During military rule, it was always a toss-up on who was next.
Aye Aye Win, her husband and her father were all journalists under the junta. All were interrogated at some point. When soldiers came to their house in Yangon, the family didn’t know who might be leaving with them.
There was one night in September 2007.
It was the height of the Saffron Revolution, when Buddhist monks took to the street to demand democracy. A Japanese cameraman had been shot dead while filming a crackdown on protesters. It had been a long, distressing day. Aye Aye Win, the local correspondent for the Associated Press and one of the only female journalists in the country, was exhausted.
She was sleeping lightly enough to hear the police car slow to a crawl outside her house. It parked. She ran downstairs, recognizing the sound. “What do you want?” she asked, opening the door.
“It’s not for you,” one of the officers replied. “It’s for your husband.”
“I don’t know if I was relieved or not,” the 61-year-old said on a recent afternoon, laughing at the memory.
The journalist was sitting in the living room of her family home, in a leafy part of the city. The house – a beautiful old wooden structure – has belonged to her family for several generations. From 1969 to 2013 it served as AP’s de facto bureau. Aye Aye Win and her father, over decades worth of breakfasts, lunches and dinner, talked shop at the large table, now crowded with papers and computer monitors.
That time has now passed – U Sein Win died in 2013 and, last month, Aye Aye Win retired from the AP after 25 years as the wire agency’s woman in Myanmar.
It has been an interesting few decades.
Over the course of her career, Aye Aye Win covered the student uprisings in the 1980s and 90s as well as the protests in 2007. She covered Cyclone Nargis in 2008 and the transition to semi-civilian government in 2011. She picked up four international awards, including the Honor Medal for Distinguished Service from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism.
“I’m not really retiring like an old person,” she said in crisp English. “It’s just a full-time job that I’m retiring [from].”
She plans to spend time with her family – especially her daughter, a doctor – and work on personal projects.
Her father left behind reams of documents – records of meetings with historical figures, personal notes – that are now yellowed and falling apart. She wants to preserve them so that one day they can be exhibited.
“I thought that if I don’t start now, it will be too late,” she said.
A unique apprenticeship
Aye Aye Win has her father, who was AP’s Myanmar correspondent before her, to credit for inspiring her to become a journalist.
She remembers him as an indefatigable reporter whose fingers bled because he pressed so hard on the keys of his typewriter. He slept beside the telex machine so he could communicate with overseas editors.
“When London or New York called the telex machine would wake up, and he woke up immediately and would be replying to all the questions at that time. It was amazing,” she recalled.
“So I said, ‘Dad, I want to be nothing but a journalist.’”
U Sein Win worked for AP from 1968 to 1989. Before that, he was the editor and publisher of local newspaper The Guardian (as a result, he was often referred to as Guardian U Sein Win).
He wrote stories during the British colonial era, the Japanese wartime occupation, the brief period of democracy in the 1950s and the decades of military rule that started in 1962. He was jailed three times for his writing but lived to see pre-publication censorship lifted in 2012.
In the late 1970s, when Aye Aye Win was in her twenties, U Sein Win began teaching her the trade. She typed for him, answered his phones and interviewed sources. At first he told her the job was too dangerous – he had already been arrested once, in 1965. She remembers her mother sitting her down and explaining: “Ok, your dad has been taken away. Don’t worry, I’ll be around. Life will go on.”
She learned what journalistic instinct was in 1983, when North Korean assassins bombed the Martyrs’ Mausoleum in Yangon, killing 21 people. It happened during a state visit by then-South Korean president Chun Doo-hwan, who survived the attack.
In preparation for the visit security had been stepped up all around the city.
“There was a soldier sitting in the garden and we gave him a chair,” recalled Aye Aye Win. “Then came a big noise. And this shows that I wasn’t acting like a journalist – I ran out of the house and asked the soldier what happened. ‘That must be a burst tyre,’ he said. My father, on the other hand, ran upstairs and looked towards the Shwedagon and saw black smoke. He knew the agenda. Something had happened there. My father said, ‘That’s the mausoleum – I’m going.’
“I was so excited,” she added. “The excitement in spite of the tragedy – the excitement of seeing him work and the instinct and everything. I think AP got the scoop.”
In the years that followed, Aye Aye Win slowly assumed more responsibility, taking on stories of her own. She held the fort when her father was away. In 1988 she telexed AP to tell them that he had been arrested after covering the student anti-government uprising. In 1989, she took over the job.
It wasn’t easy. There were people in power who expected her to be a soft touch because she was a woman, she said. And when they realized she wasn’t, she quickly became a target for the notorious Special Branch. The former military junta dubbed her “the axe-handle” of foreign journalism in Myanmar.
They tapped her phone. They kept a dossier on her, noting down when she had called the authorities ‘bastards’, she later found out. She was interrogated in the middle of the night twice.
Once, while listening to her phone calls, an intelligence agent heard her tell a friend to come and pick up a document. It was an open letter distributed by Shan State rebels, complaining about a proposed peace agreement with government forces.
“They [the authorities] stupidly said to me: ‘What paper did you pass on?’ I said, ‘Oh no, I didn’t pass the paper.’ Actually, I did. But if I had said so they would have gone and bothered that person.”
The ‘First Lady’ and ‘The Lady’
The journalist shares some of the traits associated with the daughter of another great man: Aung San Suu Kyi, whose father was independence leader Aung San. Aye Aye Win has met ‘The Lady’ several times over the years.
“I admired her a lot,” said Aye Aye Win. “I admired her because she was very tough. She really had to brave those generals who were crazy enough to shoot at her … I think the government didn’t like me because they thought I was stubborn and intransigent also,” she said.
When she was interrogated, the officers gave her a warning: “My boss conveys this message – they don’t want you to be at the protest,” they would say.
“Please tell your boss that I cannot give that promise, because my job is to be where the news is,” she would reply.
“When I got home, I would realize that this wasn’t the kind of answer that they wanted to hear from a woman … That’s why I say sometimes I understand Daw Suu for her stubbornness,” she said, referring to the opposition leader.
Times have changed in Myanmar – at least a little. People often ask Aye Aye Win what she thinks of the reforms, set to be tested by the upcoming November 8 election. She’s a cynic, but she’ll admit one thing: she no longer fears the midnight knock.
“By 2011 I could sleep without the fear that somebody would come knock at the door, she said. “I feel if they did now they would come with a warrant … Whether [the transition] is real or not, something real has happened in my life,” she said.
Sometimes she wonders whether her father would be disappointed in her for retiring – he kept working until he was in his eighties.
“Stories! Reporting! The monks protest? The cyclone? He was writing … He was jumping in and out of helicopters at the age of 80!”
His daughter plans to be more aloof – but only a little.
A few days into her semi-retirement, Myanmar was hit with the worst flooding in recent memory. It was a big story. Aung San Suu Kyi was touring some of the worst-affected villages.
Aye Aye Win went too, but she didn’t follow her everywhere this time.
“In the past, I would have been running around Daw Suu, listening carefully to what she’s saying, and reporting. Now it’s like: ‘Good, you go, take a boat. I’ll just stay where it’s dry.”
Photo of Aye Aye Win at home in Yangon in August / Coconuts Yangon
Reader Interactions