RANGOON — Sixteen years ago, on a rainy, moonless May night, I left Burma. My friend Thet Win Aung and I had been in hiding, working in the pro-democracy underground, for nearly nine years by that point -- writing, organizing, and pushing for a new politics, led by our hero and confidante, Aung San Suu Kyi. But early that year, we saw the junta's net of military intelligence finally closing in around us, and we made the decision to flee.
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That final night, we stayed at Thet Win Aung's Rangoon home, packing our belongings and contacting what friends and family we could. At 3 a.m., we said goodbye to his parents as the monsoon rain poured down. Then we got in a car and headed for the Burma-Thailand border, past checkpoints and guards, out of the low Rangoon flood plain and up into the jungle hills to the east. Little did I know how long it would be -- and how much was to happen -- before I would be able to return to my homeland.
A year later, my friend decided to slip back into Burma to organize a movement calling for national nonviolent reconciliation. He was arrested and sentenced to 59 years in prison. We heard little about Thet Win Aung over the next eight years. I worked as a reporter on the border and in Bangkok, as a visiting scholar in Berkeley, California, and as a journalist in Washington. Thet Win Aung sat in his cell. He died, reportedly broken and beaten, like so many hundreds before him, in detention in October 2006.
Today, Burma is a different place. After decades as a violent military dictatorship and pariah state -- a North Korea on the Irrawaddy -- it is finally seeming to embrace a new democratic political experiment. Over the last two years, the military junta has released its throttlehold on power, freeing hundreds of political prisoners, relaxing restrictions on the media, and finally allowing opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to run for office. U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled there last year in a historic gesture of a budding new relationship between Washington and Naypyidaw. So, in that spirit, I finally went home too, to see my old friends -- and to try to understand if and how Burma had really changed.
One of the first places I visited after arriving last December was Thet Win Aung's house. His parents are old now, but gracious and courageous. He and I had been childhood friends growing up in Rangoon, and we spent our teenage years together, playing guitar and soccer. When Burma's democratic struggle burst into the streets in 1988, we were high school students, and we became active helping to organize the student-led democratic uprisings that summer. For our efforts, we were summarily kicked out of school. For years after that, we lived underground, moving from house to house, disguising our identities, always looking over our shoulders. His parents had been supportive, and when I returned from my long exile they greeted me warmly and we sat for hours trying to assemble the missing pieces of his story.
In 1998, his mother had no idea that he had returned to the country, she told me, and was caught completely off guard when she saw her son's face on state-run TV next to officials announcing his arrest. The news came as her husband was heading back home from a visit to Thet Win Aung's brother, another well-known activist then languishing in a remote prison. They had been consoled, up until then, by the thought that at least their other son was living beyond the harm of the regime in a Thai border town. They told me that his life could have been saved if prison officials had responded in a timely fashion when he collapsed in his cell. I felt searing guilt. I knelt down and paid my respects in the Buddhist fashion, said goodbye, and left. But my mind was heavy, weighed down by a sense of unfinished business.
Not all my encounters were so sad. My wife and my family invited our relatives, neighborhood friends, and teachers to join us for a reunion at a Rangoon monastery. There were greetings, cheers, hugs, and tears. Old memories resurfaced. Our 9-month-old daughter, born in America, was the real center of attention. My cell phone rang again and again. "Do you know who this is?" the callers kept saying. "Oh, you don't even recognize my voice!" Again, I felt pangs of guilt: It's hard remembering people's faces and voices after nearly two decades of forced separation, but they refused to accept that we had ever really been apart. "We always listened to your programs on the shortwave radio." "We saw you on TV." "We just read your article." It was a transcendent experience. But they were wrong: Time passes and we forget; things do change.
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