Obituary -- U Kyaw Htun: Writer. Journalist.

Two days ago I came back home after doing some chores such as food shopping and going to the post office, and found my answering machine blinking. It was Daw Khin Aye Tint of Columbia, MD. telling me that her husband U Kyaw Htun had passed away on April 11th (2007).
I knew he had been very unwell. Since the last 3 years or so, when he finally retired for good, Ma Ma (Elder Sister)Tint, used to call me on weekends and talk to me. I had the premonition that as a trained nurse and RN, and one of the most intelligent and gutsy women I have ever met, she realized that she might soon have to part with her beloved husband.
I never met a more loving couple than them. They were tolerant of each other’s small quirks, at the same time that they deeply appreciated each other’s admirable qualities.
For me, they were family friends of long standing, over half a century.
I realize that even for Burmese who are not of his generation, the name will not ring a bell. He did nothing political and was not a public figure. Though a writer and a connoisseur of fine literature (on one holiday visit I saw him reading John Updike), he never wrote a book, and he never gave interviews, though I asked him at least twice.
He was just a very decent and fine human being, who upheld his principles, was a good son, husband and father, and a good friend of great loyalty.
By any standard, he had a phenomenal career.
He studied at the University of Chicago during the U Nu regime in Burma, while my father was DPI or Director of Public Instruction. He was one of Burma’s first western trained journalists. He then returned to Burma and worked for the late U Thant, who later became Secretary General of the U.N., and was at the time U Nu’s Minister of Information.
I was six or seven when Uncle Kyaw Htun, as I called him then, came back from Chicago and brought dolls and party dresses for my sister and me.
I don’t know what happened later, probably the military coup of 1962, staged by Gen. Ne Win, that might have made it impossible for him to work in journalism.
When I was a teenager, U Kyaw Htun worked in hotel management, for the famous Aratoon brothers, who owned the Strand Hotel. On one memorable occasion, he invited all 6 of our siblings and first cousins to a formal dinner, no adults included, at the Strand. There we had a full course western meal, which an Indian waiter in white, with a white linen napkin draped over his arm, served. For dessert we had Baked Alaska. For days afterward, I puzzled over how a block of ice cream like a brick, with meringue in peaks around it, could be baked and served in slices. By then my father had already died in a car accident, and we were living with our aunt and uncle and their family.
It was during this time that he met and married Ma Ma Tint.
My mother was very fond of them both. She said that when my father died, the majority of his former students disappeared, but U Kyaw Htun was the most faithful friend of all, and always visited us regularly.
In the sixties he worked for USAID.
Then they migrated, and he worked at the Asian Development Bank in Manila and at the World Bank in Washington, DC.
When I got the Fulbright Fellowship in 1982, they helped me get settled into my on-campus apartment in Philadelphia and took me home to visit with them for Thanksgiving and other holidays.
I began to appreciate how hard life is for immigrants, even if the head of the family works at the World Bank.
Because he was a writer, and had a writer’s eye, and so did Ma Ma Tint, and because I was so homesick, I spent quite long periods of time at their house.
Ma Ma Tint baked bread by the dozens, and sewed, fixed the house, told me stories.
After my children arrived and after 1988, oddly after I moved to DC to work, I was able to visit them less, as they also had health problems and I did not drive.
But now and then we’d talk on the phone.
After retiring from the World Bank, U Kyaw Htun worked another 15 years as a copy editor at the Washington Times.
He once told me of going to visit Gen. Ne Win and Daw Kitty on one of their visits home, and of how he overheard Mrs. Ne Win telling the cook to go and buy some tea, as there was no tea in the house. Ko Kyaw Htun said, “Living well is the best revenge.”
As an immigrant myself, I think “living,” that is, surviving, is the best revenge.
U Kyaw Htun leaves behind his wife Daw Khin Aye Tint and 4 children.
R.I.P.
*
Writer’s/publisher’s note: I just realized I have 2-3 other obituaries on file that were never published, because I could find no one to publish them. I have decided now to publish these at a few day’s interval each on my personal blog, as a tribute to people I have greatly admired and cared about.