The house at University Avenue
Harriet O’Brien pays tribute to Daw Khin Kyi, Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother
In the mid 1970s my father was posted as a British diplomat to Burma. Living in Rangoon then felt like being in a Waiting for Godot land. You were poised for something to give, something to happen, but nothing did. The city was at once charmingly nostalgic and depressingly stagnant. Time simply seemed to evaporate in the sticky heat. The modern world was somewhere far away, and Burma’s capital lay suspended in a strange era.
As foreigners, we were in Burma for a relatively brief period. Yet for all the political problems and the official suspicion of the West, we were shown great hospitality and friendship. And we were given generous insights into Burmese life: the intoxicating culture, the ethereal beliefs, the family festivals. Yet within this gentle, and at times very jolly, society it was shocking as a Western teenager to learn of the sheer brutality that the majority of people coped with. Under the military regime that had then been running the country for a decade, intimidation had become an inescapable part of daily life.
Some years before, my father had worked in Delhi with the Burmese ambassador to India and, now retired, she was especially welcoming to us. I only gradually realised quite how important she was to Burma.
Daw Khin Kyi was the widow of Aung San, Burma’s martyred hero. After her husband’s death she had served the Burmese government under U Nu but had retired in the mid 60s - fairly soon after General Ne Win’s military takeover. We would often visit her at her rambling house at University Avenue, on the banks of Inya Lake in Rangoon. Nominally she had withdrawn from public life and she elected to remain in seclusion, but she discreetly received quite a number of regular visitors. She was always full of gossip about the latest political intrigues – which she despatched with much wit. Our visits would follow a tidy pattern. On arriving at her somewhat crumbling, colonial-style house (what Rangoon house wasn’t?) we would be taken on a trip around the garden to admire the newest plants: orchids, roses, even a coffee bush that had been planted by her small grandson on a visit from England with his mother, Daw Khin Kyi’s daughter Aung San Suu Kyi who was married to a British academic. The garden also provided convenient scope to be able to talk openly. Indoors, even in Daw Khin Kyi’s house, there was always the danger of being overheard by the wrong people. Most delicate conversations in Burma would take place outside as a matter of course.
After the garden visit we would continue talking (on rather more anodyne subjects) in her sitting room. Here there was a faintly Victorian air: there were hard, upholstered chairs with anti-macassars, and large sepia-tinted photographs on the walls – Daw Khin Kyi and Aung San on their wedding day, Aung San in military uniform. In the centre of the room was a Karen frog drum. This bronze ceremonial instrument was especially prided by Daw Khin Kyi, who was herself a Karen.
Then we would be offered something to eat in the dining room. Normally Daw Khin Kyi would produce a favourite delicacy of black sticky rice with coconut milk and melted juggary (palm sugar). After that it would be time to go and we would be dismissed with an affectionate Burmese ‘kiss’ – not a peck on the check but a gentle sniff from a nose rubbed on each side of the face.
On one occasion Daw Khin Kyi told us that she had been diagnosed with diabetes. As a former nurse, she was unfazed and responded with characteristic pragmatism. ‘God is good,’ she laughed. ‘In this country it is difficult to get sugar, and now the doctors tell me I shouldn’t take it anyway.’
Although she coped comfortably with the condition for a long time, the diabetes ultimately weakened her. In March 1988 she fell ill. A few weeks later she had a severe stroke and was rushed to hospital. Her daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, arrived hot foot from England and spent three months living in the hospital in order to tend her mother. She then took Daw Khin Kyi back to her home at University Avenue and remained with her.
Daw Khin Kyi lingered for several months. She was only dimly aware of the mass movement that year which became a widespread revolution, and of the bloodshed and violence with which it was put down.
Aung San Suu Kyi, in the meantime, gradually found herself becoming the figurehead of a revolution that had started with no leader. On 25 August, a rally held beside Shwedagon pagoda in Rangoon drew crowds of about half a million. Several public figures had gathered but the people principally came to hear Aung San Suu Kyi speak. ‘At that stage her appeal was really that of a film star,’ a friend later told me. ‘People came out of curiosity to hear what Aung San’s daughter had to say.’
And what she said made a lot of sense. Echoing a speech her father had once made – as both the founder of the Burmese army and the leader of Burma’s independence movement – she told the crowds that the army should keep out of politics. There should be no discord, she commented – the people should respect the army purely as a professional body. And she said that as Aung San’s daughter she could no longer stand on the sidelines while the people of Burma came forward in what was effectively their second struggle for independence. The crowd was roared with approval.
By October that year the army had brutally crushed the movement. But it was by no means over: an opposition force had come into being, with Aung San Suu Kyi fully committed to the struggle for democracy. Meantime she continued to live at the University Avenue house, overseeing her mother’s care.
In late December 1988, while the people of Burma were still picking up the pieces of their shattered lives and the bloodstains in the cities were being whitewashed, Daw Khin Kyi died aged 76. As a figure of national importance she was given a full public funeral. It was the first time groups had been allowed to gather in the streets since the military clampdown some months earlier. Almost unbelievably, the army, the students and the politicians came peacefully together. Thousands of soldiers, students, government officials and civilians marched quietly through Rangoon in a show of respect for this gracious and very shrewd lady. Aung San Suu Kyi applauded the restraint, emphasising how it showed that the people and the military were able to cooperate.
It was in July the following year that she was first placed under house arrest, with troops visibly surrounding the house. The official reason for the army’s action was never given. Today it is a sad irony that the house on University Avenue where Daw Khin Kyi lived in happy self-imposed seclusion has been a prison to her daughter almost ever since.
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