Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
AUNG SAN SUU KYI IN WORDS & PICTURES
Freedom from Fear(1991) is a collection of writings by Suu Kyi and her supporters
on topics ranging from her father to the Nobel Prize acceptance speech delivered
by her son Alexander. Letters from Burma(1997) features a year's worth of weekly
essays Suu Kyi wrote on Burmese culture, politics and incidents from her daily life
for the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun.
The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma(2011) by
Peter Popham is the most up-to-date of several biographies of the Lady; it's com-
prehensive and includes extracts from Suu Kyi's private diaries. Justin Wintle's The
Perfect Hostage(2007) is also an impressively researched account of her life and
times, and of modern Burmese history, which paints a very believable, likeable
'warts and all' portrait of Suu Kyi.
On the cinematic front, Luc Bresson's The Ladyis a biopic released in 2011
based on Suu Kyi's life between 1988 and 1999 when her husband Michael Aris
died; it stars Malaysian actress Michelle Yeo as Suu Kyi.
Covering similar ground, but in documentary format, is Lady of No Fear
(
www.ladyofnofear.com
), directed by Anne Gyrithe Bonne, which was finished be-
fore Suu Kyi's release in 2010 and includes interviews with close friends and col-
leagues about the famously private woman.
The BBC documentary Aung San Suu Kyi: The Choice(
www.bbc.co.uk/pro-
grammes/b01n2wfw
), filmed during 2011 and 2012, includes long interviews with
Suu Kyi herself as well as with Hillary Clinton and other friends and family; you can
find it on YouTube.
Beautiful Love Story
Luc Bresson, director of the biopic
The Lady,
calls Suu Kyi and Aris's courtship and
marriage 'probably the most beautiful love story I've heard since Romeo and Juliet.'
When Aris went to Bhutan in the late '60s to work as a tutor to the royal family and con-
tinue his research, Suu Kyi was in New York, working at the UN; they corresponded by
post. After their marriage on 1 January 1972 in London, Suu Kyi joined him in Bhutan.
Five years later they were back in Oxford, Aris teaching at the university, Suu Kyi a
mother to two boys - Alexander and Kim.
In the essay she contributed to
Freedom from Fear,
her friend Anna Pasternak Slater
remembers the future leader of Burma's democracy movement from that period as a
thrifty housewife, 'laboriously pedallling back from town, laden down with sagging
plastic bags and panniers heavy with cheap fruit and vegetables' or 'running up elegant
cut-price clothes' on her sewing machine. Historian and author Thant Myint-U also re-
calls dropping by the Aris' home in 1984: 'Michael sat contentedly and quietly smoking
