I had what is called a psychic shock a few hours ago
today, Aug 6th, 2019.
I typed in “U Soe Aung” in my Twitter search bar, as I
remembered that in 2014 when I first got on Facebook, U Soe Aung, a Burmese
dissident based in Thailand, was the first person I “friended.” Then in two days my FB site became a dissident
blog, with 1000 + followers, before it got spooky and a fake KMK appeared, with
some extra numbers and alphabets behind the url.
It had been acting funny before I noticed it.
So I had to delete my FB account, with some difficulty.
Then I went back to Linked In for a while, to recover
some email addresses lost in the big Yahoo hack, and then I “went back” to
Twitter which I had already, because Trump used twitter a lot and I needed to
know what he was up to.
So now I am on twitter and on my blog.
So I went on U Soe Aung’s twitter, which I discovered
I was following already, and read some recent posts, which is when I saw the
shocker.
It was a retweet of a Moe Makha interview of Dr. Sein
Win, P.M. of the Burmese Democratic Government in Exile (NCGUB), dissolved in
2012. The interview was done on August
9, just before Dr. Sein Win and his wife Daw Si Si Thwe and their son La Yaung
set off to return to Burma after three decades overseas, fighting for democracy
in Burma via advocacy and peaceful methods.
The photo showed a late evening? shot of the family in
their best Burmese formal clothes, facing out, standing in front of the closed
gate of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s house in Rangoon.
But ASSK is not under house arrest behind the famous
barred gate.
She’s—
But why is the Dr. Sein Win family not being welcomed
at the airport with flowers and family?
Even my less well known former compatriots were.
Why are they not in ASSK’s drawing room, on that
equally famous couch by the bay window, where she has welcomed so many VIP guests?
Why are they not looking at flowers in the garden?
I am getting more spooked even as I write.
I know from experience that Daw Si Si loves flowers.
For two or three years in a row, when La Yaung was
inside his mother’s belly, and a toddler, we used to meet up at the Tidal Basin
with some difficulty, and go and see the D.C. cherry blossoms in bloom at their
peak.
One year, about 2004, it was quite cold and drizzly
when the cherries peaked and Si Si and I went by Metro to show visiting Daw San
San, sister of Thakin Tha Khin, the cherry blossoms.
Our lives, or at least my life, is punctuated by when
the flowers peak. Nabokov's was by where he saw which butterfly, real butterflies, not lolita-like young women,
It was so cold, and Daw San San only had on a thin
fleece jacket over a Burmese wutsone or
cotton jacket and longyi ensemble.
We had coffee at a Starbucks to warm up afterwards near
the Burma Fund office, then in the Bowen Building, and near the Reagan Building,
where a delegation from Burma came incognito, including economists Dr. Myint
and the late U Thet Htoon, former Burmese Ambassador to France and head of the
CSED or Central Statistical and Economics Department.
I knew them both from my time at the Economics
Institute in Rangoon, Burma.
The first time U Thet Htoon came to talk about U Nu’s
Five Year Plans at the Institute, in 1960 or so. In 2002, I met U Thet Htoon on a panel in
Gottenberg, Sweden, at the Burma Studies Conference. I helped David Steinberg, no earned Ph.D.,
arrange the panel on Democracy and Dialogue in Burma.
*
