About a month ago I was assigned a project by one of my favorite teachers relating to Time’s list of 100 people who have changed the world. Among them are those that are well known to the public, such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Others are well known, yet the reasons why they’re on the list is not so obvious, like the Twitter guys Biz Stone and Evan Williams. My famous person to write about was Aung San Suu Kyi.
And I knew nothing about her.
I heard from a friend that she was a Burmese activist and currently under house arrest. I looked her up on wikipedia and found that to be true. In her picture, I’d say she looks almost sad, as if wondering whether what she’s doing is working. I’d look the same if I were under house arrest for twelve years. But let’s step back a little bit and see the big picture.
In 1947, two years after Suu Kyi was born, her father Aung San (from which part of Suu Kyi’s name was derived) negotiated independence from the United Kingdom and was assassinated by rivals the very same year. Suu Kyi grew up with her mother and had three brothers, yet one of them died in a pool accident when she was eight. While one brother became a U.S. citizen living in San Diego, she attended an English Catholic School in Burma.
Her mother became an ambassador for Burma to India and Napal, taking Suu Kyi with her. Suu Kyi grew up and attended first the Lady Shri Ram College in India, then St. Hugh’s College in Oxford. She earned a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. She married Dr. Michael Aris in 1972 and returned to Burma in 1988. Her original plan was to tend to her sick mother, but ended up becoming an important leader in the democratic movement against military rule.
Within a year she was placed under house arrest, and since that time she only saw her husband five times. His last visit was in 1995 because the dictatorship denied any other visits, and two years later he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and died in March 1999 on his 53rd birthday. Get this: despite many prominent figures urging the government to allow Suu Kyi’s husband a visa, the government refused. The US, UN, and even the Pope appealed to them, but Burma insisted, “They did not have the facilities to care for him.”
But Aung San Suu Kyi could leave. :] Oh yes, please leave.
So, what’s so great about Aung San Suu Kyi? Why am I writing about her on this blog that practically no one knows about? Well for one thing, I've countlessly tried to imagine her fmylife.com post. More importantly, though, is that she's still under house arrest in Burma. Rather than leave the country and risk her ability to return to Burma, she stayed I the country. She didn’t trust the junta (military government, for those who don’t know), who said that she would be able to return. She hasn’t seen her two children, who live now in the United Kingdom.
She received the Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought and the Nobel Peace Prize while still under house arrest. (Woohoo! You won this prize! Too bad you can’t go around using it…) She actually ended up using her Nobel Prize money to establish a health and education trust for the Burmese people.
So what we can learn from her: Don’t take the easy way out. It would have been easy for her to get out of house arrest and see her husband and children. But that would mean abandoning those in Burma who are under military control. She knows that the road she’s chosen is a tough one, and she’s ready to take it on.
They have a website for her, dedicated to fixing the Burmese government: http://dassk.org/
Aung San Suu Kyi is fighting for Burma. She’s given up her family and freedom to make a statement. She’s aurguing her case without violence. Would you be able to do that?
Added Note: Recently, in the beginning of this month, an American guy swam across the lake by her house to see her and completely fucked everything up. Now she’s in prison because she “breached the terms of her house arrest,” even though she didn’t even invite the guy. Way to go, American Mormon, you screwed up her chance to get her freedom. She was about to be free from her arrest on May 27th. Now she might be facing prison for five years. Thanx… >_>;; See here for more details.
Picture by Eddie Adams from Times Online Article
