Episode #150: Overcoming The Nightmare
“I lived with fear, you know, I couldn't sleep at night, for so many nights, because arrests [come] at nighttime,” Thiri explains. “I had some kind of mental situation where I didn't sleep at night. I could only sleep when I saw the light coming because even though it doesn't mean that military will not come and arrest us in the daytime, at least I kind of relaxed, like they're not going to come for me.”
Joining the podcast over a year after her previous interview, which came just months after the coup, Thiri returns to update listeners on her own personal story, as well as to discuss the state of the resistance and the democracy movement.
Thiri describes living with debilitating stress and constant fear: of having to either hide her phone or clear sensitive information from it; of choosing clothing every morning which wouldn’t draw attention from soldiers; of missing friends who had been arrested, killed, or had fled to the jungle; and ultimately, of losing her mental stability from sleep deprivation, and paranoia of a looming arrest. “So I decided to leave the country,” she says with a sigh. “But it was a very heavy decision.”
Yet departure was not as easy as simply getting on a flight. There were stringent COVID protocols she had to clear at the airport, and she was even half-hoping that she would get rejected at the gate so the final decision about whether to leave or not would be made for her. But she made it through, and found herself on a flight out of Yangon. “The universe wanted me to be somewhere else, so I will just be wherever the universe wants me to be,” she says. “It sounds silly, but… I just couldn't make the decision myself and I didn’t want to be guilty of leaving.” Unable to process more, she dosed herself with sleeping pills and passed out until she arrived in America.
And transitioning to life of safety in a new country has not been easy. “Emotionally, it is very difficult, because it's about losing home,” Thiri remarks. “We're a plant that is taken out from the soil, because home is land. It's not about the society itself, it's all together, even if everyone in the country moves to a certain place.” Separated from her family and community, from her country and all her memory-filled, familiar places, and with no possibility of returning while the military regime remains in power, this has all been quite difficult for Thiri to accept. So also are the guilty feelings that arise from having fled the fight, and that are heightened whenever she hears about worsening conditions on the ground in Myanmar. “I feel like, ‘Oh my God, am I being selfish to all of them?!’ I’m here in a comfortable place, and safer. I can sleep well. But they may not be able to do that.”
More pronounced still is the feeling of having lost something integral to herself. “All I can say is that since I left, my soul… it's not there [anymore]. It's not here with me, something is missing.”
In spite of the darkness that has overtaken the country and the pain that has overwhelmed so many Burmese, it’s very important to Thiri that the international community not view the Burmese people with a sense of pity, which she strongly believes robs them of their humanity. “We are not the victim! I am not the victim,” she says, noting how there is a normalcy to be found even in the midst of conflict. “I will be loving [one moment] and hanging out with friends and everything. But when you see the picture of us like this, it also doesn't discount the level and intensity of the tragedy itself. It just that that's another face of us.” In other words, the Burmese people and their struggle should not be reduced to the one-dimensional caricature of a devastated population in shambles. “I just want to make sure that [people know] we have multiple faces in the way of living and conflict, not just single storytelling, like, ‘Oh, if you're in this conflict, you have to be miserable.’ That's not the case.”
Equally important to her is balancing the stories of horror and depravity with accounts of the selflessness and sacrifice that can be seen on a daily basis. Thiri describes, for example, residents having Coca-Cola on hand to douse the eyes of protesters who were attacked with tear gas, and her own mother preparing noodles for activists who needed to quickly hide in their home. “When I tell the story about Myanmar, I don't want to just talk about the language of tragedy,” she says. “We deserve better because we are just like you guys. Look at how much we love each other, even though we know that there are a lot of risks involved. People were united against the regime, and people were helping each other. People were supporting each other. Love between strangers, kindness between strangers, solidarity between strangers: that is very important, and I want to keep that spirit alive.”
The trauma Thiri experiences can take shape in unpredictable ways. She can find herself triggered at any time, her mind jumping back to the constant fear and dread of her life in Yangon. Additionally, she realizes that large swaths of her memory that have been wiped clean, with entire months unaccounted for. At times she will ask her mother how her grandmother is doing, completely forgetting that her grandmother had passed away years ago.
Listeners from our initial episode with Thiri may remember that she had been documenting the atrocities of her country’s military in a professional capacity for many years before the coup. But despite her familiarity with the military’s past brutality, she was not prepared for its present scale and intensity. “Even a person like myself, who has prior knowledge, it is already more than expected,” she says. “It's beyond human imagination.” In fact, her feelings against the military and their brutality runs so deep that, like others in the democracy movement, she refers to them by using the neutral term “siq daq” (စစ်တပ်) which can be translated as “fighting group.” Thiri feels that the term “military” is inappropriate given their active terror campaigns of the citizenry, and the word “Tatmadaw” includes a royal suffix, bestowing on them a dignity they hardly deserve.
Her emotional fragility is sparked by many things. For example, she is quickly at her wit’s end when she hears or reads something from someone in the international community who says they need more facts before they can act, when it is so clear what egregious human rights violations are taking place, and with no end in sight. It makes her frustrated, then furious, and finally hopeless and depressed.
Thiri has had to compartmentalize these intense emotions in order to complete tasks. This was never more challenging than when she had to report on the execution of four pro-democracy activists (described in this prior interview with Han Htoo). Ko Jimmy was one of them, and he had been a father figure to Thiri; to have to separate her warm feelings for him from the objective reporting of his death was almost impossible. But she found inspiration in the widows and mothers of the victims who did not want to hide their grief from public view, but rather wanted their husbands’/sons’ deaths to mean something for the revolution.
“The message was very powerful, to honor them and also the sacrifice of the activists themselves,” Thiri recalls. “For the sacrifice not to be in vain, we need to talk about this. And as much as it is difficult for me, the story needs to be spread, and the world needs to know that this is just pure murder.” Thiri wasn’t just appalled at the tragedy of the extra-judicial killing, but also with the fake trials, and the lack of transparency around whether the executions would actually be held. She likened this to the Nazi techniques of telling Jews that the gas chambers were, in fact, showers to disinfect them. “Living with this kind of hope and despair is extremely inhumane,” she says, “And it's exactly how Nazis did it to the Jews during the Holocaust.”
In looking back over the past year, Thiri charts how the increasing brutality and violence of the military eventually drove non-violent protesters away from public spaces, resulting in many youths fleeing the country, joining the armed resistance, or going deep into hiding. She rails against those she calls “siq daq apologists” who try to rebrand the conflict with clever, political language. “This is not a political crisis,” she insists. “A lot of the international governments and in the [military] apologists, they like to downgrade our crisis as a political crisis. But this definitely is not a political crisis! This is a humanitarian crisis. We are dealing with the fascists who don’t care anything about our civilians.”
Thiri is equally dismayed to hear criticism that the resistance movement shouldn’t take up arms to defend themselves against siq daq aggression. She says, “I am not a violent person, and also I don't like war. I have seen it. I was one of the people who kept trying every possible way not to go to war, because war is not just like in Marvel movies.” But it soon became apparent to many activists, including Thiri, that there was no other way to resist the oppression and tyranny the military was trying to impose on the country. She continues, “I have never imagined in my life that I will talk about arms and weapons. Because that's not what we signed up for. That's not who we are! Growing up in a military dictatorship, being arrested or being killed, it's not something new to us. We know that this is our destiny one way or another. But to see my friends holding guns and to have to kill… it's really heartbreaking for me. I still cannot process it, to be honest, even though I accept it as a reality. But on the other hand, we are fighting against [a military] that is extremely brutal. And a lot of people say, ‘Oh yeah, the resistance movement also does bad things and both sides are wrong.’ But the level and intensity of the violence committed by the military cannot be equated!”
Thiri is not only focused on working to defeat this military, but also hoping that they can win the revolution “the right way,” which means developing responsible accountability mechanisms that holds their own resistance fighters to the standard they are calling out the military for violating. This is what she calls “Victory with Dignity,” or “Victory with Responsibility.” Even in the midst of facing terrible grief and trauma, she stresses that her colleagues must not respond with vengeance, nor should they do anything that strips them of their own humanity.
“This is how a dictatorship works, it's to put us in fear,” she says. “They want to press us down from the human level. So, for me, the resilience is to go beyond the evilness of it. We need to love more, we need to care more, we need to be more kind. Only then can we see the light.” Still, at times that is easier said than done. “Sometimes the light is fading, but sometimes the light is more shiny,” she acknowledges. “But still, there's a hope. The darkness is very big, [while] the candlelight is very little. But the candlelight deserves to shine. And we deserve to live. We shouldn't be overshadowed by the fear of the brutality of the [military].”
Thiri hopes that this light can shine not only from those in Myanmar striving for freedom, but from those around the world supporting their cause. “A threat to democracy in our country can be a threat to democracy in your country, when your government doesn’t act on it,” she says. “This is beyond a political strife of brown people in Southeast Asia, it's broader than that. We are fighting for democracy, and we are not a victim. And we are telling you to join us in this fight together, so that we all can live in a society where fascists and dictatorship cannot have a space.”