The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma by Thant Myint-U Read Free Book Online Page A

slice of Burma. In addition to my parents and grandparents (and later three younger sisters), there was always an assortment of Burmese houseguests, who stayed anywhere from an evening to many months, and a domestic staff (all Burmese as well) of nannies and maids, cooks and gardeners as one might expect in any Rangoon pukka home. Burmese dancers and musicians sometimes performed at parties on the lawn. A Buddhist shrine with fresh-cut flowers graced a special area on the first floor, and a constant smell of curries drifted out of the always busy black-and-whitetiled kitchen. The UN security guards at the gate—mainly Irish and Italian Americans—wore uniforms of light and navy blue, but inside the stone walls a Burmese sarong or longyi , even in the Northeast winter, was the more predictable sight.
    U Thant died of cancer soon after his retirement, and my family moved not long after to Thailand, where I lived until university, first at Harvard and then at Cambridge. But many summers during those years were spent in Burma, in Rangoon, where my mother had close relatives, and in Mandalay, where my other grandfather still lived. We often traveled around, and one year—when I was fourteen—I spent a short period as a novice monk, something all Burmese Buddhist boys are meant to do. For me those trips to Burma were always a surprise, a surprise that the inside world, inside the walls in Riverdale, had become the outside world, of people on streets and in markets, in trains and in homes. What was particular to my family was suddenly public and everywhere, in a world that was at once strange and new and yet intimately familiar. I still feel that sense of surprise in Burma today when I walk outside and down the pavement in my longyi or talk to shop assistants or taxi drivers in my mother tongue.
    When the 1988 uprising began, I was only a few weeks out of college and at the very beginning of what would later be my own career at the UN, working in Geneva as an intern for Prince Saddrudin Aga Khan, then the UN’s coordinator for humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan. I listened many times a day to the BBC and read about the first wave of military violence while spending a weekend with friends inLausanne. Within a week I had decided to give up my internship and booked myself a plane ticket to Bangkok, determined to be part of what every Burmese believed was a turning point in the country’s history. Unfortunately for me, by the time I reached Bangkok and was set to travel on to Burma, the army had closed down the Rangoon airport, sealing off the country from the rest of the world. I felt I missed entirely my chance to be a part of things and to help.
    The next year was my induction into Burmese politics. When the uprising was crushed, thousands of young men and women had made their way to rebel-held areas along the Thai border, not to flee the Burmese authorities but in a desperate and ill-placed hope that the West would arm them and help them overthrow the Rangoon government. I went to see them and spent many months in their muddy makeshift camps, never thinking that an armed revolution was the answer to Burma’s problems, but in every other way sharing the anger and frustration that had sent them into the malarial jungles. I could go back more or less whenever I wanted to an air-conditioned apartment in Bangkok and had a generous postgraduate scholarship waiting for me, but they, of exactly the same generation as I was and often from similar family backgrounds, were in much deeper and had risked much more.
    It was a Burma I didn’t really know. My Burma had been an anachronism, of retired Indian Civil Service men in well-cut suits smoking cigars on the lawn at Riverdale, and genteel and lethargic evenings in a dilapidated bungalow in Rangoon, black-and-white portraits of a long-dead district magistrate on the wall and talk always turning back to a past and better age. This was a Burma that was urgent, aggressive, and dynamic,