Episode 37: Active Days, Restless Nights
While this was not the easiest of interviews, it certainly was one of our more important ones. Exhausted from the daily protests and sleeping at a different monastery roof with fellow protesters every night for safety, his face darkened from being out under the hot sun all day, his voice hoarse from giving daily speeches, and his words crackling with emotion as he struggles to describe his horror at the loss of freedom and the innocents who have died… Chit Tun takes listeners to the front lines of the protest movement.
The interview began past midnight, Burmese time, but was cut off midway as the military continues its daily Internet shutdown. Chit Tun woke up several hours later, and after a morning on the street, rejoined us to finish up our talk. Struggling at times to find the right word, his mind so harried that he sometimes loses his train of thought, and at various points not even able to pronounce sounds properly, this is a very personal portrait of the human toll the on-going military coup is taking.
Chit Tun describes his early family life: moving frequently throughout the country following his father’s job as a civil servant, his parents and siblings always worked hard, yet there was rarely enough salary to cover basic needs. The family eventually settled in Hlegu, north of Yangon, and following his father’s death and with little prospect for higher education, Chit Tun pursued his studies at the local monastery. His English fluency would come in handy, as he taught classes there and also became the liaison for a growing number of foreign meditators who came to practice under Hlegu Sayadaw.
January 2021 was a productive month for Chit Tun: he had secured a very good job in Yangon, gotten married, and found out his new wife was expecting. However, this all changed on February 1st, when the democratically elected government was overthrown. Chit Tun chose to sacrifice everything he now had in order to help win back his country’s freedom, saying, “I don't want I don't want my baby to grow up under the military government.”
Although Chit Tun had never before engaged in activism like this, he, like so many other Burmese, have an overwhelming memory of the dark times before the 2012 reforms: the corruption, the lack of opportunities and personal freedoms, the hopelessness and despair, the dismal economy, the persistent fear and lawlessness. A refusal to accept life under these conditions once again has animated him, and so many like him, to engage with all his energy to help restore the democracy that has been taken away.
In our talk, Chit Tun describes a day in the life of the protest movement. He notes that there is no one single leader, or even any group of leaders, and that his generation— Generation Z— realizes that each individual needs to take responsibility and be a leader in their own right. He also highlights the importance of non-violence, describing its roots in his Buddhist training at the monastery. This has certainly been put to the test during these protests, and at points in our talk emotion overtakes him, such as he describes his shock and fury first recounting how in Nay Pyi Daw, 19-year old protester Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing was shot through her helmet while protecting herself from a military water hose, and then later in Mandalay, 16-year old medical volunteer Wai Yan Tun was also shot in the head by a military sniper, while helping an injured protester an ambulance. Chit Tun was so enraged by this loss of innocent life that he described wanting to “burn down police stations,” yet his commitment to Buddhist principles reaffirmed his commitment to nonviolence, evoking Michelle Obama’s famous refrain, “When they go low, we go high.”