government came forward to pay their respects and pledge support. Apparently, somebody wanted to donate something. Dad’s hopes rose. As it turned out, it was only wristwatches, and cheap ones at that. His hopes fell. Now came a serious setback: a cable from Tommy Clift in Bangkok that Dad was afraid to read, having foreseen its contents. The Thai government was incensed over press reports of Nu’s seditious activities under their watch and patronage. Nobody could guarantee any longer that either U Nu or U Law-Yone would be allowed back into Thailand. Dad was on the verge of asking U Nu how he felt about spending

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the rest of his life shuttling on the ferry between Hong Kong and Macao, and was casting about the map of Asia in his mind’s eye, when he suddenly lit upon the most beautiful land imaginable. He called down to the front desk of his hotel and dictated a telegram. ‘I’ll repeat back to you, sir,’ came the staccato Hong Kong Chinese voice. ‘“To His Royal Highness Prince Norodom Sihanouk”. Correct?’ Correct. The prince did not send a cable in reply. Instead, a silk-suited worthy arrived at their hotel bearing an official invitation for Prime Minister U Nu and Foreign Minister U Law-Yone to visit Cambodia as guests of the Samdech (Prince Sihanouk’s Cambodian title). A very full programme, drawn up in English and French, accompanied the invitation. Dad fired off a cable to Bangkok to relay the good news to PDP headquarters: they were accepted, even wanted, by another Asian country! Tommy Clift conveyed the message to his mentor and protector, Air Chief Marshal Dawee, who passed it on to the prime minister, who called the cabinet into session. The resultant vote was in favour of allowing Nu and party to return to Thailand. Hallelujah! Captain Moe Gyaw, laden with two hundred wristwatches and a packet of cash in several currencies, was sent ahead to Bangkok. What with setting hotel rooms on fire and suffering from a prolonged lack of ‘real’ (Burmese) food, Moe Gyaw’s nerves were frayed. So when customs at Bangkok asked him if he had anything to declare, he panicked and pulled out all the dollar bills and cheap watches and laid them before the customs officer, reminding him all the while that he was private secretary to the prime minister of Burma. Fortunately, Brian Marcar had been sent by headquarters to meet Moe Gyaw at the airport. It took all but a flying tackle to extricate the captain before he could make more trouble. Arriving in Phnom Penh, the Burmese dignitaries stepped across some two hundred yards of gorgeous scarlet silk to where the prime minister, General Lon Nol, and the foreign minister, Prince Norodom Phurissara, were waiting to greet them. Son Sann, former prime minister

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and now protocol officer, seemed the liveliest of all. He genuflected every time he was required to interpret for the dignitaries. Prince Sihanouk was waiting at the palace to greet them. His Royal Highness could not have been more ebullient. He embraced U Nu in a bear hug. The two had met at international gatherings here, there and everywhere in the world. The prince was an astute politician. He knew in what a desperate plight his Burmese guests had found themselves in Hong Kong and must have been chuckling when he read Dad’s cable breezily informing him that Prime Minister U Nu and his foreign minister were about to pass through the region (to where was not mentioned), and could they look in on him. ‘You are my friends,’ Sihanouk exclaimed. ‘I do not forsake friends. However, you must realise Ne Win is my friend too. In fact, if he had not cancelled his trip, he should have been here about now.’ At this, the prince went into an infectious fit of giggles. When Nu and Dad hastened to assure him that they wouldn’t dream of compromising his friendship with General Ne Win, he held up an admonitory finger. ‘Ah! But that’s not to say I approve of a general taking over the reins of government. Not at all!’ Then he turned pensive. ‘What do generals know of running a government?’ After a little pause, he added, ‘We have one here, as you may have realised.’ Less than six months later, in March 1970, General Lon Nol would stage the coup that brought in the Khmer Republic. U Nu was in seventh heaven amid the wonders of Angkor, so reminiscent of the wonders of Pagan, Burma’s eleventh-century archaeological equivalent. U Law-Yone was on cloud nine seated next to the renowned Eurasian beauty, Princess Monique, reputedly the prince’s favourite wife. Their programme was indeed full, and impeccably planned. They were taken to Sihanoukville for the inauguration of the new railway to the capital. They were entertained by the exquisite Royal Cambodian Ballet. Over multi-course dinners, they were entertained by the prince himself. But with their visit drawing to a close, they began to worry about their future in Thailand. The Thais were clearly not prepared to incur the displeasure of their Burmese neighbour, General

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Ne Win, and sooner or later would be pressured into withdrawing their offer of a safe haven for Nu and his followers. They left Phnom Penh on All Saints’ Day: Sunday, 1 November 1969. By the next afternoon Dad was in the Bangkok Nursing Home hospital. Unable to locate the thermostat in his bedroom in Sihanoukville, he had gone to sleep in freezing air-conditioned temperatures and had come down with pneumonia. No sooner was Dad discharged from hospital than it was time for a tour of the camps. The aim was to ally the government in exile with the many ethnic minorities of northern Burma. The long civil war in their homeland – perhaps the longest unbroken civil war of the twentieth century – had spawned an aggregation of disparate camps, strongholds and militant refuges along the borderlands of Burma, linked only by a common hatred of the central military government. Some of these camps now declared themselves for the PDP. Partly on mule-back and partly by shank’s mare, Dad made the 5,000-foot climb to the border where factions of the Kachin, Shan and Chinese armies occupied three separate spurs. The Kachins were members of the KIA (Kachin Independence Army), the largest and best-organised ethnic military force; the Shans were Jimmy Yang’s men, the SSA (Shan State Army), which controlled the opiumproducing Kokang State; and the Chinese were elements of the Chinese Third Army, the private army of the KMT General Lee Wenhuan. Dad thought it best to steer clear of this last camp, having railed against the KMT presence on Burmese territory for years in his Nation editorials. Down south there were more outposts to inspect, chief among them the strongholds of Bo Yan Naing and Bo Hmu Aung. These men, like Bo Let Ya, the PDP vice president, had distinguished themselves as the Thirty Comrades, the select army that had followed General Aung San to Japan in 1940 for secret military training aimed at bringing down British colonial rule. Later, having turned against the Japanese in the Second World War, they formed the core group of politicians who brokered independence in 1948. The cult of the

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Thirty Comrades was an enduring nationalist myth in Burma, so the fact that three of their most prominent members were now taking up arms against one of their number, Ne Win, was a powerful indictment of his rule.

Alban (far right), 1969

Bo Yan Naing’s camp near Sangkhla on the Little Kwai had an air of a Boy Scouts’ jamboree. Dad fished and hunted game (pheasant, woodcock and wild boar on the first day!) and at night he was entertained by a ‘mouth orchestra’ led by Yan Naing himself, a crooner of classical Burmese songs. Young soldiers dressed up as monks and dancing girls for their theatre piece, and passed the hat rather forcefully after their performance. U Nu would have been shocked by the spectacle of some of the camp followers – Buddhist monks fleeing the Ne Win regime – enacting the role of highway robbers. Nu could be something of a killjoy. He had charged Dad with translating a selection of Muslim and Christian oaths into Burmese, believing that at least the senior members of the PDP should swear

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according to their respective faiths to observe the Five Buddhist Precepts. These were: to abstain from killing, stealing, fornicating, lying and imbibing. Nu seemed especially concerned to enforce the fifth injunction, and brought the matter up in a direct confrontation with Dad. Would he not be willing to take the lead so that other members of the executive committee might follow? Dad said he would not. U Nu’s moral challenge struck the rest of the executive committee as droll. They refused outright. ‘You mustn’t take it hard,’ Dad said to a despondent Nu. ‘You have the Buddhist Scriptures on your side, but the Christians have their Bible to take a contrary view where the drinking of wine is concerned.’ He pointed out that wine was treated with respect but also drunk with relish by the followers of Christ. Indeed, during the celebration of Mass, the drinking of wine was a sacrament. U Nu remained unconvinced. The PDP had yet to come up with an actual plan to overthrow Ne Win, but no plan could be put into effect before winning the support and securing the protection of key members of their host government. General Praphas, the expansive strongman who had presented U Nu with the 800-year-old Buddha, was potentially their most powerful ally. But Nu hadn’t taken kindly to Praphas’s comments about his weakness as prime minister. So the next best thing was to cultivate his deputy, General Jat Javankun, whose job was to brief Praphas on what the Burmese ate and drank, the company they kept, the guns they bought and for how much, as well as what was happening at each of their rebel camps. Dad thought that as a trusted lieutenant of Praphas, Jat should be taken into their confidence. The PDP had nothing to lose and everything to gain by being transparent. He began by informing Jat that the leaders of two ethnic groups, the Karens and the Mons, had agreed to meet with the PDP for talks on joint action against Ne Win. The leaders in fact were on their way to Bangkok at that very moment from their jungle strongholds. The only snag was expenses.

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The PDP had been buying up carbines on the black market so fast that there was no money in the kitty. Mrs Nu’s jewels had been smuggled out of Burma in a briefcase handcuffed to the wrist of a sympathetic diplomat (in the manner of routine diplomatic pouch deliveries), but they had yet to be pawned. Tommy Clift had already lent Dad money for endless incidentals, so he was loath to ask for more. He could only appeal to Tommy to find him a place where the Karen and Mon delegations could be housed and fed for the duration of their conference. Tommy located a hotel not far from Nu’s residence – a ‘quick business’ joint with deplorable food. But by overfeeding their guests, the PDP hoped to make the Sawasdee Hotel seem a little less objectionable. As the conference drew near, the Thais seemed anxious that one other minority group be included – the Kachins. Zau Seng, the Kachin Independence Organisation leader, had made it clear that he wanted no part of the Burman-dominated PDP. Alone with Dad, he asked why on earth he, U Law-Yone, himself a Kachin, was wasting his time with Burmans instead of devoting his energy to his kinsmen’s cause. Zau Seng agreed in the end to attend the conference, but only as an observer. There was every reason to hope that the parties would reach an agreement. For one thing, the Thai government had made it clear to the Karens at least that they expected an entente with U Nu. The Karens, like the Mons – like half a dozen other ethnic minority armies – were ultimately refugees in Thailand, where their safe houses and rear camps were allowed to operate, but always at the whim of their hosts. This required compromise when compromise was expressly called for by the Thai authorities. As for the Mons, they were tired of being a junior partner in a coalition with the Karens and welcomed the chance for equality, which the PDP was offering – equality with the Karens, certainly, but with the Burmans too, for a change. The time was ripe, Dad believed, for an accord. The delegates were at best cautious, at worst hostile. General Bo Mya, the Karen military leader, was a formidable figure, with no time

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for small talk or politesse. Dad had hoped that the one Karen on the PDP executive committee, General Saw Kya Doe, might enjoy a certain rapport with General Bo Mya. But as far as Bo Mya was concerned, Saw Kya Doe was suspect not only because of his Sandhurst training, but also because he had lived too long among the Burman establishment. Consequently, he was to be trusted ‘only fifty per cent’. The other Karen leader, Mahn Ba Zan, had gone through militia training with the British and been commissioned into the infantry when the Japanese invaded Burma. Fluent in several languages, Mahn Ba Zan had ambitions to be prime minister of the Union of Burma or, alternatively, president of the Independent Republic of Kawthoolei, the Karen State. The most affable of the delegates was Nai Shwe Kyin, the Mon leader. There were several thousand Mons in Thailand – Air Chief Marshal Dawee himself claimed to be of Mon descent – but the great majority were poor and treated as second-class citizens. Nai Shwe Kyin kept a low profile, but he was the undisputed leader of the Mons on both sides of the border. A soft-spoken, deeply thoughtful man, he seemed to bear no visible ill will towards the Burmans. The delegates met informally a few times and then sat down to serious business on 23 May 1970. The Karens lost no time in injecting into the proceedings their age-old demands for self-determination. If they reached agreement at all, they stated, it must be on the basis that the Burmans had wronged them in the past and were prepared to accord them the right to secede in the future. U Nu did his best to allay their misgivings, and in the end gave both the Karens and the Mons most of what they wanted. He declared that all the constituent states of the Union of Burma would enjoy the Commonwealth status of the fifty states in the USA. Thus was born the NULF, the National United Liberation Front. The coalition was without precedent. Never before had Burmans from a Rangoon regime joined hands with Mon and Karen rebels to oppose a common enemy. The Working People’s Daily singled out ‘ex-newspaperman U Law-Yone’ as the chief agent provocateur, responsible ‘for concealing the truth and spreading false news on the

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sly’. As a result of Law-Yone’s lies, ‘Foreign countries openly began slandering the Revolutionary Government of Burma.’ In fact the way in which Dad was spreading news – whether true or false in the eyes of the Ne Win regime – was anything but on the sly. ‘A Rebel’s Proclamation’, written by him in U Nu’s name, was published in the 11 November 1970 issue of the New York Times: Mine has been likened to a Castro-type revolution. The parallel is both close and false. True, we have the same sort of enemy, the same number of guns arrayed against us. The difference is that we are not a band of expatriates or bandits seeking to set up a different kind of dictatorship. I am the legal government of Burma and my colleagues are men of outstanding calibre . . . We shall go in with guns and lead in the fight for a Constitution, a free Parliament and a loyal Opposition. The minority races are with us. They have the right to self-government and other states rights . . . Castro lost most of the original 80 in the first go against Batista’s troops. It is possible our leaders will be decimated before I give the call to the people to rise. General Ne Win is not too great a problem. Generals come and go. It is the people that make a nation and I have every reason to hope . . . that when we return the people shall be free.

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12 Golden Parasol

With the resistance on course, Dad shuttled back and forth between camps and safe houses. But every now and then he would drop in unannounced at our house on Soi Bahai. At the sound of the samlor (the three-wheeler taxi) putt-putting at our front gate while he climbed out with his carrier bags full of groceries, the twins and their older brother Gordon would rush out to greet Grandpa and relieve him of his edible treats. My father had a soft spot for my stepson Gordon – not only because he reminded him of his namesake and grandfather, the ‘Burma Surgeon’ who had saved Mum’s life during the war, but because the young Gordon was an uncritical fan of his cooking. The twins were more interested in Grandpa’s shoes. The minute he removed them at the front door, in keeping with local custom, they would grab one each and clip-clop their way across the cement porch, tripping and falling on their faces while Smee, our Airedale terrier, ran around yapping, ready to pounce on the first unoccupied leather loafer and run off with it. When Dad took over the kitchen it was best to stay away. First he turned on the gas flame and set a skillet on the burner. Then, while the skillet was heating, he would start opening cupboards in search of oil and other ingredients. By the time he found the oil, the skillet would be so overheated that the first splash would send up a great hissing volley of smoke, if not a burst of flames. Now, as the oil burned and blackened and the kitchen plumed with smoke, he would start washing the vegetables and setting them to

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drain. Then he would start to peel and chop the onions, the garlic and the ginger. After that he would seed the chillies. Last of all he would attack the chicken or pork or beef with the flat end of a Chinese chopper, whether the meat needed ‘tenderising’ or not. By now the kitchen would be filled with a choking, eye-stinging fog, and soon a fresh conflagration would add to the excitement when a handful of watery onions hit the pan with a roar, causing Dad to leap back, cursing and swatting the grease burns on his arms. Once, he was so busy darting about from sink to chopping block to stove that he failed to notice his audience. Our house gibbon had swung in through the open door of the kitchen and was crouched on the worktop. Even when he turned from the fire to chop up some mustard greens, Dad was oblivious to the ape observing him with something like professional interest. It was only when the gibbon decided to shift position with a sideways jump that Dad did a double take, brandishing the chopper in self-defence. The gibbon laid a neat pipeline of shit alongside the mustard greens before swinging out the door and into the trees, hooting like a police siren. Dad wanted us all at the table, ready and waiting to be served, preferably with mouths watering. Then, having scraped his piping concoctions onto our plates, he would hover over us like some grand vizier, scarcely allowing us to swallow the first bite before demanding, ‘Well? Is it good?’ Surprisingly, it was. Having fed us to his satisfaction, Dad would wolf down his portion with more urgency than appetite before sitting back like a man well pleased with his own small miracle of the loaves and fishes. Then he would grow distracted and start scribbling with his index finger on the arm of the chair, and I knew it was time for the twins to go and find Grandpa’s shoes. From the organisational standpoint, things were falling into place for the PDP. What was needed now was money. And with a sudden flurry of cables came the prospect of some. The first cable was from Ahmad Kamal, the shadowy middleman they had met at the Balboa Bay Club and thought they’d seen the last of.

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Kamal was requesting a $10,000 advance for a feasibility study which he and a colleague would carry out in Thailand with a view to funding the PDP. In reply Dad pointed out that if they had $10,000, they would not have had recourse to him in the first instance. Another cable came from a Canadian by the name of Norman Birks, who expressed wholehearted support for the Burmese government in exile. He too wished to come to Thailand with a colleague – a ‘military expert’ in his case. He said he knew the PDP had very little money. He did not need much: just two plane tickets to allow him and his consultant to come out and study the potential – perhaps help raise funds or divert military hardware from other trouble spots of the world to which they had access. The cost of two plane tickets for potential investors seemed negligible in the scheme of things, so U Nu okayed their purchase. In due course, it wasn’t Birks but a sombre Colonel Reynolds (the ‘military expert’) who rang Dad from the Siam Intercontinental Hotel. Birks, it seemed, had brought out a pistol from his briefcase on the plane, then twirled it around his finger playfully upon landing. He had been taken into custody at immigration, where he let drop that he was working for the Burmese government in exile. Dad ran across heavy traffic to General Jat’s office in the Criminal Investigation Department building not far from the hotel. ‘You think you’re a very clever chap, eh?’ Jat mocked him. ‘You didn’t tell us anything about your friend, but the stewardess did, and the captain of the aircraft did, and now we’ve got him in stir.’ Unmoved by his dilemma, Jat laughed and said he was on his own. The next call came from a lawyer with the firm of Tilleke & Gibbins representing Mr Birks at the instance of his parents in Canada. Dad agreed in the end to pay the fine to get Birks out of the clink – a nominal fee, thanks to a lenient court. This left him with further taunts from Jat, who wanted to know what plans he might have for his Canadian cowboy now. A spin around the nightclub circuit, maybe? ‘Put the young twerp on the next plane to Canada,’ was Dad’s weary response. But now came a real break: a call from Hong Kong. It was ‘YH’

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Kwong, loyal friend and generous donor, whose seed money of $10,000 had gone a long way to building the PDP treasury. Kwong was sending him an oil millionaire by the name of Tom Brook – another Canadian, as it happened. What Brook had to say was short and sweet. Would it be all right if he wrote out a cheque for $100,000 as a donation to the PDP? U Nu’s response was not quite what the Canadian was expecting. Nu said he would prefer an advance on oil royalties to a gift or donation at this stage. He said he was prepared to consider a business proposition for the exploration of oil in Burma, on a 60–40 basis (with the Burmese government getting the lion’s share). This took things to another level, and rather more quickly than Brook had anticipated. His firm, Asamera Oil Corporation Ltd, had substantial oil interests in Indonesia, he explained, but it was a small firm. To be able to come up with an initial sum for the kind of agreement Nu was proposing, he would have to consult with some larger oil companies. Months of waiting followed. Meanwhile, money was scarce and some of the PDP outposts did not know where their next meal was coming from. Caught in this limbo, Dad decided the time had come to move the family (Mum, Dad, Alban and Jo Jo) to America, where Marlaine and her family were already living. It was while he was in Pennsylvania getting them situated that the Tom Brook contract came through, with the 60–40 split clause intact. The ‘contractor’ in the two-part agreement was a new oil company called Ocean Resources Ltd. According to the terms of the agreement, U Nu as the ‘Constitutional Government of Burma’, exercised his authority to grant ‘subsoil rights for the exploration, development, extraction, production, transportation and marketing of crude oil, natural gas and other hydrocarbons’ which might be found in certain areas in Burma, specifically offshore Burma. The country’s entire coastline would be divided into two, with Ocean Resources getting first pick of which half they wished to explore. Of paramount interest to the PDP was clause ‘M’: ‘Upon execution of this contract, the Contractor shall pay a signature bonus of US

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$2,000,000 to the Government. An additional US $2,000,000 shall be paid to the Government when the Government, on national soil, demonstrates to the satisfaction of the Contractor that this contract has the full force and effect of law in Burma.’ The $2 million was duly laundered through a Swiss bank and deposited in the Bangkok Bank, an institution conveniently owned by General Praphas and plush with foreign reserves. This meant that the PDP could draw as much in foreign currency as needed. Three people were authorised to sign cheques: U Nu, Tommy Clift and Dad. An executive committee meeting was called to discuss how the $2 million should be spent. But by then the funds in question no longer amounted to $2 million, for Dad had already given 10 per cent of it to the Karens. He explained that the Karens wanted a certain number of guns. Also, they were not content with carbines, they wanted M-16s. All of that cost money – about $200,000 by mutual reckoning. Another $100,000 had gone to the Mons, and some $250,000 towards the purchase of weapons of all description. Dad had to make out a better case when it came to the Shans. Though not yet part of their coalition, the Shans had to be taken into consideration too, and some funds earmarked for them. One of the PDP’s own generals, Jimmy Yang, was a Shan. Jimmy was a scion of the House of Kokang, the opium-producing state, a retired banker and now commander of a troop that could be the nucleus of a disciplined battalion. The committee members were nonplussed. Trying to smooth things over, Jimmy Yang offered a concrete proposal for the remaining funds. Gold, he said, was what they should buy before anything else. The price of gold in Europe was then $34–36 per troy ounce. Jimmy reached into his pocket and produced a few coins, each the size of a shirt button. Produced from gold bars bought in Hong Kong, reduced to strips and pressed with dies, they were legal tender in his state of Kokang. All right, the minting was crude, and the coins, it had to be said, were quite ugly. But they were uniform in weight and that was what mattered most. Since this idea appealed to everyone on the committee, Dad and

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Brian Marcar went in search of a Thai artist and engraver who could come up with a design for a two-gram gold coin imprinted with the effigy of a peacock, the Burmese national bird, on one side, and U Nu’s signature on the other. It was then decided to have the coins minted in Europe. Delegated to carry out this mission was none other than Ahmad Kamal, who was back in the good graces of the PDP, having come forward to take credit for the Ocean Reserves deal. He claimed to have interested the principals in the Burmese cause on his own. This led to some confusion when YH Kwong, who had put Dad in touch with Tom Brook of Asamera, the forerunner of Ocean Resources, arrived in Bangkok for a visit and was introduced to Kamal. No one seemed to know in whose direction they should kowtow in thanks. It was Kamal, in any event, who went to West Germany to mint the small gold coins to PDP specifications. This accomplished, they now had some $200,000 worth of specie, which they called mu-si. They were works of art, these little mu-si, and Dad was stingy with them, spending no more than sixty in total – nearly all of which went to Thai generals as gifts (Mrs Nu’s jewellery and Mum’s Burmese silver having long since been appropriated for such purposes). Jat was curious about the source of the $2 million. But when Dad, with Nu’s consent, told him the truth, Jat rolled his eyes as if to say, ‘Yes, yes, that was the story you told to the marines, but where did the money actually come from?’ General Jat was not alone in wondering about the infusion of PDP funds. Speculation was rife in the local press as to who the benefactors might be. The Mafia was mentioned. And the CIA, naturally. Even General Zau Seng, the Kachin leader, questioned Dad closely about Kamal’s bona fides. Was he not an agent of some international ring? Dad said he knew of no such connection. The truth was that none of these rumours was hurting the rebels’ reputation. If anything, it was adding to their cachet. By now the demand from the camps for guns and explosives was persistent – and the supply was there to meet them. When TNT or

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gelignite was needed, one had only to put out the word and soon a truckload would appear. In the beginning, when the men were buying rifles at the Laotian border, all the gunrunners were women, and they delivered the weapons in unassembled segments. This meant having to recruit armourers in haste. Always there were more barrels than stocks, so carpenters had to be impressed into service as well. As a result, there was a constant stream of Mercedes-Benz and BMWs disgorging money-changers, gunrunners and armourers on their doorstep. One day a special force of commando-type police raided the main PDP headquarters on Soi 55. They found carbines, sub-machine guns, grenades and an impressive stockpile of ammunition. When Dad arrived on the scene, he was barred from entering his own premises. He sent an SOS for Brian Marcar, and together they tried – without success – to raise a blockade. Brian was told the raiders expected a very substantial reward for their discovery of the largest cache of firearms in the heart of the city. Again they ran to General Jat, who already knew what was up and couldn’t help chortling at their discomfiture. ‘Go to General Pisak,’ he said. ‘He’ll tell you what to do.’ General Pisak was not laughing, nor could he tell them what to do, because he was in awe of the lieutenant-general who commanded the Special Force that carried out the raid. The fact of the matter was that although Jat was the key man in the Ministry of the Interior, there were a number of lieutenant generals who outranked him and held special fiefdoms – such as Crime Suppression, or Communist Suppression, or Border Police, or just deputy director of one or other department. These honchos were a law unto themselves. In despair Dad phoned Colonel Prasong Soonsiri of the prime minister’s National Security Council, another senior official who had been charged with keeping a constant eye on the Burmese. The PDP man appointed as liaison with Prasong was Zali Maw, son of Dr Ba Maw, first prime minister of independent Burma. Zali, a product of Cambridge and Yale, was a barrister with a quiet, unflappable demeanour. He had left Burma to join the resistance in Thailand with

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his brother-in-law, Bo Yan Naing, while Dad and Nu were still in prison, and actually spoke Thai, unlike the rest of the PDP. Prasong said he would see what he could do and left them to twist in the wind. That night the telephone rang. Colonel Prasong was sounding the all-clear! They had been let off the hook – but not for long. Air Chief Marshal Dawee, Tommy’s friend, decided to clamp down on the PDP’s shenanigans by appointing a committee of four generals to supervise the storage and transport of all war materiel commandeered by the Burmese. Yet another safe house was designated to which the materiel had to be transported before distribution to the various camps. This arrangement was unnecessarily time-consuming in Dad’s view. He sounded Jat out on the consequences of cutting corners. Jat’s response was ambiguous. He had made it clear that he was no fan of Dawee, from which Dad inferred that were they to land in hot water, he could count on Jat’s support. Thereafter, if the Mons or Karens, or Yan Naing at the Little Kwai camp, needed a supply of arms quickly, Brian Marcar arranged dispatch, and the only Thai official directly involved was Sergeant Boonmat, the young ADC assigned to Dad by General Jat. When this practice came to light, as sooner or later it was bound to, it was Tommy Clift who conveyed Dawee’s wrath. Red-faced, he upbraided Dad at an executive meeting. Dawee, said Tommy, had had quite enough of him and was planning to deport him to Hong Kong. Dad corrected him on the spot. Dawee, he pointed out, could have him arrested or deported to Burma. But he couldn’t deport him to Hong Kong. U Nu kept his counsel, but it was no secret that he too had been increasingly alarmed by the way Dad was running things. He had rented a house on Soi 55 to serve as party headquarters-cum-youth hostel. He’d had a phone line installed, stationery printed, beds and mattresses moved in, and the kitchen equipped like a mess hall. He had bought himself a state-of-the-art photocopier to turn out propaganda – never mind that he didn’t have the first idea how to operate it. He was writing Letters to the Editor under his own name, and

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granting interviews to all and sundry. At the same time he was carping about how little everyone else was doing. ‘What do you do?’ U Nu challenged him one day. ‘I honestly don’t know what you do. Are you doing anything? If so, what?’ Dad replied coldly that he was keeping house. He was making the beds at Soi 55. He was doing the laundry, sweeping and scrubbing and cooking for the troops. Nu looked away, exasperated. That was not what he meant, and Dad knew it. He meant the steady stream of callers that were passing through the place – Thai as well as foreign correspondents, diplomats and beachcombers, arms dealers of low and high station. Had the secretary general appointed himself treasurer as well as chief of psychological warfare? Dad replied that someone had to be thinking about some aspect of warfare. The other PDP leaders were having their own problems with the splenetic secretary general. They had all received the rough side of his tongue and were fed up with his overbearing ways. Even longsuffering Bo Let Ya complained that ‘Bo Law of late has become impossible. We can scarcely get a word in edgewise. If we start to say something he finishes the sentence for us. He knows everything and has all the answers. It is not possible for one man to know everything. Others too have lived and learned.’ In the midst of all this bickering, one of the men on the wireless detail grew careless and nearly wiped out the government in exile. With the help of Harry Farmer, an irascible US Army tech sergeant (retired), the PDP had been operating a 1-kilowatt Drake transmitter, obsolescent in design but fitted with a booster powerful enough to reach audiences all over Burma. General Jat never enquired how the transmitting equipment was brought into Thailand, but the thought of Ne Win’s direction-finders locating the rebels so close to the metropolis made him nervous. ‘Take your toy transmitter to the Burma side of the border,’ he kept saying, ‘or I won’t be responsible for what happens to you.’ The equipment had since been moved to one of the Karen camps. Now it was time to dispatch their second transmitter – along with the trained staff – to one of Bo Yan Naing’s camps. The executive

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committee was headed for a tour of the camps, anyway, so it decided to combine the two missions. On their way to the first camp, Bo Mya’s headquarters, the PDP leaders suddenly hit a stretch of road that obliged them to abandon their pickup truck. To let the camp know that they would be coming by elephant instead, the party signalled its approach through one of the handsets used for small-radius communication. But as luck would have it, the wireless operator had fallen asleep, literally, on the job, and to make up for time lost the idler took it upon himself to send a message to the Karen camp. All but one of the riding elephants had been sent away, and the party was trekking its way through jungle, when scouts brought the news that their message had been picked up not only by Bo Mya, but by Ne Win’s listening posts as well. Now two companies of Burma Army troops were converging directly on the camp. In the end it was decided that Dad, Mahn Ba Zan, the Karen president, and Nai Shwe Kyin, the Mon leader, would make a dash upstream and run the gauntlet. Zali Maw and Saw Kya Doe, the PDP’s Karen representative, would canoe down the bend of the river and walk overland towards Mae Sariang. Bo Let Ya would stay to help defend Bo Mya’s camp. Twice Dad and his party were within a mile of the waiting Burmese troops. The river was only about six feet deep, but with so many twists and turns in its course, any concentrated fire from the Burmese side would have been impossible to escape. Twice, friendly Karens from the Thai side of the border signalled them just in time. Then it was out of the river and into the tall grass, for a foot slog up into the hills. Mile after mile of steady climbing brought them to a Thai police outpost, where they were recognised by the Border Police officials. There was no question now of proceeding upriver – or downriver, come to that. The police didn’t want to be involved in any exchange of fire between Burmese rebels and the Burmese Army. What were they meant to do, then? the rebels enquired. Well, they were free to turn round and head directly for – here the Thais pointed to the steepest, most uninviting hills in the region.

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The situation was dire. Largesse was called for. Many rounds of Singha beer and many plates of fried chicken with sticky rice later, the Burmese rebels succeeded in getting away in a hired boat, fullspeed in the direction of Bangkok. At Wanghka, within sight of the Burmese town of Myawaddy, three exhausted PDP leaders were met by their troops. Zali Maw and Kya Doe, meanwhile, had had their share of narrow scrapes. Worse, their escape route had been devoid of human habitation altogether, so they had had to eat berries! To complete the debacle, it turned out that they needn’t have run at all. The Karens had proved more than a match for Ne Win’s troops. As the two Burma Army companies made ready to wade across the narrow Thaungyin River, disguised in Thai coolie garb, the Karens had opened fire. When the government forces retreated, the Karens followed and ambushed them at two points on Burmese territory. Such escapades did little to reduce the tension between Dad and his fellow revolutionaries. He kept urging them to produce a plan for the invasion of Burma, reminding U Nu over and over again that they were on borrowed time; that Praphas knew how to read a balance sheet, and he was unlikely to feel so kindly disposed towards them when month after month showed ledger entries exclusively on the debit side. Nobody, it seemed to him, was taking the concept of war in its literal sense. Whenever machine guns, mortars and hand grenades were mentioned, Captain Moe Gyaw’s eyes widened. ‘You mean you’re actually going to fight?’ Once, when Dad was speaking of plans for an eventual invasion of Rangoon, U Nu said, ‘Now, wait a minute, Bo Law. Wait a minute. Once we have Ne Win surrounded, we’re not actually going to kill him, are we?’ ‘Oh, we certainly are,’ Dad replied. ‘The son of a bitch is the first one we’ll kill.’ It was not going to be easy – no one thought it was. With the kind of cast-off weapons they were buying on the black market, there was no hope in the near future of meeting Ne Win’s regular army in open combat and living to tell the tale. It would have to be hit and run for

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a period; then, as their men got bolder and hardier in the jungle, sustained guerrilla warfare. Yes, they were rebels with little in the way of money or support; but the enemy was not without weakness. Ne Win was a dictator who had made many mistakes and seemed bent on making more. If they, the only organised opposition to his regime, had the good sense to stick together and attract more dissidents to come under their flag – maintaining in the meantime a bold front before the Thais – there was no reason why they couldn’t succeed.

Dad (centre) with Karen, Mon & Chin guerrilla leaders at Pattaya Beach, 1970

That these views were not shared by the rest of the PDP leadership was becoming clearer by the day, and Dad’s fuse grew ever shorter. So long as the alliance deliberated and dithered; so long as they shied away from the all-or-nothing approach to risk, their bold proclamations would remain without teeth. Thay myegyi; ma thay shwe hti, went the old saying. Die, and it’s the vile earth; live, and it’s the golden parasol. Why not aim for the golden pinnacle of glory with everything they had? The grave would be theirs soon enough anyway.

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That do-or-die exhortation was thought to have come from Prince Pagan, the crown prince of Burma during the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852. But Nu seemed these days to be heeding another age-old admonition: Ah-ma-tan, man shaw (If your strength be unequal, reduce your passion). ‘Please write and let me know what the old man is doing,’ my brother Byron wrote to me from London. ‘What about all those characters with World War I guns with stupid grins in the photos he’s sent me? Does he have a chance? If so how much? I wish I knew more and could be of some help. He tells me nothing and every time he’s here and I ask him he has a distant look, snaps back to the present, and says, “Son, go buy some theatre tickets – something really good.” On a Sunday, when there are no theatres.’ It was early 1971, and the family was scattered. Hubert was still in Israel, now married, with two daughters, still teaching architecture at the Technion in Haifa. Byron was in England for psychiatric training. Mum, Alban and Jo Jo were with Marlaine and her family in America. Sterling and I were the last to leave Thailand. Sterling was working as an editor for the Bangkok World, one of the two principal Englishlanguage dailies in Thailand, but the pay was poor and he was ready for a change, so when he was offered a job with an advertising agency in Singapore, we took off without hesitation. In Singapore it wasn’t long before I heard from Dad. ‘Our men have started to go into Burma,’ he wrote, ‘and there has been some initial success. If they keep up the pressure they should be capable of deep penetration by June 1971. Thereafter it will be Rangoon or bust.’ But the rest of the family was still in the dark about his plans. Mum had heard rumours that he was returning to the States. But – ‘We are playing the usual game of waiting – cable? – telephone call? – letter? What an inscrutable man, your father . . .’ Then at last: ‘We await The Arrival,’ Marlaine wrote. ‘Mummy has declared the coming on the basis of a four-line postcard in which Himself declared she meant more to him than Burma. End of revolution? Who knows . . . Mummy read recently in the Harrisburg papers

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(she’s the only one who reads anything these days) that there was a case of cannibalism in a Thai village recently. I suggested that she sent him (Daddy) a postcard saying, “Come home before you appear on Thai Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn’s table with an apple stuffed in your mouth.”’ Dad now wrote to let me know he was back in the States, and why. ‘After several false starts I’ve managed to get away at last. The last months in Bangkok have been trying and I had a few slanging matches with U Nu. In retrospect, though, U Nu has been more sinned against than sinning, and I do hope he will make out all right.’ The slanging matches were not just with Nu. Tommy Clift had railed at Dad for flouting Dawee’s rules about arms shipments. Dad in turn berated Tommy for engaging in secret diplomacy with Ne Win. When Dad took his complaint to Nu, however, Nu disclosed that he was behind Tommy’s efforts to explore a ‘Peace through Negotiation’ agreement with Ne Win. Dad was aghast at this admission of defeat. It was true that thus far their successes on the military front had been meagre. Their troops had ambushed a Burma Army column here and there in the Tenasserim region, derailed a train on the Moulmein–Ye railway, and launched grenade attacks in parts of Upper, Central and Lower Burma. These were hardly mortal blows to the Rangoon government, and Ne Win was very far from turning heel. But one could see – from the shrillness of his state-run newspapers, if nothing else – that Ne Win was jittery. In any event, the serious assaults on his nerve centres of government hadn’t even begun. Meanwhile, support for the movement was growing on other fronts. U Nu had received missions led by both Buddhist and Muslim groups in Arakan, ready and eager to join in an uprising. Bill Young, former CIA agent, organiser of the US ‘secret war’ in Laos and hill-tribe specialist with half a dozen ethnic minority armies at his beck and call, had been recruited and placed under Jimmy Yang’s Northern Command. Even the Kachins, who still insisted on fighting separately against the common enemy, were willing to make two concessions: individual Kachins could join the alliance in a grand assault upon Rangoon if they wished; and

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for propaganda purposes, the alliance could claim the Kachin Independence Army as an ally, even though it wasn’t. The momentum for armed revolt was still there, in Dad’s view; it was hardly the time for peace talks. But after he had vented his spleen he suddenly saw his mistake: it wasn’t Tommy who was misguided. If Tommy was in line with the aims of U Nu, the party chief, then he hadn’t broken faith with the PDP at all. It was he, Ed, who had broken faith by disagreeing with Nu. He went to each member of the committee to explain his reasons for resigning. Nobody tried to prevent or dissuade him except Bo Let Ya, who argued on grounds of personal friendship, and when that didn’t work, pointed out that Dad’s going would weaken the United Front considerably, as well as provide powerful ammunition to the enemy. Nu himself did not try to hide his relief that Dad was quitting. Only Mrs Nu seemed genuinely bewildered that the person who had engineered the movement should now abandon it. ‘You brought us out here,’ she reproached him. The decision to leave was not half as difficult as actually getting away. There were so many loose ends that only he could tie up. He had paved the way for U Nu’s entry into Thailand; now he must pave the way for U Nu’s exit. Then there was the matter of the PDP’s future. Dad deemed it crucial for General Praphas, as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, to recognise the new order of precedence within the PDP. Officiously, he set up a meeting between Praphas and Nu, and urged Nu to present Bo Let Ya as his second-in-command. He ironed his best suit for the occasion, for Let Ya to wear to the interview. But when he went to check up on the result of the meeting, his suit, unworn, was still hanging in the closet. U Nu had gone off to confer with the Thai general accompanied only by his son. ‘Why wasn’t Let Ya allowed to go with you?’ Dad demanded, after Nu’s reports of how well the meeting had gone. Nu gave him a cold stare. ‘Did he wish to be present?’ he asked. ‘If he did, I don’t believe I was made aware of it.’

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U Nu couldn’t hide his impatience for Dad to leave. Nor could Air Chief Marshal Dawee, according to Tommy. The Burmese government had complained to him of the ‘open diplomacy’ that Dad had been conducting from Thailand. The English-language Bangkok Post confirmed the general feeling that it was high time U Law-Yone left. GOVT TO LAUNCH NEW HUNT FOR U NU The Government will expel former Burmese Prime Minister and his colleagues if a new investigation to be launched soon finds he is still in Thailand . . . The Burmese Government have frequently claimed that U Nu has been using Thailand as a base in his efforts to overthrow the present Burmese Government. Although the exiled Prime Minister and his secretary U Law Yone called on the Prime Minister to bid farewell before leaving for Laos last year, the National Security Council felt it was necessary to discover if he re-entered the country by a clandestine route. Yan Naing was the first to come pounding on Dad’s door. What exactly was the trouble between Nu and him? Dad explained that U Nu was the Parliamentary Democracy Party. Nobody could disagree with him and remain an official of that party. He had disagreed with Nu on fundamental issues and was therefore resigning. But his leaving would have two salutary effects: it would serve as a warning to U Nu that others in the executive committee might follow his example; and it would act as a catharsis to those colleagues who were frustrated and helpless, and needed a shake-up, a change. ‘In that case, don’t go,’ Yan Naing pleaded. ‘I will also resign, and you can come live with me. Don’t laugh. I am serious. You come to my camp and I will provide for you. I will turn myself into a highwayman and rob and kill for you.’ Yan Naing was a rare spirit. He had come out to Thailand ahead of them all, leaving behind his wife and a child he had never set eyes on. Dad remembered the visit he’d paid to his father-in-law, Dr Ba Maw, to say goodbye to the old man before taking off for Thailand. Ba Maw saw Dad to the car where his daughter Tinsa, Yan Naing’s wife, had positioned herself.

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‘In twenty-four hours I’ll be with your husband,’ Dad told her. ‘What should I tell him?’ ‘Tell him this,’ she said, and held up her baby. One last attempt to prevent Dad’s departure came from Bo Let Ya, who sent a cable on 12 April 1971. DUE NE WIN’S LATEST CONDITION REQUEST POSTPONE YOUR DEPARTURE ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN ANY MOMENT. EMERGENCY MEETING ESSENTIAL. The Thai press had reported that Ne Win, after a medical check-up in Britain, had suffered a heart attack in India and was being flown back to London. For a period of a week, this led to premature euphoria on the part of Burmese exiles in Thailand, if not the world over. Ne Win had originally entered King Edward VII Hospital in London to be treated for gastric ulcers. Then he was admitted to hospital in New Delhi with haemorrhaging ulcers. Now gloom descended once again on the community of ill-wishers when the specialists in London found no cause for alarm. The ulcers may have been merely aggravated by ‘a spicy curry’. Dad was willing to wager that more than a spicy curry was behind the bleeding ulcers. The past eighteen months had seen some measurable successes for the PDP. They had declared war, gone on the offensive and still held the initiative. Ne Win might not be overly concerned about the threat of shock action on the part of the rebels. But their barrage of broadcast messages had been annoying enough to warrant jamming with a 50-kilowatt transmitter. It was tempting to think that as the people’s expectations of an invasion rose, so too did Ne Win’s fears. But for the time being, it didn’t look as if Ne Win was going to be carried off by natural causes. The one person Dad failed to see before leaving Thailand was Bo Mya, the Karen general. Bo Mya was known to be a man of few words and even fewer letters. But one of his letters would reach Dad in America.

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19/7/71 U Law-Yone, I have not seen you for a long time. I have been thinking of you and wondering what’s up. We heard you left the PDP but don’t know all the details. Aren’t you ever coming back our way? All of us, the President and our party leaders, think often of you. We understand you have left for America, and hope that you won’t forget us. Most of all we urge you not to forget the aims of our revolution. There is no reason to be disheartened. The just will prevail in the end, and the enemies of the just are bound to fall. Anyway, wherever you find yourself, please write to us. May you and your family enjoy peace and health. Just cause MUST triumph. Bo Mya

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13 Alban

‘Now that he is here, my troubles are over and I sleep better for it,’ Mum wrote of Dad’s homecoming. ‘He keeps himself busy writing, reading and mowing the lawn. So far so good, and I count my blessings . . .’ Dad was putting up a good front, but his troubles were far from over. Within a week of his return, an avalanche of letters from Bangkok had rained down on Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, where Marlaine was now running the family homestead. The letters – from the second echelon of younger, more idealistic men he had left behind – were full of anger, hurt, but mainly bewilderment. He had raised their hopes, then dashed them to the ground, leaving them stranded. What were they supposed to do now? From some of the further outposts of rebel territory came desperate demands for money, and pleas to airlift them out of Thailand. After six months in Singapore, Sterling had moved to the agency’s Malaysia office, so I was in Kuala Lumpur when Dad came clean about the family’s finances. ‘The real reason for my leaving,’ he wrote, ‘was that we had lost what little money we had due to a fellow called Hoffman running away with Real Estate of America funds. This left Mummy destitute and I had to come home to find gainful employment. It was a little unfair on Nu. He didn’t know why I was getting progressively more evil-tempered with the passage of each day, but the fact of the matter was that if I hadn’t quit in time there would have been a boxing match in Rajdamnern Arena.’ This was news to me. I had assumed, especially after the $2 million

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deal, that there was enough for a while to keep things going for the PDP, and as for the family’s expenses in the States, wasn’t everyone living under one roof and pooling their resources? Mum, ever frugal, would bend over backwards to avoid being a liability; Jo Jo would get a scholarship to college, as Hubert and Marlaine had done, and Alban would find a job, surely. But now Dad was seriously concerned about money. For as long as I could remember, he had always made money seem like a renewable resource, a commodity he could always lay his hands on. He lived by the Burmese saying for ‘the Lord will provide’: When the future comes, we will pay the future price. Now, thanks to a failed investment, the future had caught up with him. The Real Estate Fund of America was one of the earliest offshore international banking scams, a Bermuda company set up by Jerome Hoffman. The Fund crashed in December 1970, leaving a debt of some £4,000,000 to its investors. Hoffman served a two-year jail sentence before skipping the United States, but if restitution was made to any of the victims of his fraud, my father was not among them. ‘It seems I got back just in time,’ his letter continued, ‘because I learnt while still on the West Coast that Jo Jo’s College fees had not been paid. Jim Hamilton [one of his old OSS friends] soon took care of that, so we are all right for the present . . . I don’t know what I’ll do – for the moment I am cooking ngapi [fermented fish] dishes, to Marlaine’s evident distaste. Next week I’ll go down to Washington and perhaps something worthwhile will turn up. The employment situation here is discouraging and you’re lucky to be where you are . . .’ I was shocked by the rare admission of vulnerability, and by the thought that our father might actually have to find a job. But the old instinct to stay on the sunny side of the street prevailed. ‘We are singularly blessed to be in a backwater and are thus spared the agony of survival, say, in a place like New York with its muggings, power failures and whatnot,’ he wrote. Backwaters could pall very quickly, however. ‘We don’t meet anyone and don’t entertain save once a month when a scholar happens by . . . I go to the post office (there is no mail delivery in this place, which

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is like Sawbwagyigone [a town in Kachin State]) and I get accosted by people whose farthest interests are the Lions Club of Mechanicsburg . . .’ And there was another disturbing development. His children were actually trying to pursue the American Dream. ‘The Tin Nyos [Marlaine’s family] are clawing and fighting their way, and making heavy weather of it,’ he wrote. ‘They seem to forget that we are only in temporary exile . . . Burma is where we belong and where you [all] will eventually put down your roots.’ I was reminded of a letter he had sent me from jail, shortly after I arrived in America, in which he warned me of the shallow seductions of the West, ‘peopled either by cynics or hedonists’. ‘Old squares like Mummy and me,’ he concluded, ‘are best off in a country like Burma . . . Like a good old tawtha [country bumpkin] I wouldn’t change my present lot for any lot on earth.’ At the time I took such statements to be sops for the censors, but I understood their sincerity now. Mum, I knew, had her own qualms about life in America. Like Dad, she had been born in Burma, had grown up in Burma, and never expected to end up anywhere else. But once the decision to leave home was made, America was her logical destination, her ultimate haven. America was where most of her friends outside Burma were living, where her two oldest children had gone to university, and where her youngest, Jo Jo, would soon follow in their wake. America was where her husband had close friends and contacts from his war days. In America, of course, she would have to depend on her children. And because they, like everybody in America, kept moving all the time, she too would have to keep moving – from house to house, state to state. But in this she was well practised: she had married a man who never stopped moving. The comedown in her social life produced a wistful tone at times. ‘Guess what,’ she wrote. ‘The D’Alboras called from Cocoa, Florida and invited Daddy and me for Christmas for a cruise on their private yacht. We declined graciously, of course. If they only knew how we would have loved to have accepted. I think it is time we started to tell

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Living in America (watched over by Flex), 1976

our old friends that the days of travelling around in luxury liners are over and the Greyhound is about as close as we can get to elegant travel in the States.’ Dad, meanwhile, continued to observe the American scene from on high. ‘It has suddenly become fashionable here to be a Chinese expert. Of course no one is a Chinese expert – not even the Chinese – but it seems the fate of the nation – certainly Richard Nixon’s chances of re-election – depends upon Peking . . . No one is the least bit interested in Burma.’

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Mum’s observations remained close to the ground: ‘This new house is snug and warm and, although small, can fit a lot of people in . . . Thank God for sleeping bags and a basement.’ ‘Life is very monotonous!’ came the more forthright report from Marlaine. ‘And dull!! I spend the whole weekend taking out and taking in plates from the dining table to the kitchen. Had a nervous breakdown yesterday. My style. Screamed and yelled that I’m fed up of the Eating & Eating & Eating that goes on in the house. Didn’t mean the food consumption – I meant the whole bloody boring ritual – but I wish I hadn’t said it . . . I am obsessed with money problems. Typical American housewife syndrome . . .’ Marlaine had been stuck with housing the parents (as well as putting up Alban and Jo Jo for intermittent stretches), and she was sorely in need of relief. ‘We’re like coal miners in some “angry” British movie – eating and sleeping without ceremony and brushing our teeth over a communal sink every morning before rushing off to the sweat factory!’ Fortunately, help was on the way. Byron was leaving his fledgling medical practice in England partly for a better paid job in the States, but mainly in order to be closer to the parents. It was now his turn to take charge. ‘I warned Byron,’ Mum wrote to me while he was still in the UK deliberating over the move, ‘that the US is certainly not a land of bread and honey, and living in this part of the world will not be a bed of roses.’ He would soon find out what those mixed metaphors meant. He and his wife Mimi had just settled into their new home in North Carolina, when Mum and Dad moved in with them. Mimi had been a childhood friend in Burma, had grown up a member of our extended family, so she had some idea of what she was in for. Nevertheless, before long she was tearing her hair out over the selfsame annoyances that had driven Marlaine spare. Dad was monopolising the kitchen, making a big mess and stinking up the house with his pungent dishes. He was ruining one Teflon frying pan after another because of his aversion to rubber spatulas. This left Mum scurrying around trying

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to clean up and cover up after him, irritating Dad as well as adding to the general tension by instilling guilt. Then there was Alban to deal with: preoccupied, unoccupied, unfathomable Alban. ‘Do you think,’ my mother would ask me from time to time, ‘that something happened while you two were in jail?’ She was trying to find out whether any of Alban’s problems might have stemmed from our arrest in 1967, and the detention at MIS headquarters. I always answered honestly that I didn’t think so. No sooner had I left Burma than I could hear her sighs. ‘He is still an enigma to me,’ she wrote. ‘He looks so indifferent to life around him . . . I look forward to the day when I find him brought back to reality with a home and a wife and a sense of security which these combined should bring about.’ When we were finally all together in Bangkok, however, Alban seemed happier than I’d seen him in a long time. It was a buoyant moment in all our lives. Dad was in the first flush of his revolutionary activities; Mum was briskly setting up house in a new country, seeing to the needs of her husband, children and grandchildren. Marlaine and Ko Tin Nyo were finally on their way to real jobs in America. Byron was headed for his postgraduate medical studies in England. Ever-sociable Jo Jo was making the most of her new high school in Bangkok. Alban soon moved in with Sterling and me. In Sterling he found a kindred spirit. ‘You are the only brother,’ he had written while languishing in Burma, ‘who didn’t think me a complete idiot and therefore I have grown quite attached to you.’ Sailing was their shared passion. ‘I’ve designed a yacht and a schooner,’ he enthused in another letter, ‘and with good luck I’ll build it out of padauk teak the same used by the guy who went around the world recently.’ (He meant Francis Chichester.) Sketches of ‘the boat of my dreams’ followed, with reflections on stability versus speed, safety versus style. His own creation would be ‘strong as a sperm whale and fast as a shark’. Then came a practical postscript: ‘I suppose it is easy to sail around if you

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have friends. If you don’t what I would like to mention last is, some guns. In south-east Asian waters, definitely some guns.’ For all his talk of guns, however, my brother showed no inclination to take up arms for Dad’s cause. He did accompany Dad on a tour of one of the PDP camps in Karen territory, and I have a photograph of him clutching an AK-47 with a sheepish scowl on his face. Maybe he felt that Dad neither expected nor wanted his involvement. Maybe he was hurt not to be asked. Whatever his reasons, he steered clear of the military end of things, contributing instead his artistic skills – by forging Burmese government stamps for the rebels’ travel papers, for instance. He preferred to spend his days horsing around with Gordon and the twins, or practising his karate and t’ai chi moves on our rickety wooden balcony overlooking the smelly klong. Nights he stayed up late with Sterling. While I was putting the children to bed, I could hear them in the living room below: their contrapuntal hymns to life on the high seas, their duets of laughter, their recitative of exotic ports of call. Bora Bora. The Marquesas. The Aegean. The Andaman Islands. It was pleasantly hypnotic, indistinct and soporific – like listening to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner recited in a foreign language. Some weekends we hired a taxi for the day and headed for the beaches in Pattaya. There we discovered a cluster of eccentric beach bungalows for rent. Our favourite was a conversion from a widebottomed teak trawler where we could lie in hammocks strung across the bow, spinning out fantasies of a Swiss Family Robinson future, while the catchy Russian cadences of ‘Those Were the Days’ issued from a shortwave radio. I was happy to be an armchair sailor for the time being, but my own dreams – a jumble of American highways and Hollywood movies, French cafes and castles on the Rhine, the Italian Riviera and the spires of Oxford and Cambridge – pulled me in another direction. So I wasn’t altogether dismayed when reality sent us all packing – Alban to America, Sterling and me to Singapore, and eventually to Malaysia.

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Feb 11, 1971 Camp Hill, PA Dear Wendy: . . . Alban, fortunately, is gone from 11 am to 9 pm so his smoking does not suffocate Ko Tin Nyo in this badly ventilated mode of living. He [Alban] is manager of a Fish and Chips Restaurant in town. God knows how he’s held the job for so long. We got tired of driving him to and from the Underprivileged Children’s Home, so I took him to the Driving Test, looked sexy at the old policeman who gave him the test – and he passed – I’ll never know why because he did everything wrong. So he bought this car and pretty soon started taking on another job to make more money and as a result got fired from the Underprivileged Children’s Home (the Catholic priest found out that he was not putting in enough hours). Mummy did not want Daddy to know so if she has not told you, don’t say I said. Anyway, we don’t mind his living here forever and just talking about moving into a mobile home – we just wish he would stop pouring six glasses of water and forgetting to drink them. . . . Keep in touch! Love Marlaine Six months later, there was good news at last. Alban was in Valparaiso, Florida, as bosun on a sixty-foot schooner. ‘Florida is just like Rangoon!’ he wrote. ‘Boyd Lander [his captain] is quite a character, two wives, Viet Nam veteran etc., knows good navigation and radio.’ By Christmas, he was on another boat, ‘a 30-foot schooner owned by a guy called Jim Harrell. Jim has sailed to every port in the States, smuggled in Cuba, jailed in Mexico, loves the concertina and doesn’t give two damns for any government . . . I live on his boat. He lives with some married women . . . We will sail to Tampa come spring and maybe go down to Miami . . .’ By March a more sober reckoning had set in. ‘It’s all a fantastic dream, this sailing around the world on a shoestring. You can’t hunt

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because the warden will throw your ass in jail, the fish are scarce, they’ve dirtied the water so much, and the cost of having a boat with its yearly maintenance is unbelievable.’ He concludes, ‘The States is just a mess, a lump of bullshit. I miss my friends a lot and the real freedom of Asia.’ A month later Alban was back with his first boss on the sixty-foot American Eagle. ‘The wind is coming strong across the Bay of Mexico. Boyd is sailing soon but don’t think I’ll go.’ Why? Because now my brother wants to build his own boat. ‘I have blueprints of “Picaroon”, “Dragon”, “Tahiti” and “Moorea”! We’ll build and sail to America and sell them here. Hows that grab you. Another idea, all we need is Teak here, if you can send me Teak to my measurements, I’ll pay shipping and purchase price . . . Got enough money, no wood. Got wood, no money. I feel like I’m chasing my own tail.’ By that summer he was back home with Marlaine. ‘I’ve changed a lot,’ he wanted me to know. ‘I don’t laugh like an idiot and most of my absentmindedness is knocked out. I plan to get a decent job and settle down for about 5 years to save and look after Mummy as best I can. I hope you are fine and not still insane, like me.’ Sterling and I had left Asia by then, and were living in Florida, where Sterling had found a job as an editor with the St Petersburg Times. The twins had started school, and I was finally enrolled as a ‘full-time, degreeseeking student’ in college. I had a lot on my mind besides my brother’s endless toings and froings. But I was relieved to hear, in the spring of the following year, that he was gainfully employed once more. ‘I have a steady job as a Phospopodontics Techenician (gloriefied tooth maker). But it is good and theres lots of art involved and machanics too. Including my expertise in Celestial, Coastwise and Seamanship I now have, Diesel, Welding, Refrig. Electricity, fuel & ignition systems and phosthodontics, I still don’t know how to spell the damn thing. I want to study explosives, optics, electronics and some key making, still as crazy as ever.’ The only mention of sailing is a bitter little taunt. ‘I don’t believe you two are ever buying a boat.’ There was something about that letter I couldn’t put my finger on,

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Alban in Florida, 1971

and it wasn’t just the number of misspellings. Months later I had the explanation: my brother was on antipsychotic medication. It was Mum who kept track of the dosage – as she kept track of the minutiae of family life, tersely and faithfully – in her tiny diaries. From 1971, the year of her move to America, these little notebooks, with their inch-wide spaces for daily appointments, sum up the last third of her life. 1973: Wednesday 27 June: Started 1 v for Alban Friday 29 June: Alban 2 v. Friday 13 July: First pay check $130 Saturday 29 September: I tablet stel. 8 pm Alban The ‘v’ is for Valium; the ‘stel’ stands for Stelazine, a common antipsychotic drug prescribed for the treatment of schizophrenia. 1974. Marlaine and family have moved yet again. Byron and Mimi are looking for a house to buy rather than rent, this time near Durham,

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North Carolina, where Byron has found a better job. This necessitates another move for Mum and Dad, who have been living with Byron and Mimi. But at least Alban is out of their hair for the moment. He has met a nice girl, Chris, a colleague at his dental lab. ‘She seems to be quite fond of him and because they do the same kind of work perhaps they have a lot more in common,’ Mum writes, ever optimistic. Alban and Chris are married at 8 p.m. on Saturday 7 September because ‘Chris is an astrology nut, and according to her, that is an auspicious time’. In the one wedding photo still extant, Alban, sporting a moustache and goatee, stands to attention, a faraway look on his face. Chris is wearing a simple calico dress and a warm, toothy smile. For a while they sound happy – at least Chris does – in their domesticity. ‘We have a real nice little apartment now, 2 bedrooms, with lots of space. Now we don’t feel like we are living in a tunnel, like we did in the trailer.’ A load has been taken off Mum’s shoulders. Her letters continue in their obliging, matter-of-fact vein. She is expecting bad weather, and feeling the cold, but because the past month’s electric bill was $180 they are keeping the thermostat turned down and she is ‘walking around like Big Chief Thundercloud – wrapped in a blanket’. But scarcely two months after the wedding, her diary reads: Friday 29 November: Alban stela again. By spring of the following year, more and more cracks begin to appear in the eggshell surface of the family’s fortunes. Negligible IOUs abound, as well as a steady robbing of Peter to pay Paul. Wednesday 16 April: Cashed check from income tax $100 return, gave it to Ed for passage to Miami for a lecture Saturday 24 May: Ed left for San Francisco. $175. one way. Byron gave $300 check for plane fare Thursday 5 June: Received check from University of Miami. $150 Thursday 16 October: Deposited Alban’s check for $20. Had a haircut $4.50 Thursday 6 November: Train fare $25 to NY, $30 to DC. Lottery ticket $25, Breakfast $7, Lunch $10, tips $5, cab $10

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Then the year ends – and the new year is brought in with a new crisis. On 30 December Dad is examined by his doctor who gives him an ECG and sends him straight to hospital. There it is established that he has had not one but two heart attacks! He brings in the new year in the ICU. Subjected to the standard indignities – made to put on a thin rag with an opening at the back, then made to wait for tests and procedures of all kinds – Dad turns pugilistic. He announces his intention to hit the next person who comes into the room. Fortunately for the next person, he doesn’t look important enough to hit. Dad waits for someone in a white coat before lunging. Byron is called in, and has to take the old man in hand. ‘Look, Dad, you can’t be carrying on like this.’ The old man is chastened. His son! Lecturing him! ‘Yes, well, bring me my typewriter then,’ he sniffs. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea. You need to rest. They won’t allow it.’ ‘Just bring it, I’ll hide it under my bed.’ Saturday 10 January: Edward discharged Monday 12 January: bad night Wednesday 21 January: received food stamps Thursday 22 January: bought groceries with food stamps Friday 30 January: mailed alien registration forms, mailed application for citizenship Saturday 31 January: Edward went fishing Sunday 1 February: Edward lost! Friday 6 February: Tests at Watts Hospital 8:30am. Brain scan, skull, x-ray, EEG. Bought Mustang same day Dad is still up to his old tricks: he has just had a massive heart attack; Mum and he are on food stamps; and what does he do but go out and buy a Mustang. A 1966 model, granted; even so. Does Mum complain or put her foot down, though? Far from it. She never complains and she never nags, preferring to make her point through silence. Of course her silences are more thunderous than any voiced grievance. Subtleties,

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the Hollywood mogul Billy Wilder used to say, should be obvious. Mum’s subtleties were nothing if not obvious. Seeing how Dad infuriated her at times – even moved her to what seemed like outright loathing – an outright tantrum once in a while would have been universally cathartic. But then Dad had the monopoly on tantrums. Back home to convalesce, our father’s behaviour grew strange (not really strange, according to Byron, for someone in the aftermath of a serious heart attack; but strange enough to us all the same). One morning he rushed out of the house mumbling something about picking up a newspaper and hadn’t been gone five minutes when the phone rang. It took Mum a while to cotton on that he was calling because he couldn’t figure out how to get home. Between such lapses Dad seemed subdued, withdrawn, or just restless, almost desperate for escape. One day he announced that he had booked a ticket to California. We said nothing; Mum said nothing. If he wanted to head for California, who were we to stop him, never mind the ill-advised nature, financial and medical, of such a whim. But one other desire accompanied the desire for escape, and that was for his son Hubert’s leather jacket. Hubert and his wife Hava were spending their sabbatical year in America. Concerned about the parents, they had come to help sort things out. Hava, with her Israeli bluntness, had succeeded in convincing Dad of something that none of us had dared suggest: the urgency of finding a flat that he and Mum could move into, a place of their own. Hava then found it, paid the deposit and the first month’s rent, and briskly moved them in. His daughter-in-law’s brusque efficiency won Dad over; now he wanted something from his son. ‘Look, son, you’d better give me your leather jacket,’ was how he put it, adding, ‘I need it for my trip,’ as though no other explanation were necessary. It wasn’t so different from the way, in Burma, he would come to one or other of us to take back a present he’d given, because he needed a present for someone else, and he needed it in a hurry. He’d buy us another, he promised. Hubert handed him the jacket as if it were the most natural thing

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in the world for a man in his late sixties to appropriate the clothing of a son in his late forties, at once amused and saddened at the sight of his grey-haired, grey-faced, incurably flashy father California-bound in a leather bomber jacket. 1976: Saturday 28 February: Alban back on stela Wednesday 17 March: Talked to Alban (separation?) Alban was alone again – and in a bad way. Chris had stuck it out for a while, but had fled as his behaviour grew stranger and stranger. Now he was back home with the parents, and Mum was having to spend every waking moment trying to keep him out of Dad’s way. The only reprieve came when Dad was out fishing. Thank God for his fishing. Of course that too was problematic. He was once caught fishing without a licence and was only let off because the game warden had a sense of humour and was tickled by his unorthodox excuse. One morning Byron was in a meeting when he was told he had a visitor. Outside, in the hospital driveway, inmates in various states of mental distress were milling about an old Cadillac, next to which Dad was holding up a giant carp for display. ‘Look, son!’ he beamed. ‘The one that didn’t get away!’ There were two other drawbacks to Dad’s fishing trips: the mess in the kitchen after he’d cleaned his fish, and the smell throughout the house after he’d fried it. But it would have been heartless to deny him his only recreation; besides it distracted him from Alban. It was all Mum could do to put up with Alban herself. ‘Two crazy men under one roof!’ she would confide to me in a sing-song burst of black humour. I wondered if she was cracking up too. 1978. They’re moving again, according to Mum’s diaries. Byron and Mimi and Mum and Dad and Alban are all moving – this time to Maryland, where Byron has a new job at a private psychiatric hospital. Mum hopes that the change of scenery will be good for Alban, and for a while it seems to be. He finds a full-time job, benefits and all,

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with a dental lab in Columbia, Maryland. But by the end of the first week, he has crashed. Saturday 20 May: A depressed Wednesday 24 May: A low in spirits. Washed clothes Thursday 25 May: Alban low. 9 – 6 Saturday 27 May: Byron came, talked to A Wednesday 31 May: Alban ill Thursday 1 June: A had no sleep Saturday 3 June: A slept very well Tuesday 27 June: A & Ed went fishing The poignancy of father and son fishing together was not lost on Mum. It signified a shift in Dad’s attitude towards Alban. Dad had stopped snapping and yelling at him. He no longer demanded to know what the hell was wrong with the damned fool. The shift had really come in North Carolina, after that dreadful, dreadful scene with Dad losing his temper over something Alban had done, then suddenly going berserk, shouting at Mum to get him in the car. ‘Oh, Edward, why?’ Mum was too frightened to do anything but wring her hands. ‘Because he’s mad, your son is mad, I tell you! I’m driving him to hospital. He has to be committed, don’t you see?’ ‘Please! Edward! Please! Calm down! I’m begging you!’ Suddenly Alban was between them, on his knees. ‘Don’t make me go! Dad, please don’t make me go! I’ll get better, I’ll stop being crazy, I promise.’ Dad stormed out of the house and stood staring at the road for a long time. When he came back inside, Mum had given Alban a Valium and put him to bed. Dad has been kinder since then – a lot more tolerant. He has stopped railing at his son for being so stupid, so incompetent, so weak, as to succumb to madness. The rest of the year ticks by without further eruptions, thanks largely to GT, Alban’s group therapy sessions. These include trips to

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the zoo, picnics on Sugarloaf Mountain, bowling parties and meals cooked by GT participants. Then: 1979: Friday 5 January: A received disability check. Bought groceries $8 Sunday 6 January: weather bad, missed Mass Monday 22 January: Alban suffered heart attack My darling son is dead. When Mimi rang to deliver the news, the twins and I were housesitting for my sister Jo Jo, who was on holiday with her husband. Mum, said Mimi, had been alone with Alban when the pains in his chest began. He had lain down, then tried to stand, then collapsed. He fell on his knees, and finally on his side. And that was it. He was gone by the time the ambulance arrived. Mimi was crying. I felt I should be crying too, but no tears came. For one thing, the twins, age eleven, were watching me, and I hadn’t figured out how to break the news to them about their beloved Uncle Alban. For another, I felt oddly detached, as if I had been through my brother’s death before. After I put the phone down, it came back to me – the day I had been left alone with him at Marlaine’s house in Camp Hill. I was visiting for the weekend; so were Mum and Alban. We had all been invited to lunch by one of Marlaine’s friends and were getting ready to leave when Mum took me aside. ‘Alban is acting up,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t get him to leave the room.’ Everyone else had gone outside by then, and someone was honking the horn. ‘What must I do?’ said Mum, looking stricken. I told her to go ahead, I would stay behind with Alban. He was in one of the back bedrooms, standing stock-still between the two single beds. I started to tell him that he needn’t worry about having to go out now, it was just the two of us in the house, so he could relax, but he only became agitated. He rocked back and forth. ‘Alban!’ I said sharply. ‘Are you listening to me?’ He shot me a sideways look of pure hatred. ‘How can I listen to

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you,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘when I’m listening to THEM?!’ He started to pound the side of his forehead with the heel of his palm. ‘Please listen to me,’ I pleaded. ‘Don’t listen to anything else. I’m the one who loves you. Your sister. Wendy. Don’t you know me any more? Alban?’ ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ he said in his old voice. ‘Of course I know you. That’s why I’m trying to keep the bad guys away.’ ‘Oh, Alban, there are no bad guys –’ ‘I’m talking,’ he said, ‘about . . . the ones . . . INSIDE me!’ I backed away, whimpering, at a loss to know what to do. The bedroom door was shut; would opening it make him feel better? He looked so cornered, so trapped. But I was afraid to startle him, afraid to move, so I just sat at the edge of one the beds and let him mutter and pace. ‘They know, they know!’ he cried. ‘They want to make me do it!’ He wasn’t talking to me. He wasn’t seeing me at all. I covered my face and just sat, willing myself to go numb. When at long last I was able to get him to bed, he lay face down without a struggle. He didn’t seem to mind me massaging his neck, his shoulders, his back, the way I used to as a kid, when he would promise to pay me for the service but then conveniently forgot to follow through. I remembered now a moment when our roles were reversed: when I was the one in bed, hurting, and he was by my side, trying to comfort me. I was almost seventeen, and in hospital for what I thought would be a minor operation: an umbilical hernia repair. Instead, for reasons that were never satisfactorily explained, the surgery had left me with a foot-long incision that kept me in hospital for ten days. For equally unknown reasons, Mum couldn’t come to visit very often. But Alban was there every day, dozing in the chair by my side, or forcing me to drink more liquids by threatening to make me laugh. ‘Don’t!’ I begged. ‘You’ll open up my stitches!’ ‘Want me to read you something?’ He picked up one of the books on the bedside table. The day before the operation Mum had taken me to the bookshop to pick out something to read in hospital. Instead

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of the hardback I was entitled to, I had chosen two Penguin paperbacks. One was the Penguin Modern Poets 5: Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alan Ginsberg. The other was the Collected Poems of Arthur Rimbaud. ‘“Last night I Drove A car”,’ Alban read. ‘“By Gregory Corso. Last night I drove a car, not owning a car . . .”’ He stopped. ‘Huh?’ ‘Keep reading and you’ll get it,’ I urged. ‘“I drove and knocked down people I loved, went one twenty through one town. I stopped at Hedgeville and slept in the back seat . . . excited about my new life.”’ ‘Good, huh?’ I asked eagerly. He studied the book front and back. ‘Yeah, I like it.’ ‘Now I’ll read you something even better,’ I said, reaching for Rimbaud. ‘Listen to this incredible adventure story. ‘“The Drunken Boat”,’ I began. ‘“As I was floating down unconcerned rivers, I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers. Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targets, nailing them naked to coloured stakes . . .”’ Redskins. That should wake him up. I noticed he had started to yawn. Maybe Rimbaud wasn’t such a good idea. I skipped a couple of stanzas. ‘“Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children,”’ I pressed on, ‘“the green water penetrated my pinewood hull and washed me clean of the bluish wine-stains and the splashes of vomit, carrying away both rudder and anchor.”’ ‘Damn! This guy likes colours,’ he said. ‘Yes, and listen to this . . . “Suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!” Or this . . . “I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islands whose delirious skies –”’ Another big yawn. ‘But what about the boat?’ he interrupted. ‘The drunken boat?’ ‘I’m coming to that,’ I said. ‘. . . “But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter . . . O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!”’ ‘Finished?’ he asked.

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‘Finished,’ I lied. There were two more stanzas, but they seemed anticlimactic. ‘That is one sad adventure story.’ Alone with my brother years later in Camp Hill, I remembered the hospital in Rangoon. I remembered the long incision down my belly that no one could explain, and the irrational thought that if Dad had been around, he wouldn’t have let such a thing happen. I remembered most of all my brother at my bedside, day after day. But that brother, I could see, wasn’t with me any more. In his place, on Marlaine’s spare bed, was a total stranger, an impostor I couldn’t begin to win over. Crying my heart out, I said goodbye to him then – to the brother I knew. And how did Dad take leave of the son he knew? After the ambulance had come and carried him away, Byron drove with our father to the hospital. ‘We went into the room where Alban was laid out,’ Byron recalled. ‘And Dad said only one thing: “My poor son.”’

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14 Nobody’s Nation

In the summer of 1975 my father came up with a startling proposition. I had just moved to Washington DC to take up a fellowship at the Carnegie Endowment and was visiting him in rural Pennsylvania, where he and Mum were living with Marlaine. ‘Tell you what I’m going to do,’ he said out of the blue. ‘I’m going to sell my daughter the Cadillac for a dollar.’ ‘Me?’ I thought at first he might be referring to one of my sisters. But addressing people to their faces in the third person was not only a Burmese convention. It was my father’s habit of making someone in his presence quickly come to feel absent. The dollar was what threw me, though. He wanted to sell me his old Cadillac for a dollar? Had things got so bad? Was he so hard up that it had come to this? But why a dollar? Why not ten? Why not a hundred – two hundred dollars? Surely the big clunker was worth something. But then he mentioned registration and tags, and I caught on that the dollar transaction was only on paper – the easiest and cheapest way of transferring ownership. I babbled my thanks with the usual protestations. ‘Dad, are you sure? But you could sell it and get something for it. No? This is great, though, just great! I don’t know when I’d be able to afford a car, and I’ll need one in DC –’ He cut me off by handing me the keys. ‘Off you go,’ he said, the way he used to dismiss me as a child when he’d had enough of my company – even though I was twenty-eight, mother of two, and just divorced. * * *

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While Dad was having his heart attacks and Alban was cracking up, my marriage to Sterling had come to an end. But I hadn’t told my parents anything. As far as they knew, I had earned my bachelor’s degree in Florida and was taking up a summer fellowship at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington DC while Sterling took care of the twins in St Petersburg. Byron, my only confidant at that point, offered to mediate when the time came to break the news. ‘Don’t worry what the Parents think or say. Mom and Dad are great pretenders – as least Mom is – and I’m sure they can take what transpires. Dad is quite oblivious to the emotional turmoil his children are facing and seems to be content to dwell on his past.’ I hoped for the time being that Byron’s observation about Dad was true. Mum of course was not so easy to fool. But maybe her other concerns would take the spotlight off me. Obediently I took the Cadillac keys from Dad and drove off into the night, in the general direction of Washington. As usual, before I even got onto the highway, I was hopelessly lost. But I knew from long experience not to panic. It occurred to me that there was a certain symmetry to inheriting my father’s terrible sense of direction, and inheriting his Cadillac to get lost in. I drove through the night in a fog both real and internal, through neighbourhoods eerie in their darkened sci-fi sameness, past used-car lots with their swags of tattered bunting, down country lanes with camp grounds on either side – or burial grounds, for all I knew. Every so often I stopped to ask for directions which I failed to understand, or immediately forgot. My calmative in such situations was to let fate take its course. And, sure enough, I found myself swept along eventually on a slipstream that flowed into the great cataract of 95 South. I could sit back now and enjoy the drive in my new jalopy. Ah, Dad and his cars. How he loved cars; the bigger and flashier the better. In the old days, nothing would bring such radiance to his face as the purchase of a car. Calling out to anyone at home to come and look at his new Austin, or Vauxhall, or Fiat, or MGB, he would stand back

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like a proud young father, waiting for the world to fuss over his adorable, incomparable firstborn. I remembered the shiny black Chevrolet Impala, specially imported from America on the proceeds of his journalism award. Rangoon had never seen the freakishly long likes of it. Traffic would clear in its path as from a nuclear warhead. We children loved the Impala, nearly coming to blows as we jockeyed for the window seats. I thought it a huge improvement on Dad’s previous indulgence. I remembered how he showed up at my school behind the wheel of that other black behemoth. It was rare for him to pick me up from school, and I wished he hadn’t spoiled the treat by coming in such an ugly car. ‘So?’ he asked, beaming, as I slid down my seat to hide from my classmates. ‘You like Daddy’s new car?’ It broke down before we had gone a mile. While we waited for the mechanics to arrive, a crowd gathered around its open bonnet, and I heard exclamations of ‘RollsRoyce!’ and ‘Twenty-four carburettors!’ and ‘1932 model!’ The mechanics were taking forever. The gawkers, full of conflicting advice on what should be done, were getting on Dad’s nerves. He was lighting cigarette after cigarette, circling the car, swinging his arms. I knew the danger signals and waited for the tantrum. It didn’t take long. He flung his cigarette away, and with a hop-skip-and-jump that would have been funny if it weren’t so alarming, he attacked the radiator with a terrific kick. It worked. When he got back inside to start the ignition, the car shuddered and chugged as it came to life. With a smart tap of his horn Dad parted the crowds. He waved to them regally, chuckling in triumph. The Rolls was Dad’s last extravagance in the car line. He was arrested in the spring of 1963, while it was in the workshop waiting to be overhauled. He had held onto it long after it was superannuated. By the time he was released, the outgoing American ambassador, a vintage-car freak, had bought the antique from a middleman, and was shipping it back to the States. Dad would have to wait ten years before buying his next car. Soon

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after he settled in America, he went to the dealership in Mechanicsburg, where he’d had his eye on a used Volkswagen, and came home with a 1960 Cadillac de Ville. It was 1973, the year of the oil crisis and long gas lines. A less sensible purchase was hard to imagine. But the de Ville was a classic, pale blue, and impossible to resist. Impossible to resist and nearly impossible to navigate. Of course, it wasn’t the Cadillac’s fault that even with Mum beside him to decipher road signs and tell him which way to turn, Dad’s neck would turn crimson as he leaned into the steering wheel. From the back seat I could see his face implode in the rear-view mirror, a cartoon of overwrought concentration. All the while my mother gave directions in studiously calm and unconvincing tones. She had no idea where they were going, either. ‘Cadillacs!’ she would groan, once they were home and she could throw herself onto her bed and give thanks for surviving the ordeal. ‘Cadillacs were not made for short Chinamen with bandy legs.’ Dad would laugh uproariously, his humour restored. The next time my father set eyes on the old Cadillac he’d bestowed on me was six months later, in Durham, North Carolina. He was waiting outside to greet me, impatience written all over him. Oh no, I thought. I’m late! I must remember never to say exactly when I’m arriving. I jumped out of the car to give him a hug, then popped open the boot to unload the groceries I’d brought with me, careful not to show surprise at how much he’d aged. His hair was all white, his face was thin, and his lumberjack’s flannel shirt looked more like an overcoat on him. Dad stood back to inspect the El Dorado. ‘So. How’s the old grey mare?’ Only a few months had passed since he’d handed me the keys, but a lot had happened in that time. He and Mum had moved house yet again. And he’d had two heart attacks. ‘Massive,’ I remembered him saying proudly, after spending New Year’s Eve in the intensive care unit of Durham’s Watts Hospital. ‘The doctors said it was massive.’ But of course it was massive, I couldn’t help thinking. Would anyone

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who knew him expect less? Not for him a mild heart attack – a mild anything – when the alternative was massive. He was watching me closely now, this thinner, greyer, considerably smaller father of mine, as I sorted through the groceries. Abruptly – as if he couldn’t wait a minute longer – he asked if I had read his manuscript. ‘No, Dad, I haven’t,’ I replied, ‘I haven’t had time.’ That’s when he exploded. ‘You haven’t the faintest idea what my life is like, what I’m going through,’ I thought bitterly, while I went on unloading the groceries as if nothing had happened. But then how could he know what I was going through when I hadn’t told him? ‘Don’t tell Daddy!’ was Mum’s first response to any bad news. ‘Dear God, whatever you do, don’t tell Daddy.’ So of course I didn’t tell Daddy that while he was duking it out with his PDP comrades in Bangkok, I was going through a bitter legal battle in Kuala Lumpur. Sterling’s ex-wife had come out to Malaysia from her home in Virginia, to file a lawsuit over custody for their son Gordon. I didn’t tell Daddy that after the long ordeal of fighting off detectives and process servers, after sitting through hours of depositions and negotiations over temporary visiting rights, after the endless charges and counter-charges in court, Sterling had decided to relinquish custody altogether, allowing Gordon’s mother to take him back to the States. And that was why Gordon was no longer living with us. No, I hadn’t told Daddy about any of this. Or about my subsequent decision to leave Sterling. Or about the fact that I wasn’t just leaving the twins with their father for the summer: I was letting him have full custody of them rather than face another battle like the one we’d been through. Secrets and lies. Evasions and pretences. All because I couldn’t tell Daddy. I had a terrific urge now to get back into his wretched Cadillac and drive off past some point of no return. But I was damned if I would give him the satisfaction of seeing me turn tail. I would stick out my visit, abiding by one of Mum’s obiter dicta: ‘Don’t give anyone the satisfaction of seeing they’ve made you angry or upset.’

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Later, when I tattled to her, she of course sprang to Dad’s defence. Couldn’t I see from his impatience how eager he was for my help, how highly he thought of me? Anyway, why be upset by this little flare-up, especially these days, after all he’s been through, when he still wasn’t quite what he used to be? As for the manuscript in question, I simply wasn’t up to reading it, not in my sorry state – divorced, depressed, penniless and separated from my two young children. So I didn’t read it. Not then. Not the next month, either. Nor the next year. Sometime early in 1980, my father surprised me by asking to see the draft of a novel he knew I had just finished. I brought it to him with trepidation, making out all the while that it was nothing, not even a novel probably, a novella at most. He carried it off into the next room without a word. I sat talking to Mum in the cramped living/dining area of their apartment. It was difficult to concentrate on what she was saying when I was on the edge of my seat. Mum, with her antennae for unvoiced anxieties, tried to distract me with small talk and Danish butter cookies, but I was too nervous for either. An hour and a half later I heard Dad moving about in the bedroom. Then he came through the door and thrust the bound manuscript at me. ‘Good, very good,’ he pronounced, with a click of the tongue and a quick sideways jerk of the head. I reached for the Danish butter cookies, at peace with the world. Good, my father had said about my book – even though the two main characters in it were a brother and sister who must struggle to survive in America after being driven out of their home in Burma. Even though the person responsible for endangering their lives and making it necessary for them to flee is a tyrannical father with revolutionary ideals. ‘Very good,’ I heard him repeat as he went into the other room, swinging his arms and sniffing loudly. I had no desire to find out what he found good about the book, and why. His forgiveness was enough for me. He had read my book, promptly and eagerly, when I hadn’t given his manuscript the time of day. But then, as Byron once drily commented, ‘Our Father who art above pettiness . . .’

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I resolved to take up Dad’s manuscript. It was the least I could do to effect a quid pro quo. I felt equal to the task now of reading and editing him. But before I could make good on my resolution, the phone rang one evening in July. It was my sister-in-law Mimi, always delegated for some reason to be the bearer of bad news. ‘Wendy?’ From the quaver in her voice I knew. ‘You’d better sit down.’ I was standing, as it happened, in my fiancé Chuck’s kitchen. The pork chops were sizzling in the skillet and were just about ready to be flipped. Mary, Chuck’s mother, was looking over my shoulder, admiring the purple onions browning with the chops. She had only just arrived from the airport for a week’s visit. She wanted to get to know her son’s fiancée. I hung up the phone on the wall and flipped the chops. ‘That was my sister-in-law,’ I said, when I’d scraped them onto a stainless-steel platter. ‘My dad had a heart attack. They couldn’t save him.’ Mary’s face crumpled. Tears sprung to her eyes. ‘Oh! Oh, I’m so, so sorry!’ She seized my forearm, almost upsetting the platter in my hands. I had to admire a woman who could so readily enter the sorrow of a stranger, and cry. ‘In your situation?’ she muttered a while later, as we sat down to dinner. ‘I don’t think I could be sitting here. Like this. So calm, so . . .’ She was looking down at her plate, almost talking to herself. Her eyes blinked back more tears before seeking out her son’s. I saw the question in them. Is this normal? A woman who can go on frying pork chops after news of her father’s sudden death? And serving dinner as if nothing has happened? As soon as I’d cleared the table I left Chuck and his mother and drove to my parents’ apartment in Silver Spring. Mum was seated in the sagging chair by the window where Dad usually sat. She seemed remarkably sedate. In fact she’d been sedated, though that’s something I’d find out only later. She was wearing her public face – serene, gracious, long-suffering – as she greeted friends, neighbours and family members who were arriving in relays. From my two sisters and my sister-in-law Mimi I heard how Dad

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had come home from a long day of fishing in Virginia and just collapsed on the kitchen floor. The ambulance had arrived within minutes, but the medics were unable to revive him. Mum had waited alone by the phone for the call from the hospital, even though she could already tell ‘by their faces, the way they looked at each other’, that it was too late. The smell of fried fish filled the small apartment. I wondered whether Dad had enjoyed a taste of his last catch before he was felled. When I knelt beside my mother to ask how she was doing, she bit her lip and pleaded silently with me, as though something could still be done. I would sooner have dealt with loud wailing and keening than that wordless appeal. We’ll think of something, I almost said, gripping her hand. Instead I told her that my fiancé’s mother was in town, and we were taking her the next day, as planned, for a sail on the Chesapeake. Mum nodded in sympathy. I don’t think she had the faintest idea what I was talking about. Dad, I thought, would not mind my sailing the day after his death, especially on the waters of the Chesapeake. He’d done some of his best fishing in the Bay. He would have preferred it, I felt sure, to my staying home and crying. Jo Jo and I used to laugh at a phrase he liked to trot out to describe an emotionally charged experience: ‘One big tear’. When his mother witnessed his conversion to Christianity as a boy, ‘she shed a solitary tear.’ When she saw him get married, ‘one big tear’ rolled down her cheek. ‘What do you remember about Dad’s funeral?’ I asked Jo Jo not long ago. ‘What I remember,’ she said, ‘is how you never cry at funerals.’ But then neither did Dad, I thought. From his memoirs: ‘The death of my mother occurred at a time when U Nu was obsessed with the problem of making Buddhism the state religion. I received a call from him on the day of Mother’s funeral. As she was being laid to rest I realised how much she had been through, how uncomplainingly she had borne the vicissitudes of war and its aftermath. Although she tried hard to hide it, she was disappointed that I had taken up jour-

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nalism; up to the moment her great heart ceased to beat she fondly imagined that my editing a newspaper was a temporary aberration and that I would turn to something “respectable”. I don’t know what she expected me to become . . . but I had the feeling at her graveside that I had let her down. From the cemetery I went directly to U Nu’s residence. He was eating yogurt . . .’ Long after his funeral – months later, years later – whatever tears I shed for my father were never occasioned by the thought of his death. In truth I was relieved that he died when he did. I couldn’t imagine how he – how any of us – could have endured his descent into infirmity or, worse, insanity. It’s possible of course that he would have mellowed into a grand old man of tolerance and temperance. But I doubt it. It was a good time, I told myself, for Dad to go when he did. The country he loved with all his might and was forced to abandon would never again be the country he knew. The nation of his dreams was nobody’s nation now.

Dad & his catch, North Carolina, 1974

The obituaries all seemed to me terribly thin. But there was a line in the brief New York Times notice that summed up at least one of his

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singular achievements: ‘He was the first independent newspaper editor of free, post-war Burma, and also, to date, the last.’ And there were letters and vignettes written in memoriam. My favourite, published in an OSS Association bulletin, came from Alex McDonald, an old friend: We first met on Ramree, an island off Burma’s west coast. As an intelligence officer for the US Office of Strategic Services during World War II, I had come over from mainland Akyab to join an OSS force under the British 15th Army Corps, which in early 1945 was chasing the Japanese enemy down the Burma coast. Law Yone, stockily built, intelligent brown eyes lighting up his rather bland Burmese face, was serving the OSS as one of our scouts. In what we called ‘shallow penetration’ he and other Burmese agents drifted in and out of enemy areas ahead of us, bringing back reports of Japanese army strength, equipment, prospective troop movements and other intelligence. Alex goes on to describe how they met again after many years, ‘two aging men recalling the old, old days in Burma and Bandung’. Then came the paragraph that stunned me. ‘“You cannot know,” Law-Yone one day told me, “the pain of exile. To be forbidden the sight and warmth of native places that are so much a part of one’s self and nature. Literally, I grieve daily for my Burma.”’ Had my father really spoken of pain, and deprivation, and grief ? But those were feelings he never owned up to. One big tear was about as large a repertoire as his emotions would allow. I remembered what Jo Jo had once said about Dad’s stoicism. ‘I came into the house one time when Dad was on the phone. “Who’s he talking to?” I said out loud. “Shh,” someone said. “He’s talking to Prince Sihanouk.” When Dad hung up I asked him, “What were you talking to him about, Dad?” And Dad said, “About his son, and my son. I was telling him how my son died in my arms.” I thought, really? How come you never told me?’ I continued to read Alex’s piece.

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It was not long after that visit that there came a telephone call from my former wife, now remarried, from her farm in Leesburg, Virginia. The day previous, Betty said, an old Honolulu friend of ours . . . had come over from Washington for a quiet day’s outing at the farm. Accompanying him was a charming stranger. It was Ed Law-Yone. Betty had never met him but was at once captivated, she said, by the warmth of his wit and spirit. He told her, of course, how he and I had sustained over the many years our long-distance friendship. That afternoon, Betty said, Ed wandered down to the quiet stream that ran through the farm, to recline there on the bank. He said it was an ideal place to meditate for it reminded him of his boyhood surroundings in Mandalay. Before leaving for the return drive to Washington he approached Betty, smiling and seeming quite at peace. ‘I want to thank you,’ he said, ‘for one of the happiest days of my years in exile.’ Again I was struck by my father’s articulation of something so elemental as happiness. I hoped it was true. Years later, when I finally got round to reading his memoirs, I was similarly struck by another, equally uncharacteristic, expression of deep feeling. He was describing his departure from Burma and the hectic nature of his last days as he rushed around saying his goodbyes, and leaving money as usual for those in need. With a trusted friend he left a sum out of which the servants were to be paid a monthly allowance for a year at least. When he heard that another old friend, Zan Hta Sin, former minister of Kachin State, was dying of tuberculosis of the spine, he left another sum for his medical care. He went to see U Ba Swe, leader of the Socialist Party and prime minister for a year under the U Nu regime. On U Ba Swe’s table he emptied his pockets and left his remaining fund of kyat for Ba Swe’s supporter, Bo Kyaing. Bo Kyaing had been in jail with him. The rest of the family were waiting anxiously at the airport terminal for Dad to arrive – along with a squad of cameramen and secret police. Half of Rangoon, it seemed, had come to see him off: U Kyaw Nyein,

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Nu’s former nemesis on the AFPFL, and his family; ministers and judges with their wives; the Inspector General of Prisons; Dad’s old racing and poker-playing friends; his old cell mates from the Rangoon and Insein jails . . . Dad approached the MIS officer in charge and asked permission to remain in the lounge until take-off. Permission granted, Dad mingled in a crowd so thick it was impossible to hear or be heard. I remember reading this passage for the first time one morning in Los Angeles, some forty years after the event. I was sitting outside Peet’s Coffee in Brentwood, with the southern California sun on my father’s pages, alone among a contingent of sweaty bikers getting their caffeine fix. I remember catching my breath over the last two lines of his chapter on leaving his homeland: ‘Suddenly I was terribly unhappy. They sent me off with a cheer.’ I would like to think that Dad died on the happiest day of his life. Failing that, I would like to think he died peacefully. A sudden and fatal heart attack is understood to be a merciful way to go. But an abrupt cessation of life does not necessarily signify peace. Surely peace is what comes before. And here’s where I have to hand it to my father: I saw him try, towards the end of his life, to find peace by making peace. I recall one afternoon in Washington DC not long before his death. I was living on my own, in a run-down but roomy apartment in Adams Morgan, struggling to make ends meet as a freelance writer. Dad had to come into town from Silver Spring to see someone for lunch, and rang to say he wasn’t far from where I was. I urged him to come by, delighted that we’d have some time alone together for a change. I dropped what I was doing and started to clean up. But then I decided to leave things as they were: Dad wasn’t likely to notice. He would be completely absorbed in what he had to tell me – about his lunch, his latest projects, his reflections on the state of the world. Then he would become restless, and leave. Dad came in and, as I expected, the mess went unnoticed. He refused a drink but had brought along a bag of unshelled pistachios.

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These he went through even more speedily than usual. Cracking them with his teeth, he seemed impatient to get something off his chest. ‘Did I tell you about the time . . .’ he began, and I braced myself pleasurably for one of his anecdotes about some bizarre or obscure incident in the distant past. What he went on to tell me was certainly bizarre, especially so because of whom it concerned. He started to talk about Katie Ne Win, of all people – a person I hadn’t thought about in a long while. She had died of renal failure in 1972 while in London for dialysis, when Dad was still in the thick of his revolution. It seemed that Katie had asked him to bring back from one of his trips to the States something called a RelaxAcizer, an electrical muscle stimulator that came in a box with knobs and dials, and pads that had to be moistened before being applied to the muscles that wanted relaxing. Dad had not only brought Katie this machine; he had helped her assemble the thing and even apply the pads to a scar on her stomach. For reasons known only to herself, Katie had told her husband about Dad’s help with the contraption which, unsurprisingly, made Ne Win angry – but not for the obvious reasons. He told his wife she was never to use such a thing again because the wet pads were liable to shock. They had laughed about it afterwards, Dad and Katie – about how it was the danger of electrocution that her husband had objected to, and not the fact that she had exposed herself to another man. (Although, as it turned out, the FDA did later ban the gizmo for its electrical hazards.) Dad was a raconteur with a gift for burlesque, and as he re-enacted the business with the knobs and the dials and the pads that had to be wet, I found myself laughing along with him. But then he went on to another incident. It had to do with a bra Katie had asked him to bring from America. Once again she had required his help in fastening the clasp as she tried the bra on over her blouse. This time her husband had walked in on them, but quickly turned on his heel without a word. The penny dropped at this point, and so did my mouth. I had always assumed that what had got my father into jail were the ideals he espoused, his political convictions, and the threat they posed to a

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dictator like Ne Win. But now, in a flash, it came to me – the meaning of his words to Mum on being arrested: ‘We always knew something like this would happen.’ The story of his denouement with the Ne Wins is told more fully in his memoirs, which I hadn’t then read. It was the shorter version that Dad was giving me now. His friendship with Ne Win had definitely cooled, but the general was aware that Katie and Ed Law-Yone were seeing each other as before – at the usual parties and poker games. Katie had got into the habit of dismissing her chauffeur-driven Volkswagen after being dropped off at one venue or other, and of asking Ed Law-Yone to drive her home in his new Impala. Discretion was not her middle name. One day she took Dad into her confidence. She had acquired a lover and was meeting him regularly at the home of her best friend, Thelma. ‘You’re playing with fire,’ Dad warned. ‘Yes, I know I have to stop,’ she said. But the very thought of returning to decorum brought on a shudder. Dad said, ‘You’re bored. Why don’t you throw some parties at your own house and invite all your friends? Invite Colonel Tun Sein, your next-door neighbour. He’ll come.’ Tun Sein was Ne Win’s right-hand man, the mayor of Rangoon who enjoyed much of the credit for Operation Sweat, the successful clean-up campaign during the caretaker period. ‘Like hell he will. He calls me Madame Ne Win.’ ‘What’s wrong with that?’ ‘The way he pronounces “Madame”. He’s not using it in the French sense.’ ‘Then why don’t you invite the brigadiers?’ he teased. ‘Aung Gyi and Maung Maung?’ Katie turned sullen. ‘They’re a pair of so-and-sos. They’d sleep with me if they had half a chance.’ Dad wasn’t so sure about that. The end came much as he had anticipated. The telephone rang at Thelma’s house one day. Thelma picked it up, then almost dropped

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it in fright. It was the general himself. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he barked. ‘Yes, Bogyoke, I recognise your voice.’ ‘So, you think you’ve been very clever?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean, Bogyoke.’ ‘Stupid woman. I know everything that has gone on under your roof. What made you do it? How could you?’ ‘I had no choice in the matter, Bogyoke. I am afraid of the bogyokegadaw [the general’s wife] as I’m afraid of you.’ There was a long silence, and Thelma dared not breathe. ‘Well, it’s just my bad karma,’ came the bitter statement, ‘that this thing had to happen to me. Lots of people know of the disgrace and soon the whole town will know.’ Thelma started to cry. ‘I’m sorry, Bogyoke. I’m sorry and fearful. Please forgive me.’ ‘Now, listen. I’m going to ask you a very serious question, and I want the truth. Does Ko Law-Yone know about this affair? (Instead of the formal ‘U’, or ‘Mr’, Ne Win addressed Dad by the more fraternal ‘Ko’, or ‘Older Brother’.) ‘Yes, Bogyoke, he does.’ ‘And how did he come to know? Who told him?’ ‘Your wife, Bogyoke. She tells him everything.’ Another long silence. Then, ‘Listen carefully now. From this moment onwards you don’t know my wife. If you meet her in the street you’re not to speak to her.’ ‘Yes, Bogyoke.’ ‘And this goes for every member of your gang. Do you get me?’ ‘Yes, sir, yes, Bogyoke. I’ll let them all know.’ A few days later Dad received an invitation to a reception on U Wisara Road, at one of those odd sites that the army had appropriated for official functions: a set of Quonset huts. The invitation wasn’t addressed to him by name, but to ‘The Editor of The Nation.’ He went. A live band was playing. At one end of the lawn, Ne Win was holding court. At the other end was Katie, surrounded by a host of

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colonels’ wives, and looking utterly miserable. She waved to him frantically, beckoning him to her side. Out of the corner of his eye, Dad noticed that Ne Win had spotted him at the same time and was disengaging himself from his group. Dad kept walking towards Katie. The closer he got, the wider the berth the colonels’ wives gave him, until he was alone by her side. ‘Thank God you’ve come,’ Katie said into his ear. ‘Please don’t desert me. I know what made you come. I’ll never forget it.’ They grasped hands just as Ne Win joined them. Katie shot her husband a defiant look before turning away to melt into the crowd. Ne Win was trembling with rage. ‘How dare you!’ he screamed at Dad. ‘I told you never to speak to her.’ If the music hadn’t been so loud, the party would have ground to a halt. ‘You did no such thing,’ Dad said. ‘Besides, I’m here by invitation.’ The two stood face to face, or almost – for Dad was five foot six, and Ne Win was several inches taller. Both were clenching their fists. Dad calculated that the general had only to raise his hand for his minions to take him apart. When that happened, he had one chance in a hundred to land a kick on Ne Win’s groin . . . With an effort of will that made him grind his teeth, the general finally turned his back and strode away. Three nights later, Dad was arrested. I was staring at my father, speechless; and he, as if noticing it for the first time, was staring at the mess in my living room. At last he got up to go to the bathroom. For a while I wondered why Dad had decided to tell me those stories about Ne Win and Katie, when Ne Win and he had long since fallen out, and Katie was long dead. But then I discovered that after all those years, Ne Win was still on Dad’s mind – so much so that he had decided to undertake an analysis of Ne Win’s mind. ‘He never really spoke with anger about Ne Win, did you notice?’ Byron remarked not long ago. ‘He was above holding a grudge, after all. He just used a lot of humour to soothe himself, in that very Burmese way – telling stories on himself and laughing. But he came

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to me once, this was quite close to the end, wanting to know what sort of mental illness I would say Ne Win was afflicted with. I said I didn’t know, it could be one of many things, and gave him a book on the psychopathic personality that described various mental disorders. The Mask of Sanity – a classic of its time. He read it in one go and figured he had Ne Win analysed.’ Here it is before me, in the last chapter of Dad’s memoir, under the heading, ‘Comrade Ne Win’s Mind’: ‘Unless between now and the day of Ne Win’s downfall the people in Burma are put through a course of modern psychiatry, the risk is great of Ne Win’s being tried and convicted as a common criminal.’ And on another page: ‘That General Ne Win is a true psychopathic personality or sociopath there cannot be the slightest possible doubt.’ Burmese society, he goes on to point out, is one that makes allowances for abnormalities in human behaviour. ‘In the streets of Rangoon a schizophrenic who imagines he is a European sergeant and mounts the raised island at intersections in order to entertain motorists, is tolerated by the police force itself.’ Then follows a clinical assessment of Ne Win’s character as it relates to his illness – an analysis that ends on a down note. ‘Having gone to great lengths to try to understand what it is that has been ailing Ne Win over these many years, I now experience the discomfort of knowing that there is precious little medical science can do for people like him.’ Finally, on the penultimate page of his voluminous autobiography, comes Dad’s closing statement about the man who robbed him of his newspaper, his profession, his rightful home. ‘They say that to know all is to forgive all. I certainly do not know all that can be known about Ne Win, but I know sufficiently about the state of his mind to absolve him of whatever harm he has done to me and my own. What the rest of my countrymen feel about Ne Win, especially those who have suffered more severely and more unjustly at his hands, is something they themselves will have to put into expression when the time comes.’ I would say that when his time came, my father had made his peace.

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part 3 Homing

The Burma Road, 1945. Courtesy of the estate of Arthur Rothstein.

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15 The Old Road

In the spring of 1989, I decided to go back to where it all began – to the ground, that is, of Dad’s resistance movement. But why, my mother wanted to know, did I want to go. ‘Terrible things are happening in Burma,’ she said, as if I didn’t know. That was precisely why I wanted to go. The year before, a massive uprising that threatened to bring down the military regime had been brutally crushed. What started as a series of student protests in Rangoon – put down each time by riot police using excessive force – had escalated to mass demonstrations throughout the country. Day by day thousands, then tens of thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of students, schoolchildren, housewives, monks, government workers, doctors, lawyers and whole units of the armed forces had thronged the streets, chanting demands for democracy, free elections and an end to one-party rule. Government authority appeared to be crumbling. Ne Win’s startling resignation as the ruling-party chairman – and his call for a referendum on ending single-party rule – had led to a reshuffle in the junta, with three leaders rising and falling in brisk succession. For a few chaotic weeks it looked as if the people had gained the upper hand. But just when it seemed that the popular will could no longer be contained, the military came in and contained it. Tanks and heavy arms carriers formed barricades around the city. Troops opened fire on the unarmed crowds, on schoolchildren, on hospital workers and ambulances. Suspects were rooted out in house-to-house searches, and dragged away to be tortured, imprisoned or shot. Hospital esti-

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mates put the death toll in Rangoon alone at three thousand. Countrywide deaths were close to ten thousand. What began as the perceived crack-up of the Ne Win regime had turned into the worst crackdown in recent history, sending thousands of young dissidents fleeing for safety, many to the border regions, where they sought refuge and armed support in the camps of the ethnic minority armies. They were not immediately welcomed with open arms. Overstretched from their ongoing war with the Burmese military, hard pressed to protect their own civilian populations, the insurgent groups were ill-equipped to house and feed, let alone arm and train, the callow fugitives from the city descending on them in legions. This left the Burmese outcasts in a bad way, at the mercy of border politics and the elements. Many succumbed to disease in the jungle; many more were forcibly ‘repatriated’ in an agreement between the Thai and Burmese governments. The lucky ones crossed over into Thailand to seek work as illegal immigrants or to appeal for refugee status. But about two thousand students still remained at the Karen National Union (KNU) guerrilla camp at Thay Baw Bo, where the Karens agreed to train them in the use of small and heavy arms. It was these remnants of the 8888 Uprising – as the bloody upheaval that began with student protests in Rangoon on 8 August 1988 has come to be known – that I went to interview in March of the following year. After a week in Bangkok working out logistics with the help of Thant Myint U (then working for one of the relief agencies dedicated to helping the Burmese refugees), I set out for the makeshift student camps along the Burmese border, some 280 kilometres north-west of Bangkok. ‘Bhama! Bhama!’ sighed the Thai driver of our pickup truck, shaking his head over every muddy ditch and pothole on our long drive through jungle and scrub. The Bhama and their eternal, infernal troubles! But how could he not feel sorry for the poor bastards? Here they were now, ragged stick figures emerging from their huts, shielding their eyes from the sun . . .

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The camp leader, a dark-skinned lad with soulful eyes and the wispy beard of an old Chinese scholar, seemed at a loss to answer the questions put to him by the relief workers I was with. They were asking what he thought were the camp’s most pressing needs when someone from the back of the hut called out, ‘An F-16!’ Nobody laughed. It was a refrain I was to hear everywhere I went, in camp after camp, where young men and women struck down by malaria and dengue fever slept on rickety bamboo platforms, protected from the elements only by canopies of plastic sheeting; where in the first light of dawn male and female students ran laps, did jumping jacks, scaled makeshift ladders, crawled on their bellies in the mud. Later, over their main meal of the day, they talked politics. The quieter ones talked about democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi and the elections promised for 1990. The scrappers talked about M-16s and AK-47s, about Howitzers and G-3s. They talked about blowing up military bases and key installations within Burma, about assassinating military leaders, about what it would take to capture Rangoon. ‘Just an F-16 and a million dollars! Honestly, Older Sister! That’s all it would take.’ Now, where had I heard such talk before? On the last morning at the last camp on my itinerary, I found myself facing an assembly of wraiths. They had been summoned for a pep talk from their Older Sister from America, a writer who might explain their plight to the world. I looked at my young compatriots, all standing at attention, their faces strangely luminous in the soft morning light. And I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. They waited. I froze. At last I leaned towards their leader who was standing next to me and whispered, ‘I really don’t know what to say.’ ‘Anything,’ he whispered back. ‘Just say anything. It doesn’t matter what. Whatever you say will give us strength.’ In the end I just wished them all luck and said I would pray for them. When they broke out in applause, my shame was complete. * * *

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Student refugee camp at Thay Baw Bo, January 1989

There was one other camp I wanted to visit – the main headquarters of the KNU at Manerplaw. I had been granted a meeting with Bo Mya. At a river landing that doubled as a lumberyard, I hitched a ride in a long-tailed boat with teenage Karen soldiers leaning on their M-16s and trying to look fierce. We cruised past green-gold banana plantations, past herds of water buffalo basking on their mud beaches, past naked little children splashing about in the sun-shot waters of the Moei River. Half an hour later, the boat nosed into a dock at the foot of a steep but well-worn path. I had reached what an American mercenary familiar with the area referred to as ‘the Pentagon of Free Karenland’. Manerplaw was a hive of hastily formed alliances. Leaders and representatives of a dozen ethnic minorities and dissident Burman groups had just arrived from all over the country, to discuss the student refugee crisis, as well as other regional issues. And they had come bearing almost as many acronyms as arms. The ABSDF (All Burma Students Democratic Front) was meeting

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in one bungalow, the NDF (National Democratic Front) in another, the DAB (Democratic Alliance of Burma) in a third. The ABSDF was the umbrella organisation of students gathered at the border. The NDF was the alliance of the major ethnic rebel organisations. The DAB was a new coalition formed by the NDF and other dissident groups inside and outside Burma. The NDF, meanwhile, had made a separate pact with the CPB (Communist Party of Burma). And I had thought that the PDP and the NULF of my father’s day were hard to keep straight. One morning a DAB representative came to inform me that after my meetings with the ABSDF and the NDF, the KNU chief would see me in his office. Glad of an excuse to leave the NDF bungalow – where a giant lizard had just fallen out of the thatch roof and narrowly missed the top of my head – I went to call on General Bo Mya. The old warrior, by all accounts, was still going strong. Earlier, I had asked Lydia, the wife of one of his aides, what the general was really like. ‘Oh, he’s a very sincere man,’ said Lydia with feeling, ‘very, very sincere. When he puts out an edict? And someone defies it? He personally executes that individual. A very sincere man.’ That night I dined with the general and his aides, at a long table set up in the head office. A battalion of orderlies hovered over us as Bo Mya pressed platters of duck, pork and vegetable stews on me with one hand, while feeding himself with the other. I had been invited to spend the night at his private residence, so we left the headquarters immediately after dinner: the general, his six bodyguards, Lydia and I. Soon we were shooting downriver in a long-tailed boat, a fine spray in our faces, the beam of a hand-held flashlight guiding us like a goblin moon. Alighting in the shadows of a torch-lit pontoon, we piled into a pickup truck that ground its way over a rocky path, at the end of which loomed a large wooden bungalow on stilts. A ghostly flicker lit up one of the rooms as we climbed the stairs. We paused on the landing long enough to see a group of teenagers gathered around a television set, watching Full Metal Jacket.

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The general’s wife, cheerful, plump and munching betel nut, was waiting to greet us. We sat on the plank floor exchanging pleasantries. There was only one chair in the room, and there was no question who owned it. By and by, men from the 6th Brigade came along for a war council, all of them chewing betel nut. They had changed from their uniforms into their longyis and were ready for bed, which for some of them was right there on the living-room floor. With the war council in session, I was free to look around me. On the walls were calendars and posters of all description, some still in their plastic wrappers. A Swiss chalet. A Hallmark sunset. Scenes from the Bible. A Japanese garden. A Dutch garden. The King and Queen of Thailand. There was a mounted buffalo head with the horns rotting off at the roots, and a medicine cabinet containing vitamins, quinine and a bottle of paediatric suspension. And there was the cuckoo clock, which I came to know well. At the stroke of every hour, following the cuckoo’s announcement, little figures in dirndls and lederhosen would trip out for a mechanical polka. Thirty minutes later, when one was least expecting it, the tune of ‘Freude, schöner Götterfunken’ would chime from some hidden instrument that sounded like a cross between a nickelodeon and a Nintendo game. Cuckoo clocks – the insomniac’s nightmare. Early the next morning I found the general seated on the floor, feeding a bottle to a baby. He said, without looking up, ‘The child’s father was killed in battle just last month.’ I later learned that the child’s father was his son-in-law. Still looking only at the baby, he said, ‘I am sorry and sad your father is no longer alive.’ It was the first time he had mentioned my father. Battles and baby bottles; cuckoo clocks and war councils; amputees in their hospital beds cheerfully posing for the cameras, brandishing their stumps and saying cheese. War, with its routine of killing and being killed, had become a way of life for more than one generation. I was glad my father was not around to see any of it. * * *

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Ten years later, I was back at the Burmese border – but at another stretch altogether, up north along the frontier with China. It was the spring of the new millennium, and I was on the Burma Road. This was the 717-mile highway that ran south-west from Kunming through the mountains of Yunnan in China, all the way to the border with Burma. Built in the 1930s when the Japanese threat loomed large, the road had been closed off for almost half a century. But now, with China’s borders slowly opening up for trade, the old road had come to life again. Chinese arms, consumer goods and illegal immigrants flowed in one direction; Burmese opium, teak and smuggled cars in the other. I wanted to see the old road before tourism and development replaced it with the inevitable six-lane superhighway. And I was lucky enough to land a magazine assignment to do just that: to drive the full length of the road, from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, to Ruili, the frontier town at the Burmese border. I had driven the length of this fabled highway once before. After my trip to the Thai border, I had hired a car with my friends Bertil and Hseng Houng Lintner, and followed the Burma Road along its serpentine course from Kunming to Ruili, and back. But that had been a gruelling seven-day drive in a tiny Peugeot, which a succession of Chinese juggernauts bearing Burmese teak logs kept trying to nudge off the road. No more roughing it this time, thank heaven. A generous expense account allowed for an upgrade to a Mitsubishi minivan, with a veteran long-distance driver at the wheel. I even had my own interpreter, Richard from Shanghai, as well as a fancy photographer, Theo from New York City, to capture our journey on film. ‘The prospect of travelling on the Burma Road filled me with dread,’ wrote Peter Goullart, the White Russian authority on Yunnan, in the late 1930s. ‘This great highway, although marvellously constructed, well kept and extremely picturesque, has been a notorious killer. It . . . runs along the edge of giddy precipices . . . I can never forget the sight of countless heavy trucks lying at the bottom of deep ravines, smashed beyond salvage.’

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Smashed beyond salvage was exactly what we would be, I feared, if Theo kept up her urgent calls for the driver to hti, hti! (stop, stop!). Richard turned round in his front seat to make big eyes. ‘The basic general situation is very dangerous!’ he scolded. But Theo was unstoppable. It was her first time in China, indeed in the Far East – and she was driving through Yunnan, a province rich in natural wonders and human curiosities where, according to a local guide book, ‘there are worldwide rare sceneries such as dense bamboo forest along both river banks, monkeys, birds, cliffs, etc’. And there were some twenty-five ethnic minorities, all lovable for their quaint customs. ‘It is really thrilling to see the performer climbing barefooted the pole mounted with 72 sharp knife blades, or jumping into the flames with red-hot chains brandishing in the hands. And if you are lucky enough to have “a drink of true love” with a Lisu lovely girl who loves singing and dancing, you will forget your way home. Her unsophisticated affection is really intoxicating.’ My problem was trying to convince Theo not to stop for every monkey, bird, cliff, etc. Our driver Mr Xiang’s problem was humouring Theo without getting us sideswiped by an oncoming truck and smashed beyond salvage. Richard’s problem was trying to steer Theo towards more convenient photo ops (‘Why don’t we take pictures of a nice temple before lunch?’). And Theo’s problem was trying to convince the rest of us that good lighting was more important than our tiresome three meals a day. Eventually, a compromise was reached: We rose at an indecently early hour so that Theo could have her precious morning light. Then, for the rest of the day, she would keep her hti, hti! to a minimum, and settle for shooting through her open window. We in turn had to settle for the dust she let in – the volleys of red grit that clogged our nostrils and throats as we zigzagged up and up into the mountains, then corkscrewed down and down into the valleys. Every now and then we stopped on a hairpin bend, to watch with morbid fascination as some overloaded lorry shuddered and wheezed through a threepoint turn with only inches beneath its wheels to spare. Mr Xiang was well past ordinary fatigue and seemed preternaturally

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alert. His eyes in the rear-view mirror were very wide and very red; his hair stood on end. I never once saw him blink. Richard, defeated, slept like a teenager, waking only to sudden jolts of chagrin, when he would mumble some titbit of local lore – ‘They call this the fourcolour road, did you know?’ – before nodding off again. Two weeks and seven hundred miles later, we arrived at that blessed stage in every journey: the rejuvenating halfway point. We were finally at the Burmese border – at the frontier town of Ruili! I had fond memories of Ruili from my previous trip with the Lintners. An irresistibly seedy little town back then, Ruili had become a Xanadu of casinos, brothels and karaoke bars; of flea markets, night markets and teenage doxies; of drug dealers, gem dealers and banks that stayed open till 10 p.m. At Ruili we bid farewell to Theo, who was flying back to Kunming and on to New York, leaving Richard, Mr Xiang and me to retrace our route by car. We dropped Theo off at the airport, and no sooner had we reached the open road than the men broke out in a cheer. The early wake-up calls for Theo’s sunrise shoots; the missed breakfasts and postponed lunches thanks to her endless hti, hti; the rushed dinners on account of her sunset shoots – the whole nightmare of photojournalism was over. It was time to celebrate. ‘We shall find nice restaurant,’ Richard declared, ‘to eat chicken feet.’ ‘And eight-treasure rice,’ said Mr Xiang, beaming in the rear-view mirror. Ever since I expressed a fondness for this sweet, greasy concoction, Mr Xiang had gone to great lengths to stop only at restaurants with eight-treasure rice on the menu. ‘But first,’ I said, sounding like Theo, ‘we must get to Tengchong.’ The idea had been brewing for the past few days. According to my map, if we took an arm of the main road leading west towards northern Burma, we would reach Tengchong by early evening. I had read somewhere that Tengchong until the 1930s was known as Tengyueh; and Tengyueh was where my grandfather Tong Chi-fan was born.

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I asked Richard if he knew anything about the name change from Tengyueh to Tengchong. ‘Well, I think it was maybe an accident,’ he replied. ‘Then some affairs happened, and it was changed.’ Poor Richard was flagging. Two weeks of round-the-clock interpreting in three languages – not to mention the odd dialect – had worn him down to vagueness. ‘What are those people eating over there, Richard?’ ‘Food. Some kind of fruit.’ ‘What’s the fruit called?’ ‘A common fruit.’ ‘And over there? What have they planted on those terraces?’ ‘Vegetables. Maybe a kind of vegetable like a cabbage. A different kind of cabbage.’ We were all worn out. At a roadside hut where we stopped for tea, Mr Xiang fell asleep and was so dead to the world that even having his face sprayed with ice-cold water failed to rouse him. Richard had to practically rough him up to get him on his feet. I myself had developed a fever and was nursing an incipient migraine. By the time we arrived at Tengchong, I had a raging sinus infection. The hotel we checked into was brand new: carpets were being glued to the stairs even as I dragged myself up to my room. I fell into bed and was just dropping off when Richard knocked at my door. ‘We must go,’ he said, standing stiffly at the threshold, ‘to hospital.’ He had been increasingly concerned about my fever and chills. ‘No hospital, Richard,’ I croaked. Hospital was the last place I wanted to go in a town like this. The medical establishments we had passed on the way – DR ZHANG ZUNXIAN’S CLINIC FOR COMPLICATED DISEASES and THERAPY FOR THE SEXUAL THING – didn’t seem very promising. ‘But you are sick –’ ‘Just a little sick. And I’ll be all right if I sleep. You and Mr Xiang go and get something to eat.’ ‘But we are not hungry –’ ‘Please go and eat! Then you can ask people around town, in the

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restaurant, in some shops, maybe at the police station, whether anyone knows the name Tong, how I can find any families with the name of Tong.’ ‘Ah, you would like to find your four bears?’ Bears? Who said anything about bears? Then I understood. ‘Yes, my ancestors,’ I said. I was deep in sleep when Richard knocked again. ‘I found some informations,’ he said, grinning proudly. He closed the door behind him before delivering his report. ‘Tong is the name of one of the biggest clans in Tengchong. There are East Tong and West Tong. And nearby, about half-hour away, there is a village of the West Tong. We can go there this evening, if you are feeling better.’ I was feeling better. I was right as rain. We pulled up at the gate to the West Tong village at dusk. Squatting by the side of the gate was an elderly peasant couple in threadbare Mao suits. Richard got out to state the nature of our business. ‘America,’ I heard him say, and ‘Tong’ – again and again. The old couple rose as one and approached my side of the car. Before I could step out to greet them, the old man stuck his head through my window and studied me up close. Laughing and chattering, he withdrew to make way for his wife. The old lady took her time sizing me up; then, twisting her neck back through the window, she nodded yes, yes. ‘What are they saying, Richard?’ ‘I told them that you are a Tong from America and you would like to find your forebears. They are saying you have the Tong face. Definitely the Tong face. And now we must see the man with the book.’ We left the car to follow the old couple down a narrow lane that ran between high mud walls, frightening two chickens and a little black pig in our path. ‘What man with the book?’ I asked Richard.

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‘There is a man in the village who keeps the ja-pu, a book of records, concerning the Tong clan.’ ‘Ah, the archivist!’ We turned into the doorway of the archivist’s dwelling, and stood waiting in the gloom until an elderly man, also dressed in a Mao suit, emerged from an inner room. Once again Richard went through the nature of our quest. ‘So.’ The archivist nodded, smiling at me. ‘So.’ Signalling me to wait, he disappeared for a while, returning with an armload of ledgers. By now it was dark, but a small boy appeared out of nowhere with a light bulb in his hand. He climbed onto a rickety wooden table, above which a bare socket dangled from a cord. The boy screwed the bulb into the socket, and a cone of light fell onto the head of the archivist. The books were bound in coarse mulberry paper. On the reverse of each leaf of the ricepaper was a faint butterfly emblem. Blocks of handwritten characters filled the pages – characters so regimented they might have been machine-printed. ‘And how do you say your grandfather’s name again?’ Richard asked. ‘Tong Chi-fan.’ The archivist looked blank. Richard said, ‘Do you know how to say that in Chinese?’ ‘No, all I know is how it’s spelled in English. Here. I’ll write it down for you.’ I handed him my notebook. ‘Ah, Tong Chi-fan.’ Richard pronounced it exactly as I had, but for some reason the archivist could now understand. He licked his fingers and turned page after page, book after book, until, reaching the last page of the last volume, he shook his head regretfully. No. Sorry. No Tong Chi-fan. ‘Do you know where your grandfather was born?’ Richard persisted. ‘This man says maybe if you know the town . . .’ ‘Richard, I don’t know.’

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‘. . . or the village? He says there is another Tong village not far away, by the name of Manchiyen.’ Manchiyen? I knew that name! I had heard it somewhere. But where? ‘Ask him how we get to that village, please, Richard.’ Richard asked, and was told. ‘So we will go tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘At dawn.’ He was pulling a Theo on me. A Tong! From America! The archivist of Manchiyen seized my hand and began pumping it. In the courtyard of his ancient timber house, with

Grandfather Tong Chi-fan, circa 1930. Courtesy of the estate of U Ko Ko.

its wooden shutters and roof of red tiles, a plump woman was sorting through heaps of spinach. Hello, hello! A Tong, did you say? The news had certainly spread quickly. She wiped her hands on the sides of her skirt and took my arm. She wanted to show me something. On the wall of the room facing the courtyard was a portrait, a photograph in a glass frame.

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‘Tong Chi-yu,’ she said, pointing to the vaguely familiar face. Tong Chi-yu? Who is Tong Chi-Yu? I turned to Richard. The woman’s eyes widened. You don’t know? Tong Chi-yu is Tong Chi-fan’s brother, that’s who. ‘Tong Chi-fan’s brother,’ Richard repeated, staring at the photograph in a daze. My great-uncle had been a prosperous Chinese merchant from the look of it: a burgher with an implacable, faintly weary stare. But that look was my look – no mistake about it. That chin was my chin! Those eyes with the dark pouches were, alas, mine exactly. The old couple who had come up to the car at the West Tong village to stare at me hadn’t been joking: I had the Tong features, all right. The archivist and his wife had vanished into the house. Now they reappeared, in a new state of excitement. She is alive! She is still alive! the wife announced, clapping her hands. ‘She is still alive,’ said Richard to me. ‘Who is still alive, Richard?’ ‘I don’t know,’ cried Richard. ‘I don’t know who is still alive.’ The old lady, Mr Xiang intervened. ‘The old lady,’ said Richard to me. ‘But which old lady? What is everyone talking about?’ The widow of Tong Chi-yu, said the archivist’s wife to Mr Xiang. The widow of Tong Chi-yu, said Mr Xiang to Richard. ‘The widow of Tong Chi-yu,’ said Richard to me. The archivist’s wife sidled up to me and rubbed her plump red hands as though offering an illicit pleasure. ‘She wants to know,’ said Richard, ‘if you would like to see the widow. Because she is still alive.’ But of course. Any widow of any great-uncle – dead or alive – had to be seen. The widow lay in a darkened room, on a wooden kang, under an old sheepskin coverlet. Flat on her back, swaddled in heavy rags and furs, she turned her head slightly to look up at me with cloudy, unblinking eyes. Not quite right in the head, the archivist indicated apologetically, giving

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his skull a few raps with his knuckles. But at ninety-five . . . ? ‘Richard,’ I said, ‘who are these people? I mean, how exactly am I related to them?’ Ah, the very question I was anticipating, the archivist seemed to be saying, even as he hurried off to fetch evidence. The books he brought out looked the same as his counterpart’s in the West Tong village: the same mulberry paper covers, the same ricepaper pages with the butterfly emblem. ‘The ja-pu!’ I said, showing off. Ja-pu, ja-pu! the old man affirmed. Then, licking his fingers, he thumbed through the pages. Here! he said, pointing out a block of text to Richard. ‘Tong Chi-fan went to Burma,’ said Richard, reading slowly. ‘And some of his brothers went also.’ ‘Yes, yes. And what else?’ ‘In this book,’ said Richard, still reading, ‘they mention a son of Tong Chi-fan. He was working in the transportation office, then he owned a newspaper in Rangoon.’ ‘My father!’ I shouted. ‘That’s my father!’ ‘The Nation,’ said Richard, ‘was the name of his newspaper.’ ‘My father!’ I shouted again, turning from Richard, to the archivist, to the archivist’s wife, to Mr Xiang, and back to Richard again. All of them were nodding and beaming. So you are from Burma, said the archivist. ‘He says if you are from Burma,’ said Richard, ‘then maybe you can speak, in Burmese, to the man who wrote these records.’ ‘And where is this man?’ ‘He lives just round the corner,’ said Richard after asking the archivist. ‘He is the grandson of Tong Chi-yu, your grandfather’s brother. So he should be something like your cousin.’ My second cousin was in the privy when our party – now consisting of nearly half the village – descended on him. The bewildered young woman in the courtyard called out to him in some consternation. The exchange that followed was comprehensible enough: You have visitors!

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Tell them I’m taking a shit! Looking annoyed as he stepped out of the privy was a wiry, middleaged man with bristling black hair. This lady, said Richard, presenting me, is the granddaughter of Tong Chi-fan. My cousin’s eyes – hooded Tong eyes with those heavy pouches – darted about in confusion. Which cousin? What granddaughter? I could see him thinking. ‘You speak Burmese?’ I asked him. ‘Yes,’ he answered warily. ‘I am the granddaughter,’ I said, ‘of Tong Chi-fan.’ My cousin gaped. ‘My father’s name was U Law-Yone. He was Tong Chi-fan’s eldest son.’ ‘U Law-Yone!’ He reached out to shake my hand mechanically, while searching the faces of the onlookers as though to uncover a hoax. ‘But U Law-Yone,’ he said to me in heavily accented Burmese, ‘was a newspaper editor in Rangoon. He was Tong Chi-fan’s eldest son.’ ‘That’s what I just said. And that U Law-Yone was my father.’ ‘But U Law-Yone had a son,’ said my cousin, as if still trying to shake himself out of a heavy sleep. ‘A doctor, who studied in England. America is where he lives now.’ ‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘My older brother Byron.’ ‘And a daughter,’ said my cousin. ‘U Law-Yone had a daughter. A writer. She too lives in America. A writer of books.’ ‘Cousin, that’s me,’ I said, laughing. ‘You! U Law-Yone’s daughter. Your name is –’ ‘Wendy.’ ‘Windy! Windy! Windy Law-Yone! I know about you, Younger Sister! I know all about you. I read in the newspapers about how you tried to escape from Burma and went to jail. I wrote your name in the ja-pu. I did. The ja-pu! Where’s the ja-pu? Never mind. I even told my wife about you.’ He turned to the attractive, much younger, woman by his side.

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‘Tell her I told you about her,’ he ordered in Burmese. Then he laughed. ‘What am I saying? She doesn’t speak Burmese. She is from the Lisu tribe,’ he said, distracted. ‘Where is the tea? But, Sister Windy, how can this be? That you have come all the way from Burma?’ ‘Not Burma’, I said. ‘I left Burma ages ago. America.’ ‘America. Of course. I knew that. Why did I say Burma? I don’t know what I’m saying. Chairs. You must sit. You and your friends.’ ‘Richard,’ I said. ‘And Mr Xiang.’ He went from one to the other, shaking hands. It was only when we sat down and I turned to ask Richard something that I noticed that he was choked up, and Mr Xiang was wiping a tear from his cheek. ‘What is your name, Older Brother?’ I asked. ‘Tong Kai-chi, just Tong Kai-chi,’ he said, suddenly shy. ‘But I must ask you, Younger Sister Windy. How is it that you have come such a distance from America to find us, all the way over here, deep in the backside of China?’ I told him about my interest in the Burma Road. ‘The Old Road! Excellent. But where is that tea? I am trying to learn English. Let me show you my English writing.’ We got up and went to see. In a tiny cubicle that appeared to be his private space was a shelf with a pile of old newspaper clippings, and a few books in Chinese. Above the shelf was a hand-lettered sign: HELLO. YOU ARE WELCOME. WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO? ‘Without English,’ said my cousin, ‘there is no profit to be had. Is that not so, Windy, eh? You, my dear cousin, are to be admired. You have English. You can wander hither and thither about the big world. You are so fortunate. But mine is a narrow life, narrow and cramped. An endless crossing back and forth between China and Burma. I too am a wanderer, you see. It runs in our blood. I buy, I sell, I trade – a little of this, a little of that. But times, as you know, are hard, very hard. But you are a writer, writers like books . . . You must have my books,’ he said, sweeping them off the shelf and into my hands. ‘Thank you, oh thank you, Older Brother.’ I handed them back to

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him. ‘They would be of no use to me. You have no English, but I have even greater cause for shame. I, who am part Chinese, cannot speak one word of the language.’ ‘But learning Chinese should be nothing for you . . . Let me tell you about learning Chinese –’ ‘Older Brother,’ I interrupted, ‘I don’t know how to say this, but I must leave very soon.’ ‘Leave? You cannot leave! How can you leave, now that we have found each other?’ ‘I have a plane to catch in a few hours,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t plan things right. I really didn’t expect to find you here. I just came to Tengchong to see what the place was like, to find my grandfather’s home.’ ‘His home is gone,’ said Tong Kai-chi, suddenly deflated. ‘Long gone. But that’ – he pointed to a newer wing on one side of the courtyard – ‘that part of the house was built with money your grandfather sent home from Burma. That’s his home. It’s your home too now. Can’t you stay? At least for one night?’ ‘I can’t, cousin, I’m sorry. I wish I could, but I really can’t. Anyway, this is just the beginning. Now that I’ve found you all, my new relatives, I can think about coming back for a longer visit.’ ‘With your family,’ he said. ‘With all your family. Brothers and sisters. Children, even. I have two children, you know. And two wives. But this one over here is the one I love. She is twenty-five. The other one’s off somewhere or other.’ ‘Good for you, cousin. But now I really must go.’ ‘Then take these newspapers,’ he said. ‘If you won’t take the books. Take them please. You must take something from me.’ ‘I’ll take pictures,’ I said. ‘Of the whole family.’ ‘Pictures! Call everybody!’ he shouted – in Burmese, I noticed; yet the next thing I knew, the entire clan had been summoned and were arguing and arranging themselves for a group portrait on the front porch. Behind me I heard Richard gasp. The archivist and his wife were frogmarching the old widow into the courtyard. They propped her

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up in a chair, motioning me to hurry up and take a picture, quick! As soon as I had clicked, the archivist’s wife bent to look into the widow’s eyes. She is alive! She is still alive! she sang. The widow blinked. I heard from my new-found Yunnanese cousin about a month after my return to the States. I had sent him a few trinkets for his family along with the photographs I had taken of the Tong clan. Back came a letter in Burmese, thanking me briskly for the gifts (‘two bags, one address book, etc.’) then moving on to ‘a private matter.’ A friend of his had in his possession an American currency note on which was printed: ‘One Million Series. 1935. A 0077518 D’. On the front of the note it said UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. On the back: NON-NEGOTIABLE – NOT LEGAL TENDER. Could I look into the matter and let him know what such a note might be worth? Now, what was it about the currency note that rang a bell? Something about my grandfather Tong . . . Hadn’t he been involved in some currency scam also? I remembered the story vaguely from Dad’s prison notebooks. That set of exercise books he had filled in jail were kept with my birth certificate and other important documents in a brown briefcase that had belonged to Alban. I brought out the briefcase from storage and popped it open. Ah, here it was. My Life, Vol. I. I flipped through the pages and soon found the passage I sought: Father decided he was going to make a fortune the easy way when he fell in with a Burmese con man called Ba Lun. Having come into possession of two ten-rupee notes with the same serial number, he persuaded Father to invest his fortune in getting the right kind of paper because he claimed he had mastered the art of duplicating currency notes . . . ‘No matter where we go, no matter where we live,’ was how my cousin had begun his letter, ‘it is important that we know our roots.’ Well said, Cousin Tong Kai-chi! But now it was Dad’s exercise book that held me in its grip. It was

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a long time since I had read his prison notebooks. I couldn’t even remember how they had come into my possession, but Mum must have entrusted them to me some time after Alban’s death. I was almost at the end of Vol. I when I sat up, astonished. The Japanese were at it hammer and tongs and construction of the Burma Road had begun. Sims was grappling with the problem of shifting a huge volume of traffic (Lend Lease) via Lashio and he ordered me to Kunming. It was not until the end of 1937 that I managed to take the new road in a hired Ford Vanette . . . That was a memorable trip, winding up and down mountains, crossing now the Salween, now the Mekong, until Hsiahkwan was reached. I parked in the courtyard of my uncle’s house, one of my father’s brothers who had cornered the brick-tea and orpiment markets as far afield as Calcutta and Kalimpong . . . At Pao Shan we decided to detour. We would walk a hundred miles over the ranges to Tengyueh and have the van meet us at Lungling. I was nothing loath because Tengyueh (currently renamed Tengchong) was where my father hailed from. The climb was most unpleasant but I made it with only the loss of one toenail. On the way to the British Consulate we passed Manchiyen. Manchiyen! That’s where I had heard the name of the Tong village before! . . . ‘Why, that’s my father’s native place,’ I said and instinctively found our home. I recognised it the moment I entered the courtyard. I could hardly fail to, for facing the open doorway was an enlarged photograph of myself! Having explored Tengyueh thoroughly . . . and dispensed largesse to all the Tong tribe of relatives, we wended our way home.

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I closed the notebook, chastened. How could I have gone all the way to China, all the way to Dad’s ancestral home, without having consulted his notebooks? How could I have gone to the Thai border, for that matter, back to the very ground of his failed revolution? Enough! My avoidance had gone on long enough. It was time I read through the rest of Dad’s papers. I went to the closet and started taking down the stack of cardboard boxes in the corner.

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‘Is it possible,’ I asked Hubert, ‘that Dad could have been mistaken?’ ‘Dad? Mistaken?’ My brother’s smile was ironic. ‘I mean, do you think Dad was a fabulist?’ Hubert snorted. ‘Of course he was a fabulist.’ My brother’s view of the old man was more jaundiced, I knew, than my own. Still, I couldn’t believe that our father would be leading us on such a wild goose chase. It was the spring of 2000, a month after my Burma Road trip. Hubert and I were in London, footsore and perplexed after another afternoon of fruitless research – this time at the Public Record Office at Kew. The PRO was the alpha and omega of imperial record-keeping, the repository for every class of biographical and historical documentation covering the armed forces of the British Empire. Another day of grimy train rides, overcrowded tube stations, and bewildering forays into the genealogical record centres of Greater London; another dead end. We had been to the British Library, to the Family Records Centre, and now to the Public Record Office. Everywhere we had come up empty-handed. But I at least felt vindicated. It hadn’t been easy to convince Hubert that despite repeated trips to London over the years, despite plodding searches through all the other obvious repositories (the Oriental and India Office Records of the British Library, the National Army Museum, the Society of Genealogists), I was unable to dig up anything more substantial on our British grandfather Eric Sydney Percy-Smith than a standard profile of his military career in the army lists.

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My quest was instigated by a new book I had embarked on: one that would link the histories of my two grandfathers, whose paths had crossed in Burma, with a history of the old Burma Road. But I wasn’t getting very far with my research. Hubert, who was visiting from Israel, volunteered his assistance for a day or two. But soon he too was stumped. ‘This thing,’ he said wearily, ‘is getting to be like an investigation of something . . . something like a cross between Diderot and the Encyclopaedia Sinica.’ He had called Dad a fabulist. But fabulists, I thought, did not supply such specific dates, or such exactly worded obituaries for their fabrications. ‘The obituary in the London Times [sic] concluded with the prayer, “Peace be to his soul, if such a restless spirit can find peace,”’ my father had written about his father-in-law, Percy-Smith. But there was no such obituary – or any obituary at all for Percy-Smith – in The Times Index volumes I searched through again and again: not in 1937 (the year of his death by my father’s account), not in any of the ten years preceding or the ten years following, which I went on to check, just in case my father had been off by a decade either way. Could Percy-Smith be listed under Smith, Percy? I checked through the S’s. No, there were no obituaries for any SMITHS, Percy – or for any SMITHS, Eric – in The Times between 1927 and 1947. At the British Library’s India Office Records, I had gone through the fastidiously hand-lettered registers of births and baptisms, marriages and burials of European and Eurasian Christians in the Bombay, Madras and Bengal presidencies. I found one or two Eric Sydneys, an Eric Percy, and many Smiths – even a Percy Smith or two. But no Eric Sydney Percy-Smith. Or Eric Percy-Smith. Or Eric P. Smith. Or Eric Smith. At the Public Record Office at Kew I had looked through the General Registration of births, deaths and marriages for England and Wales (each quarter of each year separately indexed); through CD-roms for the 1881 and 1901 censuses for England and Wales; through more lists of overseas births recorded by British consuls. Still no Eric Sydney Percy-Smith, or any of his likely permutations.

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At the Family Records Centre in Clerkenwell, a helpful person in the Office of National Statistics had steered me to the Office of the Registrar General, India, Ministry of Home Affairs, West Block 1RK, Puram, New Delhi 110066. I wrote. Months passed. I wrote again. Still no reply. I tried to send a fax. ‘Hello! Hello!’ came a plaintive male voice instead of the two-tone trill of a fax going through. I picked up the phone. ‘I am trying to fax you something,’ I said. ‘Could you please hang up?’ ‘Hello?’ ‘Please put the phone down. I am trying to send you a fax.’ ‘Yes, thank you.’ I redialled the fax number; I heard two rings. Then, ‘Hello, hello?’ I gave up. I went to the Society of Genealogists to look through their India Index compiled by one of their past librarians, whose name, curiously enough, was Hubert Kendall Percy-Smith. Could this be a possible relation? Back I went to the India Office Records, where within the archives called the Administrative Series I found the file on Hubert Kendall Percy Smith (no hyphen, I noted). Percy Smith, Hubert Kendall: DOB: 9/9/1897. Too young, I decided, to be a brother of Eric Sydney, and clearly not a son. In the file of records was an evaluation of Hubert Kendall by a senior officer: ‘Plenty of brains but doesn’t play enough games; needs more taste for active pursuits. Satisfactory work, above average in accounts, but only a fair rider. Personality needs developing. Takes duties rather too lightly. Of temperate habits, but with selfcomplacently weak point in his character. Lacking in power of command, tactical ability, and military imagination.’ Not of the right calibre, I concluded, to be related to any grandfather of mine. Eric Sydney Percy-Smith was a product of Sandhurst, my father had said. I telephoned the librarian at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and asked if my grandfather had in fact been enrolled there, expecting to be told I would have to send my enquiry in writing.

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Instead the librarian said he would go and check. He was back in less than five minutes. Yes, Eric Sydney Percy-Smith was indeed a graduate of Sandhurst, attending from August 1897 to August 1898, with conduct marked ‘very good’. Excellent. Could the librarian tell me anything else about my grandfather? Unfortunately, he could not. The only information held on Gentlemen Candidates prior to 1947 were one-line comments in the Academy’s ledgers. I still didn’t know where my grandfather was born. Perhaps, though, this would be spelled out in his marriage records, which had to be somewhere in the Ecclesiastical Returns of the India Office Records. So back it was to the British Library, this time to trawl through the marriage registers. Here I made an astonishing discovery. No Eric Sydney Percy-Smith had been married in Burma; or in India; or in England during my grandfather’s time. I looked again – and again. Then, suddenly, as I was leafing through the selfsame registers for the third or fourth time, it dawned on me: My grandfather and grandmother had never actually been married: not in the eyes of the colonial government, anyway. I hadn’t thought about my grandmother, Daw Phwa Tint, for a long time; but now the old memories came rushing back and I saw her as she was – not as the semi-mythical young girl washing by the well; or as the distraught mother weeping in front of the convent gates; I saw her as she was when I knew her best: a peevish old tyrant, heavy with complaint and self-importance. I remembered her slow, almost ceremonial pace and how I thought it was affected. In fact she was probably having a series of small strokes even then. We used to laugh when, increasingly upset that one of her long sulks was being ignored, she would suddenly struggle up from her chair. Rising to her feet, gathering up all her strength, she would tilt forward to shout at the top of her lungs, in Burmese, ‘Listen to me! Do you know who I am? My husband was Colonel (she pronounced the word Cahnair, the Burmese way) Percy-Smith! He sent me biscuits, wherever he was! Only the best biscuits! From Barnett Brothers! Do any of you know who I am? My name is Mingadaw [Lady] Daw Phwa Tint!’

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What else had my father written about his father-in-law? ‘He went off to catch the bongo, which he sold to the New York zoo, and to start a Game Sanctuary in Kenya.’ What on earth was the bongo? I wondered. And the game sanctuary sounded a bit far-fetched. Where to start the search for this particular track? Where else but at the good old Newspaper Library at Colindale. Once again I was rewarded. Here were old issues of the Kenyan East African Standard, going back to the 1930s . . . and these weren’t even on microfilm! How very like Burma in the fifties was Kenya in the thirties. Here too were ads for Sanatogen, Eno’s Fruit Salts, Zam-Buk Ointment, Sloan’s Linament; for Rinso, Flit (‘Kill flies with Flit or they may kill you’) and Vim. Here too were available the fashion fabrics of my mother’s generation: Robia voile and Tootal cottons. The East African Standard’s headlines, however, were not exactly reminiscent of The Nation’s. CONTAGIOUS ABORTION IN DAIRY HERDS MORTALITY IN POULTRY – A DIRGE OF DEATH, DISEASE AND DEFECT FEEDING JAM TO COWS AS EXPERIMENT DOSING SHEEP FOR WORMS THE IMPORTANCE OF PIG LITTER RECORDING

Kenya, it appeared, was in need of more settlers. The British government was encouraging settlement by awarding land grants at £1 an acre. But Kenya, according to Mrs Florence Ridell, author of I Go Wandering, was ‘a country with a curse’. ‘More people I met there committed suicide than I can count in all the other years of my life together,’ declared Mrs Ridell. ‘They were all men and all young. In quite a few of the cases no definite reason was found for this taking their own lives. No doubt the latitude and altitude had something to do with it.’ My grandfather would not have been susceptible to the Kenya curse, not after his long exposure to the vertical rays of the Burmese sun.

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He would have been in Kenya, in any case, not for the weather but for the game. For here in East Africa was the mecca of big-game hunters where lions were so common as to be considered vermin; where forty-three rhinos were shot in the space of two months by Mr E. Cunningham, Honorary Game Warden. I glanced at my watch and realised that the library would soon be closing. It was my third day at Colindale, and I still hadn’t come across any mention of Colonel Percy-Smith. Then suddenly, with just fifteen minutes to go before closing time, I hit the jackpot: News from Nanyuki Friday, 13 December 1935 Colonel Percy Smith, known to his intimates as ‘Bongo’ Smith, is busy developing his 550 acres of land on the upper Liki River – most of which he intends to convert into a game sanctuary. The three-quarter grown female bongo antelope which he shipped to the States some two years ago is in excellent health and is still drawing crowds to the Bronx Zoo in New York. So Dad’s bongo and game sanctuary story was true! All I had to find now was an obituary – even if it wasn’t in The Times. I filled in my order form for the August–September 1937 issues of the East African Standard, with an impatient librarian looking at the clock and breathing down my neck. The next day it was waiting for me: the big red volume of brittle newsprint already shedding its dandruff with every turn of a page. I found it almost immediately: proof that my grandfather had actually ended his days in East Africa. Obituary: Friday, 10 September 1937 The late Lieut.-Col. E.S. Percy-Smith, whose sudden death in Marseilles while en route to Kenya has already been announced in the EAS, first came to this colony about 1920 on a shooting

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expedition. Prior to the war, in which he served in the Near East, he was in the Burma Police, having transferred to that service from the Army. He had been in India for many years, with the 19th Jat Lancers. After the shooting expedition in 1920, he visited the Colony again four years later, eventually taking up a farm at Ol Likia, Nanyuki. He was the first to capture and transport to Europe alive a bongo. This he did in June 1932 after camping on the edge of the Aberdares for four months and exercising almost superhuman patience and skill. The rarity of the bongo, and its shyness and timidity, are proverbial, but the late Colonel Percy-Smith at last managed to capture a half-grown female in a noose, bring her safely to camp, and later transport her to the New York Zoo, where ‘Doreen’, as she was christened, became a firm favourite. A year or so later he made another visit to the Colony and succeeded in capturing a full-grown male bongo, which he sent to the zoo at Rome. These two bongos are the only ones alive and in captivity today. But the real eureka moment in my long search for Percy-Smith came only in 2005, after I had moved to London to live with John. It was on my birthday that he handed me the surprise. ‘How beautiful!’ I said, trying not to tear the wrapping paper I had admired at Falkiners, my favourite London stationer. ‘Well, wait till you see what it is,’ said John. ‘You may not find it so beautiful.’ The book was a slightly worn, plastic-wrapped coffee-table publication titled Paradise Found: The Story of the Mount Kenya Safari Club. Intrigued, I turned to the first chapter. Love in a hut, with water and a crust Is – Love, forgive us! – cinders, ashes, dust Love in a palace is, perhaps, at last More grievous torment than a hermit’s fast – Keats

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The words fluttered over Eric Sydney Percy Smith’s lips as he stood transfixed, title deeds in hand, gazing at his new home – an angelic grass-thatched cottage nestled in the quiet foothills above Kenya’s sleepy Equator town, Nanyuki. I couldn’t believe it. The first mention of my grandfather outside of Dad’s notebooks and the India Army Lists! ‘But John! How on earth, where on earth . . . ? Don’t tell me you already had this in the Collection?’ The Collection was a library on Burma – part of John’s stock of rare books. John said, ‘When you told me your grandfather was a big-game hunter I just looked up a bibliography of books on big-game hunting, got in touch with the bibliographer to see if he had ever come across the name Percy-Smith, and he set me in the right direction. ‘Quite a bastard, your grandfather,’ he added, taking me aback. ‘What do you mean?’ I bristled. ‘Read on.’ I not only read on: I tracked down the author of Paradise Found. Lucinda de Laroque was a former Kenya resident who had been commissioned to write the text for the illustrated history of the Mount Kenya Safari Club. She had written it, she said, some fifteen years ago and could no longer recall many of her sources, but she had told the story in a way she thought most suitable to the subject: ‘as a kind of fairy-tale romance’. I could see from my initial reading that Grandfather’s African adventure was nothing if not romantic. There was only one thing missing from the romance: my grandmother. But I didn’t care. I said to John, ‘If this is what you mean, it’s hardly the worst thing in the world.’ I couldn’t wait to get back to the fairy-tale in Paradise Found. It seems that sometime in his mid-fifties, long after his tour of duty in Burma had come to an end, Grandfather went to India, where he met a rich American by the name of Myra Wheeler. Myra was a widow, or possibly a divorcee, but an heiress in any event from Pasadena, California. Myra and Eric fell in love, ‘and the two were now inseparable’. Eric had been planning to move to Kenya for some time, and it

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didn’t take much to persuade Myra to move with him. He had gone ahead to reconnoitre in 1935, and soon found exactly what he was looking for: seven hundred acres of pristine forest at the foot of Mount Kenya. ‘Percy’s feverish telegram was succinct. “Darling, I have found the most perfect spot. Come.” Myra cabled back, “I’m on my way.”’ Myra brought silk tents from India for camping out until more substantial lodgings could be built. These tents were lined with yellow silk and fitted out with verandas, cedar floors, Persian carpets and ‘rare tapestries’. Eric had put up a couple of pens for his captured bongos; for this was the other thing that had drawn him to Africa: the challenge of bagging a live bongo for sale to zoos abroad. Bongos were among the world’s most elusive antelopes, and he had made a name for himself because the only two specimens alive in captivity had been caught by him. Not for nothing was he nicknamed ‘Bongo’ Smith. It was in Marseilles, on the way home from one of his bongo deliveries, that tragedy struck. Alone and in unfamiliar surroundings, Percy sought solace from his solitary travels in the neon nightclubs and downtown bars that scatter Europe’s major cities; needing Dutch courage in the company of strangers, he sought the whisky bottle. Drink always encouraged Percy to rise to the occasion. It enabled him to play showman, amazing his fellow drinkers with wild tales of bongos, hogs, and the other wild beasts of the African plains. But as his level of intoxication rose, so too did the bravado and boasting. Finally, Percy’s macho theatrics were challenged – by a groggy French sailor fresh into port. Both heavily intoxicated, and both with egos large enough to swell any wave, the resort (after verbal affrontages) to physical proof of their manliness was inevitable. The blow was to Percy’s head – and fatal. The news left Mrs Wheeler heartbroken, her blissful mountain retreat shattered into irreparable pieces.

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A bastard and a drunk! – and I thought my grandfather was just a run-of-the-mill, polo-playing colonial official, a more or less worthy contemporary of George Orwell, who had also served in Burma with the Imperial Police. (In Orwell’s case, the experience was so distasteful that he resigned from the service at the earliest opportunity. ‘I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear,’ he confessed years later. He did of course make it clear: in his novel Burmese Days, and more succinctly, in his essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’.) Paradise Found had a bitter-sweet ending: Eric’s death had left Myra heartbroken and homebound for Pasadena. But the property they had staked out saw a steady increase in value. From a humble 700-acre farm it was turned into a game sanctuary (you were right again, Dad!), then into the hunting retreat of the film star William Holden, where King Solomon’s Mines was filmed; and finally into the exclusive Mount Kenya Safari Club, whose members included Winston Churchill and Bing Crosby.

Bongo (tragelaphus eurycerus), 1894. From Paul du Chaillu’s Travels in Equatorial Africa.

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Despite the perverse pleasure that Grandfather’s romance afforded me, I was glad of one thing: my mother was no longer alive to hear about it. I remembered the lengthy deliberations I had been through when it first dawned on me that her parents had never been officially married. How would I tell her? How would she react? She was already in her late eighties then, and it was difficult to gauge her memory. What did she even remember about her parents? One of Mum’s stock phrases in response to questions about her health or state of mind was ‘everything’s under control’. I could see, towards the end, how she had succeeded in getting everything under control – her memory included. She had willed herself, it seemed to me, into forgetfulness. I had gone to her nursing home in Maryland soon after my return from London, having decided that I would gently let her in on my findings. I suppose I wanted to see if I could prise her out of her shell of self-induced amnesia just once, with a little shock from the past. My mother greeted me with the usual expression of astonishment followed by the obligatory delight. I began the preamble I had rehearsed in my mind, about my research into family history. Then I lost my nerve. Clearing my throat, I asked whether she thought it was possible that her mother and father might never have been married. ‘Oh, no,’ said Mum mildly. ‘Of course they were married.’ Then came the serene non sequitur. ‘My mother was a beautiful young girl, washing by a well, when my father came up on a white horse . . .’ In the summer of 2004, at the age of ninety-four, Mum developed a blood clot in one leg and was taken to hospital for tests. These tests called for treatments that led to further complications requiring further tests that ended in the final collapse of her heart. I had talked to her on the phone just the day before, when none of us knew how very close she was to the end (for there had been other scares, other treatments, and she had withstood each of them, prevailing in better physical health than most of her contemporaries).

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Grandfather Eric Percy-Smith, circa 1908

She sounded weary, groggy and raspy from the tubes pushed down her throat. All her nightmares – of hospitals, pain, helplessness – that had kept her for so long in a chronic state of fright had now come true. Yet when I said how sorry I was that she’d been subjected to so many unpleasant tests, her old self responded. ‘Oh, you’ve no idea what I’ve been through,’ she said, with an ironic tut-tut. ‘She gave me something like that too,’ said Marlaine when we spoke later that day. Marlaine had been her principal carer in recent years, ever since her move to the nursing home. ‘The poor thing was so

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miserable, wincing and sucking in her breath whenever they just touched her legs, or moved her from the bed to the wheelchair. And she was scared out of her mind, probably. But later, when I tried to commiserate, she said, “Mmm, yes, darling . . . not something you’d wish on your worst enemy.”’ At least, I thought, Mum’s fund of mechanical pleasantries was still intact. Of late, though, I had noticed stray impurities floating up to mar the surface of her steadfast decorum. ‘All bullshit, man!’ she would remark – to herself, ostensibly, though by no means under her breath – during a lull in a conversation. Then, after a beat, ‘As Daddy would say.’ There was something poignant about the coda of attribution. She was only repeating her husband’s strong language. Yes, now and then a voice would rise out of the remote past: a voice that spoke its mind. She had developed an irritating habit of closing her eyes while someone else was talking. ‘What’s the matter? Something wrong?’ I asked. ‘No, no. No, darling,’ she would reply, widening her eyes in apology for the lapse. ‘Just a little dizzy.’ Or: ‘Just a little tired. Nothing really.’ Her eyes, in the old days, were stereoscopic instruments that could see clear through doors I had shut, keyholes I had stopped up. They could penetrate every layer of deceit or pretence, down to the nub of my most secretive self. It was difficult to credit now that those eyes had stopped watching, even wanting to watch me. One day I was rambling on about things that members of the family had done recently or were about to do, when I caught her shutting her eyes again. This time she kept them shut so long that I wondered if she had dozed off. ‘Mum? Are you OK?’ ‘Yes, fine.’ ‘But you’re closing your eyes. What’s wrong?’ Her chin went up several inches, but the eyes remained resolutely shut. ‘Bored stiff,’ she said. ‘If only she would complain,’ Byron had said sadly, just a few days

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before she died. Other mothers of her age drove their families to distraction by growing meaner and nastier in senility. Ours suffered in martyred silence. Byron and I were too late to get to her in time. The call from the hospital came first thing in the morning, sending us rushing to our respective airports, in Dallas and Los Angeles. But before we even boarded our planes, our cell phones rang again with the news that Mum was no longer with us, as my sister-in-law Mimi put it. Two other daughters and a grandson were already by her side – although they too had been called only after the hospital’s failed attempts to revive her. A machine kept her breathing a few hours longer, then the monitor discharged its conclusive beeps . . . ‘. . . and I watched the flatlining,’ my son Chad told me when he picked me up at the airport. ‘I watched them unplug everything.’ Chad was the grandchild closest to her. ‘You were with her then?’ I asked. ‘You were able to talk to her?’ ‘Yes I was,’ Chad said, not upset in any of the ways I had imagined him to be: in fact not visibly upset at all. ‘And I talked to her. I was the last one to touch her before Auntie Jo Jo and I left the room.’ ‘But there’s something else I have to tell you.’ He hesitated, uncertain of the wisdom of his disclosure. ‘After I left the hospital, when I was driving around town, Grandma was right here, the whole time, riding along with me.’ He took his eyes off the road long enough to turn and nod at my seat. ‘She was sitting right there. She felt so warm, and bright. And she was relieved. I felt it. Relieved.’ I was ready to take Chad’s word as the last one on the subject. I wanted to believe in my mother’s relief, and in my son’s relief at her relief. But above all I wanted to believe in my own relief. The predominant fear of my childhood and much of my adulthood had been a fear of my mother’s death. What a relief to see beyond that dread at long last; to imagine, now that it had come to pass, the compensations her actual death might bring. Increasingly in her decline she had turned into a fake: imperturbable, unreachable,

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absent. Surely the death of that impostor would return the mother I knew. Yes, I thought, with a sudden joyless surge of relief, now that she’s dead she can come alive again. We agreed on the simplest of burials. No wake, no Mass or memorial service (not until some weeks later, anyway). Only the family would gather by her grave for this occasion, to witness the priest’s blessing, and to place a rose each on her coffin. Of course in the end it wasn’t just family but an assortment of old friends and even a few strangers who insisted on coming, so that it was more like four dozen rather than a dozen roses left covering the casket. I didn’t want to see the body. Asked why, I would have had the usual clichés at the ready: I preferred to remember my mother as she was, or something of that sort. So I avoided the viewing, but not without a twinge of remorse when my brother-in-law Ko Tin-Nyo emerged from the viewing room at the cemetery, blinking back tears. ‘She looks beautiful as ever,’ he said. This son-in-law had been married to her eldest daughter for almost as long as she herself had been married – for close to half a century. ‘My favourite son-in-law,’ she used to say. ‘No, Mum,’ he would correct her with a chuckle. ‘Your only sonin-law.’ And it was true: all the other sons-in-law, still devoted to her as they were, had since bitten the dust of divorce. ‘Yes, she did look beautiful,’ Marlaine affirmed, describing to me the dress she was wearing, the cotton shawl I had bought her in Mandalay, where she was born, the rosary Chad had brought her from his recent trip to Ireland. I stood to attention out in the pitiless sun, itching with impatience as the ceremony dragged on: attending but not seeing my mother in death; hearing the drone but not taking in one word of the priest’s recitation; noticing with a kind of envy and guilt that all around me people were openly weeping. My daughter Bess placed her hand on mine, removing it only to wipe away her tears. Why was it that a funeral always seemed to me the last place where

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I wanted to shed tears of grief ? And why had I not given a single thought to my mother’s funeral rites – hadn’t proposed something more memorable, more salutary for the priest to read than that toneless, lifeless, meaningless liturgy? The priest was gone; the mourners had drifted off and were gathered near their cars in groups, chatting volubly, even laughing with newfound exuberance. The coffin had yet to be lowered into the freshly dug pit. I read with a kind of delayed shock the lettering on the plaque next to it: Edward Michael Law-Yone, 1911–1980 – a detail I had failed to observe in my unholy distraction. My father’s grave, forgotten until that moment! And my brother’s too, come to that. Alban Law-Yone, 1937–1979. Now where was his plaque? Somewhere nearby, if I remembered correctly. But I couldn’t see it, and I knew I would never find it, in the blinding dislocation of the moment. Three members of my immediate family buried within a few feet of one another, and in a suburban graveyard that gave new meaning to the word soulless. I simply did not believe any of it. Perhaps that was why, the very next day, I went in search of the bongos. I knew where to look, or thought I did. But no sooner had I set out to find my path through the zoo in Washington DC than I was forced to stop in confusion. Gone was the trail leading to the bongo enclosure. Gone too was any mention of the bongos on the zoo map and directory. Covering my old circuit, on the map, was a blank grey expanse labelled ‘Asia Trail Construction’. ‘But didn’t you know?’ said Jo Jo later. ‘The zoo’s had all kinds of problems. Bad management. Big drop in animal population. Lots of changes.’ I didn’t know: I had been away. I was back now, in Washington DC, only because of Mum’s death. And on the day after her death, needing to take a walk, I found myself heading down Connecticut Avenue, towards Cleveland Park and the National Zoo. The bongo is a big antelope, nearly as big as an elk, with thin white stripes on a rich chestnut coat, and spiralled horns that can resemble an antique stringed instrument minus the strings. I had formed only

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a general idea of what a bongo looked like until a few years before, when I was still living in Washington. I was jogging through the zoo one afternoon when I came across a sign that stopped me in my tracks. ‘BONGO (tragelaphus eurycerus)’. My grandfather’s beasts! There they were, just the other side of a thin wire fence: a trio of big, burly antelopes. Burly but so finely, delicately, striped – like zebras of a higher, nobler order. There they were, in the flesh, my grandfather’s game: calmly browsing and pronking about in their private savannah. I felt a rush of kinship and ownership. What if these beauties were the very descendants of Doreen, brought to America under my grandfather’s auspices? Wouldn’t that make me related to them? I visited them regularly from then on, my bongo kin, paying my respects with a discreet nod in their direction on my late-afternoon runs through the zoo. I thanked my father silently, too. If it hadn’t been for his potted mini-biography of Percy-Smith, I would never have known about my bongo pedigree. I went on staring at the zoo map for a long time, unable to credit the changes. The bongos were gone. There had to be some mistake. I turned to the nearest person in sight, a man in Bermuda shorts struggling uphill with a small boy astride his shoulders. ‘Have you seen the bongos?’ I said. ‘No, ma’am!’ The man picked up his pace, edging away from me to the side of the road. I must have seemed like an unhinged mother in search of a lost child. Back I went to the map, hoping I had misread it. No, there was no mistake. The bongos were gone without a trace. A sense of let-down, physical and profound, was making me lightheaded. It was like getting up from a sickbed too fast, too soon. But sitting down, even for a moment, seemed unwise. I had to keep moving, to distance myself from the site of my unforeseen loss. A whole world had been erased with the vanished bongos. These distant relatives had long represented a subtle yet vital link to the terra obscura of family history I was forever intending, but never managing, to

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explore. Now that vital link had disappeared without a trace, leaving me abruptly orphaned. Closing time was still an hour away, but in the late-August heat the crowds had thinned early and suddenly I felt alone, a tourist in a ghost town without a guide. I started to head home the way I had come; but leaving without casting a glance at a single zoo animal seemed somehow heartless, and wrong. If I crossed over to the other side of the grounds, I could walk by the cheetahs at least. I went to lean over the railing above the cheetah enclosure but could see nothing of note in the plot of scrub beyond the electrified fence. Just as I was about to give up and leave, a mottled shadow stirred in the bamboo by the back fence. Then the shadow slid forward into the light – and out stepped a skinny, leggy adolescent cheetah. On the back of her neck was a thick hump of muscle that rocked from side to side as she paced. She sank to the ground in a liquid collapse, rubbed her back on the weeds as though scratching a deep itch, then rolled over to stretch out on her belly, facing me. The small, painted-warrior face – spotted on the crown, striped between the eyes and across the cheeks – turned up towards me . . . and I met my mother’s eyes. I knew that look so well: that haughty, slightly vacant look Mum put on when faced with an unpleasant truth or task; when she seemed to be not so much weighing her thoughts as suspending them altogether. Our eyes met; and held; and locked. Cheetahs rarely blink: they have to keep their eyes open every second, read the legend on the plaque between the rails. This one’s eyes blinked, and often, from the swarming summer midges. But they never once left me. We stared at each other for an eternity of five, ten, fifteen minutes. In the end, eyes stinging, I was the one to break the spell – by looking away, then walking away.

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A Note on Sources

I have relied on many histories and narratives – scholarly and popular, published and unpublished, official and personal – to help me understand and assess my father’s version of his life and times. Some of these deserve special mention. For the colonial period in Burmese history, I turned to Htin Aung’s A History of Burma; F. Tennyson Jesse’s The Lacquer Lady; Pe Maung Tin & G.H. Luce’s translation of the Hmannan Yazawin (The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma); J.G. Scott’s compilation of the Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States; The Prince of Wales’ Eastern Book: 1921– 1922, and the archives of the Rangoon Times and the Rangoon Gazette. My main sources for the Second World War as it played out in the China-Burma-India Theatre were Louis Allen’s Burma: The Longest War, 1941–45; Frank McLynn’s The Burma Campaign: Disaster into Triumph, 1942–45; Theippan Maung Wa’s Wartime in Burma: A Diary, January to June 1942 (translated by L.E. Bagshawe & A.J. Allott), and Barbara W. Tuchman’s Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–14. For post-colonial history and politics I drew on Michael W. Charney’s A History of Modern Burma; Alastair Lamb’s Asian Frontiers: Studies in a Continuing Problem; Norman Lewis’s Golden Earth; Dr Daw Myint Myint Kyi & Dr Naw Angiline’s Myanmar Politics 1958–1962; Bertil Lintner’s Burma In Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948; James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia; Martin Smith’s Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity, and Tin Naing Toe’s Khit-haung thadinza pyaw-thaw 12-yathi aphyit-apyet-mya (Events throughout the year as reported in old newspapers).

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a note on sources

On the subject of Yunnan, home of my Chinese ancestors, I found much of interest in A.J. Little’s Across Yunnan: A Journey of Surprise; Bin Yang’s Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Second Century BCE–Twentieth Century BCE); Edwin Dingle’s Across China on Foot; Major C.M. Enriquez’ unpublished manuscript, ‘Diary entries from a tour of Tengyueh (now Tengchong) in the fall of 1934, by way of the two main trade routes connecting Burma with Southwestern China via Bhamo and Myitkyina’; William J. Gill’s The River of Golden Sand: Being the Narrative of a Journey through China and Eastern Tibet to Burmah; Hsiao-Tung Fei & Chih-I Chang’s Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan; T’an Pei-Ying’s The Building of the Burma Road; Clement Williams’ Through Burmah to Western China, and Alan Winnington’s The Slaves of the Cool Mountains. In piecing together the career of my British grandfather I mined the Army Lists in the Oriental and India Office of the British Library; the Newspaper Library in Colindale for archives of the East African Standard; G.P. Evans’ Big-Game Shooting in Upper Burma; Dennis Holman’s Inside Safari Hunting; Lucinda De Laroque’s Paradise Found: The Story of the Mount Kenya Safari Club; Philip Lutley Sclater & Oldfield Thomas’ The Book of Antelopes, and Prince Gregoire Sturdza’s En Birmanie: Souvenirs de Chasse et de Voyage. Biographical and other background information on some of the personalities in this memoir were found in Richard Butwell’s U Nu of Burma; Ahmad Kamal’s Land Without Laughter; William J. Lederer & Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American; Maung Maung’s Burma and General Ne Win; U Nu’s Saturday’s Son: Memoirs of the Prime Minister of Burma (translated by U Law-Yone); James Atlee Phillips’ Pagoda; J.F. Samaranayake’s Rangoon Journalist: Memoirs of Burma Days 1940–1958, and U Sat-Su’ s Htu-teh Sat-Su (Mr Nosey’s Nosiness: 75 Years of Hearing, 49 Years of Seeing Burma). Finally, in basing my father’s story largely on his own utterances – his articles, autobiographies, editorials, lectures, letters, histories, and his newspaper’s voice not least – I hope I have done justice to both subject and primary source.

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful for the many kinds of help that have made A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma what it is. Thanks first of all to my agents Susanna Lea and Kerry Glencorse, whose integrity and imagination have carried this book from inception to reception. I’ve been blessed as well by the guidance of two outstanding editors: Rebecca Carter, who wholeheartedly lived through the first go-round with me, and Clara Farmer, who saw me through completion with rare sensitivity and dedication. That my Burma Road trips came about I owe to the friendship of Leila Kight, Denny Lane, Bertil Lintner, Hseng Noung Lintner, Cecilia Lung, the late Shing Lung, and Nicholas von Hoffman. For leads and tips that aided research I am indebted to Nance Cunningham, Patricia Herbert, Bobo Lansin, Aung Soe Min, Lei Lei Myaing, Phyllis Richman, and Lyn Aung Thet. John Okell was my linguistic guru. Justin Watkins kept my Pali errors in check. Marc Hussain produced a bespoke map in record time. Guy Slater supplied photographs – and vivid impressions – of The Nation fifty years apart. Susannah Otter put the book to bed and tucked it in with tender care. Sue Amaradivakara spread the word with heartening zest. For postpartum counsel on style and substance, I turned inevitably to Rosalind Belben. Michael Charney and Martin Smith devoted precious time to reading and commenting on the manuscript. I am grateful too for my siblings’ contributions at various stages. Hubert’s scrutiny of my drafts led to many important revisions.

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acknowledgment s

Marlaine’s laborious efforts to turn our father’s memoirs into a readable document were all to the benefit of my own efforts some three decades later. In exploring our shared past, Byron brought to bear his enlightened perspective: always reasoned, always humane. Comparing notes with Jo Jo on family lore and dynamics was ever a source of insight, not to mention fun. My children, near and far, came through with all manner of support. Tinker persevered with me every step of the way, listening, commiserating, reading, editing and encouraging as needed. My sonin-law Ted walked me through countless technical – to say nothing of emotional – glitches. Sean’s response to my emergency pleas for help were unfailingly prompt and creative. Chad’s curiosity and probity led to lines of enquiry that would have passed me by. Bess endeavoured to keep me healthy and sane. Last but not least I am thankful to my husband John: for his faith in this book, for his hand in so much of its making, and most of all for his love.

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Index

ABSDF (All Burma Students Democratic Front) 260–1 AFPFL (Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League) 52, 80, 88, 92, 122, 124, 136, 248 Ali (cook) 94, 152 American Eagle (schooner) 225, 226 Amnesty International 158, 179 Arakan 213 Arakan Field Unit 75, 75–6 Arakan Flood Relief Fund 171 Asamera Oil Corporation Ltd 203, 205 Atzi tribe 43 Aung Aung 57–8 Bo Hmu Aung 192 Aung Gyi, Brigadier 125, 250 Aung Nyunt 86–7, 96, 137 Aung San, General 4–5, 52, 78–84, 89, 90, 126, 194 Aung San Suu Kyi 1, 4–5, 259 Aung Than 52, 80 Ava Bank (Rangoon) 139 AVG (American Volunteer Group) pilots 64 Aw Sian, Sally 191

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Ba Han, Dr 104, 105 Ba Lun 37, 275 Ba Maw, Dr 90, 92, 103–4, 106, 206, 215 Ba Oh, George 173 Ba Swe, Mrs 141 U Ba Swe, Tiger 122, 247 Ba Than, Dr 128 Ba Than, Katie (d.1972) 126–7, 128–9, 134, 137–8, 173, 191, 249, 250–2 U Ba Yin 39–40 Mahn Ba Zan 198, 209 Balboa Bay Club, Newport Beach (California) 189–90, 201 Bandung Conference (1955) 108–9, 112–13 Bangkok 161, 162, 168, 170, 175, 192, 194, 213 Bangkok Post 215 Bangkok World 212 Bateson, Gregory 75 BBC 187 BBC World Service 177 Bevin, Ernest 88 Bhama Khit newspaper 91 BIC intelligence outfit 76

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index

Birks, Norman 202 Braunsberg, Hans 105 British Army 65–6, 75 British Library Newspaper Library (Colindale) 22, 25, 26, 27, 278, 282 British United Press (BUP) 84–5 Brook, Tom 203, 205 Brown, Emily 84–5 Buddhism, Buddhist 32, 195–6, 213 Burma rumours and prospect of change 1–3, 16–17; elections and military take-over 25, 123–6; migrant settlers in 30–1; jade traders in 31; slavery in 37; independence of 52, 78–9, 87–8; insurgents in 52–5, 258–62; during Second World War 64–71; Japanese defeat in 69; general strike in 82; chaotic state of 87–92; corruption in 103; relationship with China 113–14; mass arrests in 122; under military leadership 130–1, 152; civil war 194 Burma Army 210, 213 Burma Independence Army 78–9, 87 Burma Railways 11, 40–1, 63–4, 66–7 Burma Road 263–9, 273, 276, 278 Burmese government in exile. See Parliamentary Democracy Party (PDP) Burmese Way to Socialism 22, 173–4, 178 Calcutta Refugee Centre 71–2 Cambodia 192–4

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Chan Htoon, Justice 179 Chevalier, Maurice 149 Chiang Kai-shek 47 Chin Affairs Council 122–3 China, Chinese 30, 66, 70, 71, 72, 113–14, 263, 273 Chinese Third Army 194 Chit Khin, Colonel 159 Chou En-lai 114 Christa (girlfriend of Alban) 145–9 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 12, 205 Clean faction 122, 124 Clift, Air Commander Tommy 183–4, 185, 191, 192, 197, 204, 207, 213, 214 Communism, Communists 52, 80, 87–8, 92, 111, 114, 124, 179 Cotton, Lettie 42 CPB (Communist Party of Burma) 261 Craw, H.H. 39–40 Cunningham, E. 283 Curtis-Bennett, Frederick Henry (‘Derek’) 83–4 DAB (Democratic Alliance of Burma) 261 D’Alboras family (the Orange Millionaires) 116, 220–1 Daryl (film producer) 162–3, 165 Davis, Marian 134–6 Davis, Tommy 100, 101, 134–6 Dawee Chullasapya, Air Chief Marshal (‘Dicky Stone’) 183–4, 192, 207, 213, 215 Denigré, Mademoiselle Marie 35–6

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index

Dinjan airfield (Assam) 71 Dobama Asi-Ayone (We Burmans Association) 89 Du Bois, Cora 74, 75 Duan’nai Slope (Heshun, Tengyueh) 31 Dufferin (ship) 33 8888 Uprising (8th August 1988) 257–8 East African Standard 282–3 Economic Cooperation for Aid (ECA) 102–3, 105 Edward VIII (formerly the Prince of Wales) 33–4 E Maung, Dr 104, 106 Ettinger, Dr 168–9, 175 Family Records Centre (Clerkenwell) 278, 280 Farmer, Harry 208 Farrell, Roy 105 Fleishmann, Manly 75, 76, 77, 100–1 Fontaine, Joan 102 Force 136 intelligence outfit 76 Fort Dufferin (Mandalay) 66 Fort Harrison (later Sadon) 41–2 Frontier Service 39, 41, 68 Furnivall, J.S. 24 Geneva Conference 108 Gigante, Giuseppe 127 Goethe Institute (Rangoon) 152–3 Good Shepherd Nuns 34–5, 40 Goullart, Peter 263 Grangaard, Lieutenant 76–7, 78 Gurkhas 70–1, 76

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Gwin Ni (or Red Loop) 85 Hamilton, Jim 219 Hand, Arlan 189–90 Harrell, Jim 225 Henley, Nadine 189–90 Heshun (Tengyueh) 31 U Hla Maung 103, 104, 105–6 Hla Myint, Dr 136, 144–5 Ho, Susan 42 Hoff, Dr Hans 139 Hoffman, Jerome 218–19 Hollandia (ship) 116 Hollywood 162–5 Holroyd-Smith, Mr 106 Hosie, Alban 41 Htawgaw Fort 42 Hughes, Howard 188–9, 191 Hukawng Valley 37 Humphries, Christmas 24 Hunter, Colonel 71 Husevaag, Solveig 158–9 Hutton, Gladys (Sister Gladys) 41, 42 Illustrated Weekly of India 12 India Office Records 280, 281 Indian Penal Code 39, 104 Insein 84–5 Insein Jail 157, 177–80, 248 International Press Institute, General Assembly of 179 Inya Lake 135 Iselin Commission (1937) 113 Jail Advisory Board 43 Japanese 65, 67–9, 74, 75–6, 78–9, 90, 194, 263, 276

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index

Jat Javankun, General 196, 202, 205, 206 Jefferson, Thomas 25 Jenny (classmate of Wendy’s) 117–20 Joint Boundary Commission 113 Kaba Aye Pagoda (Rangoon) 171 Kachin Independence Army 214 Kachin Independence Organisation 197 Kachin State 80, 86, 124, 247 Kachins (ethnic minority peoples) 32, 62, 153, 194, 197–9, 213 Kahn, Gustav H. 116–20, 151 Kamaing 29, 37 Kamal, Ahmad 190, 201–2, 205 Kandy (Ceylon) 72, 74, 183 Karens (ethnic minority peoples) 53, 92, 93, 196, 197–9, 204, 207, 210 Károly, Julian von 153 Kemmendine (Rangoon) 62–3 Kenya 282–7 Kerr, Andy 138 Daw Khin Kyi 80–1 Khin Maung, Arthur 68, 87 U Khin Maung Maung 178 KIA (Kachin Independence Army) 194 King Solomon’s Mines (film) 287 Kirkham, Frank 86 KNDO (Karen National Defence Organisation) 53 KNU (Karen National Union) 258–60 Ko Ko of Rangoon (U Khin Maung Aye) 56, 57, 96, 156

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U Ko Ko of Mytkyina 56, 57, 156 Koch, Eugene 165 Kokang, House of 204 Kokang State 194 Kunming 263, 265 Saw Kya Doe, General 198, 209, 210 Bo Kyaing 247 U Kyaw Nyein 122, 124, 247–8 Kyaw Nyein, Mrs 141 U Kyi Chai 177–8 Lamb, Alastair 133 Laroque, Lucinda de, Paradise Found: The Story of the Mount Kenya Safari Club 284–7 Law of Crimes (Indian Penal Code) 104 Law-Yone, Alban (1937-1979) birth and death 44, 233, 293; personal life 47, 67, 115, 133–4, 145–9, 175, 203, 212, 223–6, 228; arrest, imprisonment and release 157–9; mental health problems 223, 227, 231–6; supports PDP 224 Law-Yone, Byron (b.1941) 272 birth and childhood 44, 62, 63, 132–3; personal life 47, 67, 70–1, 115, 118, 148, 149, 174, 175, 212, 222, 223, 227–8, 229; death and funeral of his mother 290, 291 Law-Yone, Chris 228 Law-Yone, Edward Michael ‘Ed’ (1911-1980) arrest and imprisonment 7, 22, 27, 140–3, 149–50, 155, 158–9, 167–8, 177–80, 180, 249–53; as newspaper

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index

journalist and owner 8–9, 12–14, 42, 49, 84–7, 95–100, 135–6; career in railways and transportation 11–12, 40–1, 44, 63–5, 82; personal and family life 26–8, 33, 34, 35–6, 40, 41, 43–4, 48–9, 71–3, 87, 111–12, 169–77, 218–22, 229, 230–3, 236, 237, 238–40, 242, 244–5; character and description 27, 32–3, 40, 57, 58, 63, 73, 78, 79, 93, 94–5, 107–8, 122, 133, 183, 200–1, 222–3, 229–31, 238, 246–8; illnesses and death 27, 37, 38, 194, 229–30, 240–1, 243–7, 248, 293; childhood and family background 29–34, 36, 38, 271–5; works for the Frontier Service 38–40, 41–4; political life 53, 55, 80–2, 92–3, 121–2, 126, 129–30, 131, 171–5, 183, 185–99, 202, 204–12, 213, 215–17, 249–53; wartime activities 65–77, 78, 79; relationship with the Japanese 67–9, 74; conferences, press junkets and goodwill missions 100–3, 108–15; successfully defends himself at defamation trial 103–6; prison notebooks 180, 276–7 Law-Yone, Eleanor Percy-Smith (1912-2004) personal and family life 34–6, 40, 41, 62–3, 70, 80–1, 115–16, 140–2, 144, 147–8, 156–7, 164–5, 175–7, 203, 218– 23, 227–9, 232, 233, 243–4; character and description of 41, 43, 50, 51, 54, 107, 108, 132, 229–30, 238, 289–91, 295; comments and sayings 46, 55, 120, 132, 169, 222, 288, 290; brush

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with the PVO 53–5; wartime experiences 67–73, 76, 153; illness, death and funeral 288–93 Law-Yone, Hubert (b.1934) 44, 47, 70, 115, 132, 142–3, 212, 229–30, 278–9 Law-Yone, Jocelyn ‘Jo Jo’ 47, 132, 142, 152, 175, 203, 212, 218, 219, 223, 244, 293 Law-Yone, John 164 Law-Yone, Marjolaine ‘Marlaine’ (b.1936) 27, 50 birth, childhood and education 44, 47, 62, 115; wartime experiences 67; personal and family life 115–16, 132, 143, 152, 168, 203, 212, 218, 220, 222, 223, 225, 226, 289–90, 292 Law-Yone, Mimi 222, 227–8, 243 Law-Yone, Wendy (b.1948) returns to Rangoon 1–3; revisits The Nation offices 3–11, 15–17; reads her father’s prison notebooks and manuscripts 26–8, 242, 243, 276–7; birth, childhood and education 45, 46, 47–51, 59–61, 94–100, 117–20, 131–4, 143, 143–5, 150, 152, 159; personal and family life 55–9, 115, 132–3, 143, 145–57, 163–70, 175, 176–7, 212, 233–6, 237, 238, 240, 241; escape, capture and imprisonment 157–9, 160–1, 175–7; interviews remnants of 8888 Uprising 258–62; travels along the Burma Road 263–9; meets relatives of her father 269–75;

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index

discovers the truth concerning grandfather Eric Sydney PercySmith 278–88; death and funeral of her mother 288–93; goes in search of the bongos 293–5 Lazaro, Noel 129 League of Nations 37, 113 Bo Let Ya 185, 194, 208, 209, 214, 216 Lintner, Bertil 263 Lintner, Hseng Houng 263 Lon Nol, General 192, 193 U Lum Pum 122–3 U Lun Maung 67, 68, 71 McDonald, Alex 246 Mae Sariang 209 Magsaysay Award 135–6 Manchiyen 269, 276 Mandalay 33–4, 40, 45 Manerplaw camp 260 Marcar, Brian 184, 192, 205, 206 Marshall, Sergeant 65–6 Maung Maung 125, 178, 250 MGM Studios 162, 165 Mills College, Oakland (California) 115, 143 the Mirror 86 MIS (Military Intelligence Service) 22, 157–8, 159, 175–6, 177, 223, 248 Moe Gyaw, Captain 186, 189, 192, 210 Molly (classmate of Wendy’s) 117–20 Monique, Princess, of Cambodia 193 Mons (ethnic minority peoples) 93, 196, 197–9, 207 Moore, Alan 188–91 Moscow 110–11

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Moulmein-Ye railway 213 Mount Kenya Safari Club 284–7 Mount Tangkuban Perahu 108 Mountbatten, Lord Louis 34, 75, 187 Bo Mya, General 197–8, 209, 216–17, 261–2 Mya Mya 56 Myanmar Times, visit to 8–11, 15–17 Daw Myint Myint 60 Myint U, Thant 258 Myitkyina 32, 36, 40, 42, 43, 66, 67, 68, 87, 103, 153 The Nation description of office 5–9, 11–17, 96–100; founding and closure of 21, 45, 86–7; copies held in the British Library 22–6, 27; contents and editorial 23–5, 92–3, 122, 138, 153; staff 53, 55, 91, 139 National Army Museum 279 National Zoo, Cleveland Park (Washington DC) 293–5 NDF (National Democratic Front) 261 National United Front 124 Ne Win, General political life 125, 126, 127–8, 129, 134–9, 171, 209, 210, 213; relationship with Ed LawYone 126, 129–32, 171–5, 249–53; character and description 127, 130, 138–9, 252–3; personal life 128–9, 216; U Nu’s campaign against 186–94, 195; crackdown on 8888 Uprising 257–8 New Light of Myanmar 1, 8, 12

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index

New Times of Burma 10, 13, 14, 15, 85 New York Times 199, 245–6 U Nu 88, 92, 93, 112, 138 political life 52, 87–8, 88, 89–91, 104, 108–9, 121, 122, 123–6, 136–7, 152, 170–1; character of 91–2, 121–2, 131; as head of government in exile 184–99, 202, 203, 205, 208, 210, 212, 213–15; international tours 186–94; and birth of the NULF 196–9 NULF (National United Liberation Front) 198–9 Operation Sweat 250 OSS (Office of Strategic Services) 11–12, 72–7, 78, 100, 183, 246 Palasbari camp 71 Pariah, Dr 70 Thakin Pe Htay 173–4 Peng Hong 93 Parliamentary Democracy Party (PDP) setting up 185–6; fundraising and spending 201–6; acquisition of guns and explosives 205–6, 207; police raid on HQ 206–7; tensions and bickering among 207–8, 210–12, 213, 215–17; escapades 208–10; support for 213–14 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 30, 113–14 Peradiniya (Ceylon) 74 Percy-Smith, Donald ‘Polo’ 30, 56 Percy-Smith, Edward (b.1948) 56 Percy-Smith, Eleanor see Law-Yone, Eleanor

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Percy-Smith, Eric Sydney 34, 35, 278–88 Percy-Smith, William ‘Willie’ 30 Percy Smith, Hubert Kendall 280 Phelips, Brigadier Denis 82 Phnom Penh 192–4 Phurissara, Prince Norodom 192 Daw Phwa Tint 34, 35, 58–9, 281 U Pi (stray dog) 135 Pidaung Game Reserve 43–4 Pisak, General 206 Po Myaing 90 U Po Saw 31, 38 Polo, Eddie 152, 156 Poulton, John 41–2 Poulton, Mrs 41–2 Praphas Charusathien, General 185, 196, 204, 210, 214 Prasert Ruchirawongse 185 Prasong Soonsiri, Colonel 206–7 Prendergast, Colonel 66 Prinz Eugen (ship) 76, 77 Pronin, Alexius 109, 111, 112 Public Record Office (Kew) 278, 279 PVO (People’s Volunteer Organisation) 52, 53–5 Pyidaungsu (Union League) Party 136 Rangoon 23–4, 76, 210 warehouse fire 1, 3, 16, 17; bomb-blasts and war-damage in 9, 11, 13, 14–15, 64; falls to the Japanese 65; relative peace in 92; in state of alert 123–4; student demonstrations in 138, 257; Chinese riots in 160; fitful

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index

amnesty in 166; 8888 Uprising 257–8 Rangoon Gazette 14, 86 Rangoon River 33 Rangoon Times 12 Rangoon Turf Club 93 Rangoon University 138, 150 Real Estate Fund of America 218–19 Revolutionary Government of Burma 199 Reynolds, Colonel 202 Richard (interpreter) 263–71, 274 Ridell, Florence 282 Road Transport Board (RTB) 82 Roberts, Colonel 66 Rosario, Victor de 85 Royal Cambodian Ballet 193 Royal Thai Army 185 St Joseph’s Convent (Mandalay) 34–5 St Peter’s school (Mandalay) 33, 45, 178 St Petersburg Times 226 San Francisco Press Club 102 U San Tun 90 SANE company 127–8 Sangkhla 195 Sarah (music teacher) 143, 145 U Saw 83–5 Daw Saw Shwe 31, 32, 45, 58, 59, 61, 67, 68 Seagrave, Dr Gordon 72, 153 Seagrave, Gordon (b.1963) 168, 200, 224 Seagrave, Sean (b.1968) 175, 200, 201 Seagrave, Sterling 153–7, 162, 165, 168–9, 212, 218, 223–4, 226, 237, 238, 241

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Seagrave, Tinker (b.1968) 175, 200, 201 Second World War 47, 63, 69, 113, 153, 194 U Sein 110 Setkya Thiha Pagoda (Mandalay) 33 Sevigny, Corice de 127–8 Shan States 153 Shans (ethnic minority peoples) 194, 204 Shwe Dagon Pagoda 81 Nai Shwe Kyin 198, 209 Shwebo 66 Sihanouk, Prince Norodom 192, 193 Slim, Viscount John 52 Son Sann 192–3 Soviet Union 108, 109–12 SSA (Shan State Army) 194 Stable faction 122, 124 Stars and Stripes military newspaper 74 Stilwell, General 153 Sun Yat Sen 30 Swann’s Way (Proust) 23 Swinhoe, Rodney 37 Switzerland 117–20 Takahashi, Lieutenant 69 Tamiroff, Akim 116 Tatagale Mental Hospital (Rangoon) 152 Tayok Pyay Min 112 Tengyueh (re-named Tengchong) (Yunnan) 29, 31, 265–6, 274, 276 Thadoe Thiri Thudhamma Award 126

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index

Than May 49–51 Thakin Than Tun 68 Thanom Kittikachorn, Prime Minister 184–5, 213 U Thant 104, 121–2, 187–8 Thay Baw Bo Camp 258–9 Thazi 44 Thein Sein, President 1 Maung Thein Tun 160 Thelma (friend of Katie Ba Than) 250–1 Theo (photographer) 263, 264, 265 Thirty Comrades 78–9, 127, 194–5 Thomas de la Rue Company 46–7 Tilleke & Gibbins 202 The Times 187, 279 Thakin Tin 91 Tin Maung 157 Ko Tin Nyo 115–16, 143, 220, 223, 292 Tin Tut 12–13, 15, 85, 87, 215–16 Tinsa (wife of Yan Naing) 215–16 U Tint 54, 77 Tong Chi-fan 30–2, 36–8, 266, 268, 270–5 Tong Chi-yu 270, 271, 274–5 Tong Kai-chi 273–4, 275 Tran Van Luan 127 U Tun Sein, Colonel 250 Tunney, Gene 76 Union Military Police 52, 125 United Nations 188

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Upper Burma 31–2, 33, 35, 113, 213 USSR 109–12 V-Force intelligence outfit 76 Waingmaw 43–4 Wanghka 210 Wen-huan, General Lee 194 West Tong 267 Wheeler, Myra 285–7 White Band PVO 52 White Flag Communists 52 Working People’s Daily 187, 198–9 Xiang, Mr 264–5, 270, 271 Bo Yan Naing 194, 195, 207, 208, 215 Yang, Jimmy 194, 204, 213 Yellow Band PVO 52 YH Kwong 191, 203, 205 Auntie Yi Yi 56 Yunnan 29, 30, 31, 69, 114, 263, 264 Z-Force intelligence outfit 76 U Zahre Lian 122–3 Zali Maw 206–7, 209, 210 Zan Hta Sin 247 Duwa Zau Lawn 108 Zau Seng, General 197, 205 Zon, Auntie 56

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