Wandering Jew Flower -- Photograph copyright Kyi M. Kaung 
Mother demonstrating the war in Iraq with fake coffins at Arlington National Cemetery -- August 2004. Photograph -- copyright Kyi M. Kaung.
Taw Myo Myint, political activist, Burmese dissident, wife and mother and my good friend, died of breast cancer in Los Angeles two days ago. It is with the heaviest of hearts that I sit down to write this on my laptop. I wish that this onerous rite of mourning were not something I have to do, for Taw and her loved ones, and also for those in the struggle who remain and have no other alternative but to go on. And also for myself, because at such times as this one does not know what else to do but write.
Taw was untiring in her efforts for social justice and political change in Burma. She told me often, she and her husband U Khin Maung Shwe, and their young daughter Stephanie (Htet Htet) were the only ones demonstrating with handmade signs in front of the UNOCAL building, rain or shine, continuously almost every weekend for months on end.
I first met Taw when she invited me to stay at her house in a predominantly Spanish speaking suburb of LA. It was 1997 and I was going to my first conference convened by the Free Burma Coalition at UCLA (University of California in LA). Friends that I knew previously through my marriage and who were allegedly close to Secretary 1 (Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt), the head of the MI or Military Intelligence, had just told me obliquely that I was unwelcome in their home because “the monk had told them not to admit two legged guests.”
I felt four legged and realized my friends (should I call them former friends?) were getting cold feet because I told them I was coming to FBC. A mutual acquaintance in the pro-democracy movement, Ohmar Khin, told me that whenever she herself was in LA she stayed at Taw Myo’s, and gave me Taw’s phone number. I was already booked into a cheapy motel near UCLA, but when U Khin Maung Shwe and a friend picked me up at the airport and were about to drop me off at the motel, I realized I would meet and be able to interview more people at their home, and it would be easier as a non-driver in LA to stay with them. And so I checked out of the motel after paying for one night, and moved to Taw’s guest room, which was really Stephanie’s room.
For the duration of the one-week conference, Taw and U Khin Maung Shwe had about 20 people camped out with them. One seldom sees generosity like that especially in America and Taw and her family were subsisting on U Khin Maung Shwe’s salary. It was not as if they were millionaires with very deep pockets.
Taw cooked meals for the whole group of us. Her husband and other volunteers drove us back and forth to campus and to El Segundo to demonstrate in front of the UNOCAL and TOTAL offices, protesting the natural gas pipeline in southern Burma which uses forced labor. In deference to my age I was in a room by myself, two other women guests were sharing the next room and Htet Htet was with her parents. At the back of the house and garden were other small buildings, which I later found out were occupied by long term residents who were political asylees and refugees from Burma, and whom Taw and U Khin Maung Shwe were helping by giving them a place to stay till they got on their feet again. All the male guests were sleeping on the floor in the living room lined up like sardines.
It was not at all difficult to interview the political activists one after the other at Taw’s kitchen table in addition to the interviews I conducted on site at UCLA. I even recorded a program of nursery rhymes with Htet Htet singing and Taw humming along.
Taw told me of an incident in Burma when she was on a bus alone and a soldier had come up and started inspecting the insides of everyone’s Shan bag. The soldier found a long needle used to sew up gunny sacks holding rice in the bag of a young man. “Isn’t this a weapon? Are you denying this is a weapon?” The soldier demanded. He took the young man off the bus and while the young man was knealing, pleading at his feet, he kicked him so hard in the face with his army boots that, Taw said, the skin on the young man’s face peeled backwards upwards and his face started bleeding. Then, with his wounds still raw, he was marched off somewhere and no one on the bus ever saw him again. I could see from the expression on Taw’s face as she told me this that she thought the young man had probably been arrested or shot.
*
Taw told me about participating in the 1988 mass demonstrations in Rangoon and then of fleeing to Thailand through the jungle with her husband. She described hiding under piles of dry leaves to elude SLORC forces. At the refugee camp she set up a mohinga stall as a way of providing employment for the refugee students. Her daughter was born in America.
Our ride to El Segundo for the demonstration had elements of humor in it, because the well meaning neighbor whom U Khin Maung Shwe had asked to drive the second car, the one we were in, to El Segundo, apparently had left/right confusion and could not read road signs fast enough, so we kept getting lost in LA and barely got there in time. But the demonstrations – planned by FBC, including artist/writer Edith Mirante, went off well and beautifully. At one point we were all in the small lobby of either the TOTAL or the UNOCAL building, accompanied by the FBC legal advisor, the students shouting slogans to “Get out of Burma!” and the voices reverberating off the glass walls through the impossibly green and shiny leaves of the potted plants. We were back in the square in front of the building by the time office security realized what was happening. On getting home we were relieved we were in the U. S. of A., and not in Burma, where we would have become instant “guests” of the military regime.
Taw and U Khin Maung Shwe were arrested once in Los Angeles, after they chained themselves to a truck to protest the pipeline. In spite of protestors chained and locked to the wheels, the driver of the truck tried to move it a few feet, and Taw sustained a back injury. At that time Stephanie was still only about four years old, and while her parents were in the lockup, had to stay with friends. Taw told me that the feeling that she had as the big steel doors clanged shut was indescribable.
After my first visit in 1997, Taw became a close friend of mine, who would listen patiently while I related all my trials and tribulations in the democracy struggle. She helped set up NLD (LA) -- for Liberated Areas, not Los Angeles. She continued helping recent asylees. A famous poet stayed in their house for months. I joked with her sometimes on the telephone “Shouldn’t you be putting salt in the hearth to get the guest to leave? Can’t you try to be less generous?” I urged her to set up as a non-profit so she could legally ask for donations and apply for grants. Then at least she would get some help. But as a descendant of the last royal family of Burma (she was descended from Pakhan Gyi Supaya, the sister of the last king Thibaw) she was a proud, independent minded woman and preferred to do it with her own funds, in her own way.
Some of the people she helped were indeed ingrates and rewarded her and U Khin Maung Shwe by bad mouthing them in California dissident circles. I used to try to remonstrate with her, “This is getting like the famous Burmese saying. (The dog) sleeps on the piece of leather, and gnaws at the leather’s edges. Can’t you try to be less kind?” but I knew even as I was saying that, that a good person cannot stop being good, in the same way as it is futile to try to straighten out a crooked person, like putting a dog’s crooked tail into a bamboo tube to straighten it out.
I last saw Taw in person in 2001. She still had a couple of semi-permanent houseguests. I made a fruit cake for the big birthday celebration of one of her guests, which was being held at her house. On an impulse she opened her kitchen drawer full of mismatched cutlery and gave me a bamboo ladle, that was new and that she obviously liked herself. I tried to refuse it but she kept pressing it on me, so I brought it home.
She noticed the cancer only about 8 to 9 months ago. I knew her to be a very religious person and I was a bit concerned that like Daw May Kyi Win, the Burma-born librarian at the Burma Studies Center in DeKalb, Illinois, who died of cancer soon after diagnosis and refusing chemotherapy, Taw also might “accept her fate” too easily and stop fighting the disease.
As it was, she did have chemotherapy. I tried to check on her every 2 to 3 weeks by phone. Always, she tried to come to the phone, even though the last time I spoke with her, she was obviously very weary. I did not talk long. I told her I wished I could come and see her, stay at my niece’s and come and visit her for a short while.
We joked about her hair growing back and how cool it must be with this new short haircut.
The day she died, I realize now, I woke up depressed. I thought it was just Monday or winter blues when the sky is so often gray. I had a stomach upset and so I decided to boil myself a barley porridge using the ladle Taw gave me. I forgot the pot and the barley burned and parts of the ladle were blackened, like the bamboo craft toys from Kyaikhtiyo pagoda festival.
At least now she is beyond pain.
My heart goes out to her entire family: U Khin Maung Shwe and Htet Htet, Taw’s parents in Burma, her brother in law in China, and I send sincere condolences and metta (loving kindness) with this tribute.
As one of the famous Burmese dissidents, the founder of FBC, now trying engagement with Burma, once said, “What people discount is love.”
We do a lot of things for love of other people, or for love of the truth, or due to our desire to keep the faith and find and create a better future for those we love.
Taw Myo Myint knew who she was and was not afraid of dying. She was one of the most exemplary and fine human beings I have ever met.
*
Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) is a writer and political analyst based in Washington DC.
· Note: I am publishing this on my blog site over two years after Taw Myo Myint passed away because whenI sent it out at the time, none of the editors I sent it to, decided to publish it.
· Taw Myo Myint died of stage 4 breast cancer at an LA hospital on March 13, 2005.
· All women, please have regular gynaecological checkups, self-examinations and mammograms.
*
Copyright Kyi May Kaung. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Taw was untiring in her efforts for social justice and political change in Burma. She told me often, she and her husband U Khin Maung Shwe, and their young daughter Stephanie (Htet Htet) were the only ones demonstrating with handmade signs in front of the UNOCAL building, rain or shine, continuously almost every weekend for months on end.
I first met Taw when she invited me to stay at her house in a predominantly Spanish speaking suburb of LA. It was 1997 and I was going to my first conference convened by the Free Burma Coalition at UCLA (University of California in LA). Friends that I knew previously through my marriage and who were allegedly close to Secretary 1 (Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt), the head of the MI or Military Intelligence, had just told me obliquely that I was unwelcome in their home because “the monk had told them not to admit two legged guests.”
I felt four legged and realized my friends (should I call them former friends?) were getting cold feet because I told them I was coming to FBC. A mutual acquaintance in the pro-democracy movement, Ohmar Khin, told me that whenever she herself was in LA she stayed at Taw Myo’s, and gave me Taw’s phone number. I was already booked into a cheapy motel near UCLA, but when U Khin Maung Shwe and a friend picked me up at the airport and were about to drop me off at the motel, I realized I would meet and be able to interview more people at their home, and it would be easier as a non-driver in LA to stay with them. And so I checked out of the motel after paying for one night, and moved to Taw’s guest room, which was really Stephanie’s room.
For the duration of the one-week conference, Taw and U Khin Maung Shwe had about 20 people camped out with them. One seldom sees generosity like that especially in America and Taw and her family were subsisting on U Khin Maung Shwe’s salary. It was not as if they were millionaires with very deep pockets.
Taw cooked meals for the whole group of us. Her husband and other volunteers drove us back and forth to campus and to El Segundo to demonstrate in front of the UNOCAL and TOTAL offices, protesting the natural gas pipeline in southern Burma which uses forced labor. In deference to my age I was in a room by myself, two other women guests were sharing the next room and Htet Htet was with her parents. At the back of the house and garden were other small buildings, which I later found out were occupied by long term residents who were political asylees and refugees from Burma, and whom Taw and U Khin Maung Shwe were helping by giving them a place to stay till they got on their feet again. All the male guests were sleeping on the floor in the living room lined up like sardines.
It was not at all difficult to interview the political activists one after the other at Taw’s kitchen table in addition to the interviews I conducted on site at UCLA. I even recorded a program of nursery rhymes with Htet Htet singing and Taw humming along.
Taw told me of an incident in Burma when she was on a bus alone and a soldier had come up and started inspecting the insides of everyone’s Shan bag. The soldier found a long needle used to sew up gunny sacks holding rice in the bag of a young man. “Isn’t this a weapon? Are you denying this is a weapon?” The soldier demanded. He took the young man off the bus and while the young man was knealing, pleading at his feet, he kicked him so hard in the face with his army boots that, Taw said, the skin on the young man’s face peeled backwards upwards and his face started bleeding. Then, with his wounds still raw, he was marched off somewhere and no one on the bus ever saw him again. I could see from the expression on Taw’s face as she told me this that she thought the young man had probably been arrested or shot.
*
Taw told me about participating in the 1988 mass demonstrations in Rangoon and then of fleeing to Thailand through the jungle with her husband. She described hiding under piles of dry leaves to elude SLORC forces. At the refugee camp she set up a mohinga stall as a way of providing employment for the refugee students. Her daughter was born in America.
Our ride to El Segundo for the demonstration had elements of humor in it, because the well meaning neighbor whom U Khin Maung Shwe had asked to drive the second car, the one we were in, to El Segundo, apparently had left/right confusion and could not read road signs fast enough, so we kept getting lost in LA and barely got there in time. But the demonstrations – planned by FBC, including artist/writer Edith Mirante, went off well and beautifully. At one point we were all in the small lobby of either the TOTAL or the UNOCAL building, accompanied by the FBC legal advisor, the students shouting slogans to “Get out of Burma!” and the voices reverberating off the glass walls through the impossibly green and shiny leaves of the potted plants. We were back in the square in front of the building by the time office security realized what was happening. On getting home we were relieved we were in the U. S. of A., and not in Burma, where we would have become instant “guests” of the military regime.
Taw and U Khin Maung Shwe were arrested once in Los Angeles, after they chained themselves to a truck to protest the pipeline. In spite of protestors chained and locked to the wheels, the driver of the truck tried to move it a few feet, and Taw sustained a back injury. At that time Stephanie was still only about four years old, and while her parents were in the lockup, had to stay with friends. Taw told me that the feeling that she had as the big steel doors clanged shut was indescribable.
After my first visit in 1997, Taw became a close friend of mine, who would listen patiently while I related all my trials and tribulations in the democracy struggle. She helped set up NLD (LA) -- for Liberated Areas, not Los Angeles. She continued helping recent asylees. A famous poet stayed in their house for months. I joked with her sometimes on the telephone “Shouldn’t you be putting salt in the hearth to get the guest to leave? Can’t you try to be less generous?” I urged her to set up as a non-profit so she could legally ask for donations and apply for grants. Then at least she would get some help. But as a descendant of the last royal family of Burma (she was descended from Pakhan Gyi Supaya, the sister of the last king Thibaw) she was a proud, independent minded woman and preferred to do it with her own funds, in her own way.
Some of the people she helped were indeed ingrates and rewarded her and U Khin Maung Shwe by bad mouthing them in California dissident circles. I used to try to remonstrate with her, “This is getting like the famous Burmese saying. (The dog) sleeps on the piece of leather, and gnaws at the leather’s edges. Can’t you try to be less kind?” but I knew even as I was saying that, that a good person cannot stop being good, in the same way as it is futile to try to straighten out a crooked person, like putting a dog’s crooked tail into a bamboo tube to straighten it out.
I last saw Taw in person in 2001. She still had a couple of semi-permanent houseguests. I made a fruit cake for the big birthday celebration of one of her guests, which was being held at her house. On an impulse she opened her kitchen drawer full of mismatched cutlery and gave me a bamboo ladle, that was new and that she obviously liked herself. I tried to refuse it but she kept pressing it on me, so I brought it home.
She noticed the cancer only about 8 to 9 months ago. I knew her to be a very religious person and I was a bit concerned that like Daw May Kyi Win, the Burma-born librarian at the Burma Studies Center in DeKalb, Illinois, who died of cancer soon after diagnosis and refusing chemotherapy, Taw also might “accept her fate” too easily and stop fighting the disease.
As it was, she did have chemotherapy. I tried to check on her every 2 to 3 weeks by phone. Always, she tried to come to the phone, even though the last time I spoke with her, she was obviously very weary. I did not talk long. I told her I wished I could come and see her, stay at my niece’s and come and visit her for a short while.
We joked about her hair growing back and how cool it must be with this new short haircut.
The day she died, I realize now, I woke up depressed. I thought it was just Monday or winter blues when the sky is so often gray. I had a stomach upset and so I decided to boil myself a barley porridge using the ladle Taw gave me. I forgot the pot and the barley burned and parts of the ladle were blackened, like the bamboo craft toys from Kyaikhtiyo pagoda festival.
At least now she is beyond pain.
My heart goes out to her entire family: U Khin Maung Shwe and Htet Htet, Taw’s parents in Burma, her brother in law in China, and I send sincere condolences and metta (loving kindness) with this tribute.
As one of the famous Burmese dissidents, the founder of FBC, now trying engagement with Burma, once said, “What people discount is love.”
We do a lot of things for love of other people, or for love of the truth, or due to our desire to keep the faith and find and create a better future for those we love.
Taw Myo Myint knew who she was and was not afraid of dying. She was one of the most exemplary and fine human beings I have ever met.
*
Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) is a writer and political analyst based in Washington DC.
· Note: I am publishing this on my blog site over two years after Taw Myo Myint passed away because whenI sent it out at the time, none of the editors I sent it to, decided to publish it.
· Taw Myo Myint died of stage 4 breast cancer at an LA hospital on March 13, 2005.
· All women, please have regular gynaecological checkups, self-examinations and mammograms.
*
Copyright Kyi May Kaung. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
