Ten Million Fireflies
Coming Soon…
“My motto is that love is the most powerful magic,” says Elizabeth Yee, a Burmese medical doctor, writer, and activist who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement after Myanmar’s 2021 military coup. Now living in Thailand, she works with the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners on mental-health and psychosocial support, and she creates art and AI-generated music exploring feminism, ecology, and revolutionary resistance.
Elizabeth explains that when she was a child, she spent her days buried in Chinese martial-arts novels. Those stories of noble heroes and battling evil forces shaped her imagination. She used to picture herself as one of those characters, a girl determined to right wrongs. Reading, she adds, also made her a serious student, sharpening her powers of concentration and her memory, and she later moved on to Burmese romance novels. One such author also doubled in working as a medical doctor. This became Elizabeth’s inspiration, and with this in mind, she entered medical school believing she could “become a doctor and then write a lot of books.”
She notes her parents were unusually supportive. Although her family is Chinese and traditionally favored sons, her father treated her “like a princess,” largely because he had come to believe that his daughter was the reincarnation of his own father. Because of this conviction, he gave her a freedom and confidence that many girls around her did not have. She laughs as she exclaims that in most Chinese families, “people support sons a lot, but in my family, they supported me!” With that encouragement, she excelled in school, ranking first in her class, and earning entry to medical college as she had been hoping.
Influenced by the depictions of compassionate physicians in the novels she was reading, Elizabeth decided to specialize in surgery and eventually became an assistant surgeon in a government hospital. But while she loved clinical work, she also grew restless. Myanmar’s medical-training system, she explains, was founded by General Khin Nyunt, previously head of military intelligence. Even in the transition period, the medical system was under the firm grip of military control. For political reasons, it was designed to keep young doctors from rising to the level of specialist; most had to remain assistant-surgeons. The junta intentionally created this bottleneck at the top through restrictive and exclusionary examinations, and by rewarding political loyalty over skill and ability. All this enabled the military regime to maintain their tight grip on institutional control and professional development. Elizabeth protested this arrangement and refused to take the exam, choosing instead to sit for foreign medical qualifications. She began studying to take the MRCP (Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians) exam in the United Kingdom.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, her curiosity was piqued about new and evolving forms of technology-based education. She particularly remembers discovering YouTube anatomy videos in an internet café (albeit with a painfully slow connection). “I am a visual learner,” she says, “so even though the internet was very slow, watching videos helped me a lot.” She began to dream of streaming medical lessons online so that other students could have the resources she had lacked.
During this period, she also volunteered in the public-health sector. It was in this work that she experienced the government’s inefficiency firsthand. For example, she recalls with amusement, “They assign people from clinical background to public health, and public-health people to hospitals!” Still, she did what she could.
Then February 1, 2021 happened. Elizabeth remembers being on duty when friends told her the military had seized power. At first, she didn’t believe it, as the word had previously been bantered around as a joke online. When she realized the truth, she told her colleagues she would resign and join the Civil Disobedience Movement. The hospital tried to persuade her to take a paid leave instead, but she refused. She posted a video online effectively saying she would be joining the CDM. As a result, the authorities classified her as a dissident, citing her under Article 505A of the penal code, effectively her arrest warrant. Rather than retreat, she says she took it as an honor. She says bravely, “I regard it as that I passed that exam with distinction!” Her humor could not hide the danger, however; within weeks, the hospital warned her by phone that she might be arrested. So she fled her apartment in Yangon and went into hiding in the city. At the same time, she joined medical teams supporting the burgeoning street protests.
When soldiers began hunting CDM doctors, Elizabeth fled to farther out, to the countryside, disguising herself as “just a normal, happy lady.” In the villages, she rediscovered peace. It was a respite from her pre-coup work when she was taking emergency calls at all hours of the day and night. For a year she moved between communities, using her medical expertise to treat villagers and writing about mental health. Eventually, as the fighting continued to spread, friends urged her to cross into Thailand. The decision was agonizing, though in the end, she chose safety –with the caveat that she would not go permanently into exile. She wanted to stay involved in the revolution. In Thailand, she found refuge through the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), where she began to combine her medical background with psychological and social-justice work.
Elizabeth explains that her interest in mental health began long before the coup. Even in medical school she had studied psychology because, as a would-be writer, she wanted to understand about people better. While hiding out in the countryside, she continued that practice, writing blog posts about trauma and resilience. She says that during the early stages of the revolution, she was acutely aware of the psychological warfare waged by the junta, with its misinformation, intimidation, and manipulation. Her work at AAPP deepened that insight: as a facilitator and trainer, she heard the stories of former political prisoners who had endured torture and imprisonment. “They told me what they encountered in their time, and how we can be strong mentally and physically,” she says. From them she learned endurance. The work also made her a target again—under the junta’s laws, mere affiliation with AAPP adds additional years to one’s sentence—but she shrugs it off. “I feel so happy,” she says, because the risk proves the truth of her commitment.
Her time with AAPP also introduced her to new intellectual worlds as well as Elizabeth attended workshops that discussed feminism, art, and political science. “At that training, I learned about feminism,” she says. “My definition [for it] is justice with love.” The phrase echoes the moral balance she seeks between compassion and resistance. She now refers to herself an ‘eco-feminist,’ because she feels connected to nature as well as to social justice. The idea, she explains, draws on a childhood fascination with fairness. Through AAPP, she was also encouraged to explore new technologies. In 2023 she started to learn about AI (artificial intelligence), which soon became central to her creative life.
Elizabeth also turned to music as a medium for healing and activism. She had written lyrics since medical school, adapting melodies from Chinese, Thai, and English songs. With AI she could finally compose her own. Now all she has to do is enter her own lyrics—about gentleness, revolution, and resilience—and then work to refine the generated tunes until they sound right. She acknowledges the ethical debates around machine creativity, but stresses its utility: recording music in Thailand’s studios costs twenty-thousand baht, far beyond her means, while AI is more affordable, giving her a way to spread messages of feminism and resistance. Her TikTok account now has more than seventy-one-thousand followers, and she smiles that even after she tells listeners the songs are AI-generated, “they like my music and use it in their TikTok.”
Through art, she says, she has been able to heal from her life in exile. She compares her flight from Myanmar to a story from Chinese folklore: before being reborn, a soul drinks a potion that makes it forget its previous life. “When I fled to Thailand,” she says, “I thought that I took that potion and forgot about my past life. In this way I can survive here happily and do new things.” Art, for her, is both therapy and testimony, allowing her to expresses her feelings and what she has learned about survival and resilience.
Recently Elizabeth has prepared for a new exhibition that combines painting and sound. Five of her paintings will be displayed alongside three songs she composed that will be played through Bluetooth speakers. She describes the works in careful detail: two paintings center on fireflies, creatures that lit her childhood nights in her rural village. When she learned that these insects might disappear because of pollution and habitat loss, she felt compelled to honor them. One painting hides the shape of a military boot amid glowing forms, visible only when the light changes. The second painting shows a single firefly surrounded by red threads that represent the human connection but also the danger humans pose. The music complements the imagery. Her song “Blue Mekong” echoes the environmental theme, while “Fake Green” criticizes governments and corporations that proclaim sustainability while destroying ecosystems. The paintings and songs, she hopes, will remind viewers that even fragile lights can persist in darkness.
Another painting in her exhibition depicts a view once visible from her home. This is especially poignant, because, as she says quietly, “My home in Myanmar is already burned down.” Creating this piece, she says, helped her rebuild a sense of place. “We have our own feeling in our head,” she explains. “This feeling comes out, and we express it with different media—painting, music, writing—and then it becomes art.”
Yee’s reflections return often to memory and imagination. She recalls that as a child she had dreamed of being reborn in the heroic universe of the martial-arts novels she loved; growing older, she realized that the real world was that universe after all. But the enemies are not fictional villains. They are the injustices that have shaped her country: censorship, inequality, patriarchy, and fear. The weapons to fight them are words, images, and songs. Each of these media captures a different emotion for her; she says once she expresses a feeling in painting, she cannot repeat it in music.
For her, creativity is not escape but survival, the continuation of resistance by other means. “We need to fight until we are done,” she says in closing, her tone firm but calm, “because there are so many unjust things.”