AUNG SAN SUU KYI353patient, nonviolent activism. She embodies what the
people of Myanmar callawzaa – charisma and powerful
moral authority.
Family & Infl uences
Aung San Suu Kyi was born just two years before the as-
sassination in July 1947 of her father, Aung San, leader
of the Burma Independence Army and the key architect
of the country’s independence. Aung San had met Suu
Kyi’s mother,Ma Khin Kyi, a nurse, while recuperating
from malaria in Rangoon General Hospital in 1942.
Her father’s premature death was not the only family
tragedy: in 1953 Suu Kyi’s elder brother Lin drowned
accidentally at the age of eight (there was also an elder
sister Chit, but she had died when only a few days old
in 1946, a year before Suu Kyi’s birth). Later, Suu Kyi
would become estranged from her eldest brother Aung
San Oo, an engineer who emigrated to the US; in 2001
he unsuccessfully tried to sue her for a share of their
mother’s home – 54 University Ave, Yangon, where Suu
Kyi has spent the many years of her house arrest.
Her parents’ political activism and example of public
service had an enormous infl uence on Suu Kyi. ‘When I
honour my father, I honour all those who stand for the
political integrity of Burma’, she writes in the dedica-
tion to her book Freedom from Fear. In the essay My
Father, she says he was ‘a man who put the interests of
the country before his own needs’ – something Suu Kyi
has also done.
Suu Kyi’s mother was also a prominent public fi gure
in newly independent Burma, heading up social plan-
ning and policy bodies, and briefl y acting as an MP,
before being appointed the country’s ambassador to
India in 1960. Suu Kyi fi nished her schooling in New
Dehli, then moved to the UK in 1964 to study at Oxford
University. It was in London at the home of Lord Gore
Booth, a former ambassador to Burma, and his wife
that Suu Kyi met history student Michael Aris.
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 ’ 6 0s
to work as a tutor to the royal family and continue 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 Bhutan.
Five years later they were back in Oxford, Aris teaching
at the university, Suu Kyi a mother to two boys – Alex-
ander and Kim.
From that period, her friend Anna Pasternak Slater
remembers, in the essay she contributes to Freedom
from Fear, the future leader of Burma’s democracy
movement as a thrifty housewife, ‘laboriously pedalling
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
AUNG SAN SUU
KYI TIMELINE19 June 1945
A baby girl is born in Yangon and
named after her father (Aung
San), paternal grandmother
(Suu) and mother (Khin Kyi); the
name means ‘a bright collection
of strange victories’.1960
Daw Khin Kyi is appointed
Burma’s ambassador to India.
Suu Kyi accompanies her
mother to New Delhi, where
she continues her schooling.1964
Moves to the UK to study at
Oxford University. Meets future
husband, Tibetan scholar
Michael Aris, at London home
of her ‘British parents’ Lord
Gore Booth and his wife.1967
Graduates with a third-class
degree in politics, philosophy
and economics. Daw Khin Kyi
retires to Yangon.1969–71
Moves to New York for
postgraduate studies, but ends
up working for the UN alongside
family friend and ‘emergency
aunt’ Ma Than E and Secretary-
General U Thant.1972
Marries Aris and joins him in
Bhutan, where he is tutoring
the royal family. Suu works as
research offi cer in Bhutan’s
Royal Ministry of Foreign
Aff airs.1973–77
The couple return to the UK
for the birth of their fi rst
son, Alexander. They take up
residence in Oxford, where
their second son, Kim, is born
in 1977.