Revisiting Myanmar’s Early Reform Era - Irony and Paradox
“The Nationalists Now Wear Panties.”
That sentence caught my attention as I drove down a small but critical traffic artery called Baho Street in 2014. Baho Street was unused by tour busses and it was avoided as much as possible by taxi drivers. Yet Baho Street, which stretched from near downtown to the outskirts of Rangoon along a minor vein of the Rangoon River was my daily commute for almost two years. Commuter trains also ran beside Baho Street where open land and structures unchanged since colonial times rotted away. Baho Street displayed an authentic representation of Rangoon’s lower working class who lived on the flood prone side streets where even today seasonal floods can be waste deep in some areas. There were also large areas of green-forested tracts pegged with tilted old wooden shacks held upright by bamboo poles. People still lived in them, and they lived in much worse including lean-tos and tents. All of that living was in plain view from the road where homeless people also resided.
Like the old and slow to change American South during the days of Martin Luther King, Burma was not shy about its poverty. Burma’s poverty was on full display everywhere as the once sanctioned rulers and cronies morphed into business suit politicians. Those same business suit politicians who were previously reviled for their crimes against humanity were gleefully pardoned by the Globalist UN and their enablers. The price tag for the pardons went unannounced, of course. The pardoned ones then positioned themselves as admirable reformers. In truth, they were far from admirable in any way except to those of their own ilk - the globalist elites of the world who wanted a bite of Burma’s golden eggs.
The pardoned ones were lauded for their forward vision to make Burma great again as they plotted to make Aung San Suu Kyi accept a passive role - out of sight out of mind. Of course she did not. Then the globalists began their takedown of The Lady in 2013 with a hit piece in The Economist. It said Aung San Suu Kyi lost her slipping halo. That line was repeated tens of thousands of times around the globe for years. (Search and see for yourself.) Suddenly a cabal of washed up leftist bureaucrats and failed politicians from the UN calling themselves The Burma Experts appeared. They tried to create a shadow government and they discredited The Lady, but there was no way Aung San Suu Kyi would take a back seat to corrupt foreign bureaucrats. However, money talks. Many of Burma’s wealthy elites who once supported Aung San Suu Kyi abandoned her for investment opportunities. It seemed Burma’s wealthy faux Democracy supporters were unwilling to sacrifice everything in life. They had better options. They made life changing investments and bought land and opened resorts in places like Bagan and Inle Lake. In other words, they talked the talk but when Aung San Suu Kyi needed their support most of all during the reform period, they failed her. In a sarcastic twist of fate some of them are in Burma today trying to offload their once profitable resorts and properties. But they are getting screwed in the process, and most have returned home abroad to live in obscurity minus the money they tossed at the winds of change in during the reform era.
On the other hand, the poor never gave up on Aung San Suu Kyi like the many aging elites who once supported her did. During the reform era Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t sell out. But she could have. She could have played a passive role as Burma’s savior and lived a comfortable life elsewhere in the world. No one would have blamed her for doing so because she suffered immensely since 1988. Aung San Suu Kyi was true to Burma’s people and for her devotion she is still in prison in 2025. Where are those wealthy faux supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi now? Crickets. No one dare’s say her name today just as they didn’t dare say her name until she was released from house arrest in 2010. That’s called irony.
As for Baho Street in 2013, I seldom saw the BMW’s, Lexus’ and Land Rover’s that ran rampant around the superior bumpy streets of the expat-coveted Golden Valley. In 2013 Golden Valley was inhabited by the upper crust of Burma and the swarm of neo-colonialist globalist expats who flooded into Burma to make a buck or two. At the same time, less well off expats flooded into Burma. Many of them carried 30-day TEFL certificates as they leaked in from Thailand or Cambodia to teach English, take drugs, and get drunk. Hoards of them lived in cheap old flats filled with insects and black ooze flowing down the walls in the Yaw Mn Gyi area of downtown. One of my friends called that area an english teacher ghetto. It was. On the other hand, I never saw an expat on Baho except for one neon-wearing mountain bike rider navigating a bumpy Baho side road. “How cool for him,” I thought. I wished I had the guts to ride a bike on those crazy potholed roads absent traffic signs or lights and rule of law for drivers.
I instead spent time driving up and down Baho Street going back and forth to work. I also used Baho Street in order to avoid the massive traffic jams that appeared without a warning on other main roads. The thing with Baho Street was that one had to drive slow because the working people living in shacks and moldy cement flats and bamboo huts didn’t think of Baho as just a street. It was a lifeline where tens of thousands of people inhabited its byways and offshoots. The ancient commuter train that rambled up and down one side of Baho Street was like a long slow caterpillar adding and subtracting legs as it almost stopped at stations. Those stations were nothing more than cement slabs with a cement bench and a small cement overhead cover to protect nobody from monsoon rains or the blazing sun. No one worried about catching the train. It barely moved fast enough to miss. One hopped on or off without interrupting the rhythm of one’s footsteps.
Trishaw drivers, kids playing or selling things, lottery ticket carts-men, fruit cart pushers, bicycle commuters, mothers walking kids home from school, motorbike riders, trishaw’s pushing steel or bamboo poles, trash recycling cart pushers, water and beetle-nut chew sellers, drunks, people standing and talking, men flagging down drivers to clean their cars, street dogs fighting, foraging, pooping and humping, streetwalkers in the evening hours, and crowds of people standing in too small an area waiting for buses all kept Baho Street busy. Included among the throng of Yangon’s working class beatniks were monstrous busses with no head lights or brake lights that belched noxious fumes and constantly blasted their wicked loud horns. Then light-trucks with unbalanced loads of too many people or too much merchandise that all seemed sure to fall off spliced swiftly in and out of the traffic lanes. People spit beetle nut juice from everywhere and, oh yeah, I freaked out in anticipation of slamming on the brakes every five yards to avoid collisions and letting the logjam of rude, selfish, and over aggressive drivers cut me off. Finally, at intersections that actually had traffic lights, the lights didn’t work because the electricity was usually off.
Baho Street was a also a merchant filled avenue with teashops, beer stations, little markets, shop houses, truck stops, and food stalls. It’s one of those places tourists wish they could see but can’t because tour agents don’t make money by showing rundown but thriving neighborhoods in Rangoon. Most tourists in Burma rightly saw the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, Inle Lake, and Bagan. Due to time constraints, that trifecta of wondrous places was without a doubt a must-see must-do plan. Most tourists just had no time to see the Burma where millions of people survive to eat and make a living any way they can.
My concept of Myanmar people has changed a lot since I left my year plus inhabitancy on Baho Street. It was different side of life in Rangoon that I didn’t love because it was mainly not a nice place. It was a hustle and a shakedown street. But I was blessed to be there because no one cared about me being there. It was relaxing for me to not have to say minglalaba and je su tin ba deh repeatedly. Instead, I honked my horn like local drivers as I edge along the street reading silly graffiti on the walls that seemed to make no sense. “The nationalist now wear panties” tag struck my funny bone because I understood exactly what the tagger meant.
The panty-wearing nationalists were marginalized by globalism’s neoliberal economics that bursted their pre-reform unity and that made them irrelevant. Before the reform era chanting the word Democracy seemed like a noble cause until the moment to commit oneself to do something for Democracy arrived. Most of Aung San Suu Kyi’s elitist supporters chose to scuttle away like roaches seeking further enrichment.
So, here we are in 2025. Burma is still mired in chaos. Violence, bullets, bombs, fire, religious and ethnic clashes, earthquakes, lawlessness and crime, and the military government. Compared to those who once supported Aung San Suu Kyi at least the government is reliable and it certainly remains true to its nature. As for the millions of people etching out a living like those on Baho Street, some crushed under disasters both natural and unnatural, their lives didn’t change much, if at all, during the reform era. If there is civilian led government in the future it’s hard to predict if they will fare much better than they do in the present, or even do as well as during the past reform era. History in Myanmar, or in the days Myanmar was called Burma, doesn’t rhyme. It repeats. That’s called a paradox.
- By TLQA