Episode #174: Jack Myint, Part 1
“English as a language was something that I needed to learn, in fact, and to master, in order to get out of this lower middleclass circle,” reflects Jack Myint, reminiscing about his childhood in Yangon.
Unfortunately, with a father working as a taxi driver and a mother as a primary school teacher, his family had little extra income to spare for language lessons. To complicate matters, English instruction had been discontinued decades earlier by Ne Win, who considered it a vestige of colonialism, a decision that had contributed to the country’s isolation. Consequently, the only chance Jack had to acquire English was through the phrases his father taught him during lengthy taxi rides. Despite having little comprehension of their meaning, he would nonetheless diligently recite these sentences phonetically. Later on, he would repeat these phrases to foreign tourists he encountered at Shwedagon Pagoda.
As Jack’s language ability improved, his father ran out of vocabulary to teach him, but his parents were able to track down English CDs and videotapes so he could pursue his language study. At the same time, Jack utilized Shwedagon Pagoda as a free classroom space. Before long, this appealing narrative of a boy learning English in a way that circumvented the overpriced private school structure and was within this family’s means eventually caught the ear of Ma Thanegi at the Myanmar Times. Her story about Jack landed with such an impact that he was given a full private school scholarship.
Jack dreamed big. In particular, he was inspired by the movie Air Force One, in which Harrison Ford played the US President, and young Jack decided that he also wanted to be president one day. And when asked by the tourists at Shwedagon what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would confidently respond, “President.” Occasionally, though, a tourist would point out the unfortunate truth: Myanmar had no means of installing a democratically elected leader.
Indeed, it was hard to avoid the pervasive influence of the military dictatorship even in the most mundane aspects of life. Jack had turned into somewhat of an attraction, drawing dozens of onlookers as he confidently conversed with travelers in his second language. One day, a concerned man urgently pulled Jack's father aside, cautioning him, “I know he's young, but the junta doesn't understand age, and when crowds form around a young child and foreigners, we need to understand that there are also military intelligence and pagoda security there. Some of those people speak English, and some don't, but you don't want to take the chance.” So even at a young age, Jack had to learn how to self-censor.
Being able to attend a private school certainly opened up horizons for Jack that were beyond the reach of many children from similar socio-economic backgrounds, but it was his discovery of the American Center, where he could expand his mind in safety, that had the most profound impact on him. Within its walls, among other great English writers, Jack immersed himself in the complete works of George Orwell, whom he grew to cherish. The center also kindled his fascination with political speeches, and he eagerly absorbed everything the library had to offer about past leaders. The American Center became a sanctuary where Jack could explore ideas and perspectives that were otherwise restricted, nurturing his thirst for knowledge and critical thinking.
“Good oratory is really just an encapsulation of the public sentiment, and what people feel,” he notes. “If you're able to find the right words and to capture what people feel, you will get a following, not so much because you're creating anything new per se, it's just that you're able to put into words what others aren't.” He was particularly moved by Bill Clinton’s oratory skills; so much so, in fact, that his English teachers began to notice he even started copying Clinton’s Southern accent!
By the time Jack was a teenager, he began to hear more whispers about the existence of ‘The Lady “—code for Aung San Suu Kyi—who people believed could expel the military regime and establish a better society. Jack immediately recognized her innate ability to speak in a way that inspired the masses. “It's hard to put into words these feelings of repression that have been pressed down into society for decades upon decades, and not to mention marred by civil war and economic inequality,” he notes, adding that for many, they had simply been beaten down for so long that they sought basic survival over any dim hope of a better world. “But then deep down, there is an innate yearning for… anything but this system, that is all that has always existed [in Myanmar]! And if you can tap into that, you can draw out pretty much the entire country. You can have a voice to not so much change the country, but put towards the sentiment of the country, which is as close to the description of what Aung San Suu Kyi was able to capture in the late 1980s and early 90s.”
Like many Burmese Buddhist boys, Jack ordained as a novice at age 13, and his preceptor, Shwe Nya Nwar Sayadaw, became Jack’s first real mentor. “He was a rebel in every sense of the word! He said what he wanted to say, but he understood politics in the sense that he knew what levers to push and when to pull back.” The Sayadaw was a forceful critic of the military, so much so that the State Saṅgha Maha Nayaka Committee forcibly expelled him from his monastery for giving a speech at the Mandalay office of the National League for Democracy (conveniently ignoring the many occurrences of monks speaking at military facilities). He met Hilary Clinton during her visit, and was imprisoned in the wake of the 2021 coup. But for Jack, he was simply his first tutor.
Although the Sayadaw had enormous responsibilities in overseeing a Buddhist university comprising over 20,000 monks, he stayed up through the night to answer Jack’s many questions and satisfy his endless curiosity about the world. But it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. “[The Sayadaw] said to me, ‘Okay, well, I'll teach you everything you want to know about history and the people's movement, our struggle against military governance, and the nature of ethnic politics, religious politics, monk politics, etc., if you teach me a little bit of English.” The relationship between the revered, elder monk and the young teenager grew very close, and the Sayadaw requested that he stay in robes instead of returning to school so they could have even more time together. “In incorporating some of the teachings of Buddhism and the history of ancient kings into his regular speeches, even for a brief moment, there was this almost therapeutic calm in an otherwise very oppressed and fair and unfree society,” Jack says.
What Jack learned about the nature of monastic politics from the Sayadaw was equally shocking, as he witnessed a type of cunning and maneuvering that left him in awe. “You have to be self-serving under the banner of selflessness,” he describes. “Your every move, and political position of influence and dominance, will either set the stage [for] who gets what monastery real estate, and how many groups of monks will be placed in which region, and where you get to preach… And it's nuanced, right? It's a level of skill that I have never witnessed anywhere, and I've been in Washington over a decade!” He goes on to explain how monks’ messaging had to carefully fit into the particular power structure at the time, and to showcase their skill in interweaving narratives that supposedly backed Buddhist teachings while obscuring their naked quest for power and control. “The fight for those resources and the fight for those pockets of power by those who, on the surface, reject power and everything defined as humanly and earthly possessions… That's conundrum! And to be able to do that while still maintaining a base, justifying the [the Buddha’s] original teachings. That's a balance that's very hard to maintain!”
In explaining the Saṅgha’s role in Burmese society, Jack pushes back against Western, exotified notions of the Buddhist monk as a beacon of Zen-like calm and wisdom. He notes that decades of military rule had gutted most all of the infrastructure of a civil society, impelling monks to step into administrative roles in their local communities, regarding education, health care, and even conflict resolution, some of which could easily put them on a collision course with the military. But following the horrendous killings of monks and nuns during the Saffron Revolution in 2007, the military realized they were playing with fire, and instead, initiated a concerted effort to infiltrate the monkhood to manipulate them for their own benefit.
“The military's tone and rhetoric has always been a largely xenophobic and protectionist, culturally oriented, anti-pretty much everything progressive, really. And the way you tie that bind is culture and religion,” he says. “There are no better representatives to sell the story of culture and religion than monks! But now you've gone ahead and shot them, and so you've lost your base! I think that awareness, starting from 2008 and beyond, to at all costs reshape that relationship.” Indeed, Jack noticed anti-Muslim rhetoric pick up at around that time, while the notion of being a good Burmese citizen became inextricably linked to being Buddhist. Jack began to see how the military was effectively using a new type of nationalist rhetoric to co-opt monks into becoming the messengers of their propaganda Simultaneously, they employed fear tactics to rally their Bamar base by using the new medium of social media, particularly Facebook, which had become accessible seemingly overnight. It was a perfect storm, and further bolstered by the fact that the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi did little to push back against the military’s tactics once they were voted into power in 2015. Jack believes that this accounts for the relatively low involvement of monks in the current democratic movement as compared to 2007.
During the transition period, Jack describes a visceral hunger growing amongst the Burmese people as they were exposed of the possibilities of a better life through the opening of the country, and as their horizon of opportunities expanded. This is why many economists at the time proclaimed Myanmar to be “The Last Asian Tiger.” Yet this economic growth continued to pass by many Bamar Buddhists, who were, in Jack’s words, “at the bottom of the food chain.” And when members of a majority group is feeling left behind, Jack notes it’s human nature to turn back to those base principles which one can cling to: racial identity and religion, both of which fit squarely into the military propaganda machine, and which Jack aptly compares to the role that the Culture Wars have played in American politics and society.
This marks the end of Part 1 with Jack Myint. The next episode will go into Jack’s professional career and move to Washington, DC, along with his relationship to Aung San Suu Kyi and other democratic leaders. He closes with a reflection as to where Myanmar finds itself in the current conflict.
“Whatever the crisis may be, humanitarian, environmental or political, I know that the onus is on us, the Myanmar people, to walk our walk and fight our own battles, but it is helpful to know that there are friends of Myanmar who care who will continue to care and try to support in any way that they can throughout. That's encouraging.”