Depth report

　　

"Imagine what Yangon will be like in ten years?" After two beers, I asked Nay Pont Latt across the table. The 19th Street in Yangon is like a mix of the bar street in Sanlitun in Beijing and the Taipei night market in the 1990s. Densely arranged bars, barbecue stalls, shuttle diners, singers, people sitting around low tables, drinking, talking, and eating chicken skewers.

    The diners also reflect the new face of a reopened Yangon. The table next to me is an Italian couple. They drew on a napkin the location of the small town they came from. It is the bottom right of this boot-shaped country. It is said to be breathtakingly beautiful. They had just been to Bagan and were shocked by the pagodas. Next to them is a Japanese family. A little boy with a chubby face runs around the table. His mother's face is fair and his father's hair is fluffy.

    In the 20th century, Japan and Burma had a special kind of intimacy. The young General Aung San had looked forward to working with the Japanese to drive away British colonists. During the partial opening up in the 1990s, Japanese capital and technology were important forces for Myanmar's development. When the brand images of Huawei and Xiaomi appeared in the small shops on the roadside, the 37-story "Sakura Building" stood in the city center.

    Nay Pont Latt has short hair, handsome, and laughs often. He wears a plaid shirt and a pair of loose jeans on his leg. I am always worried that it will fall off at any time. He is a younger generation of rebels than Ma Thida, born in 1980. The event that shaped him was not the 1988 uprising, but the 2007 "cassock revolution." In that year, hundreds of thousands of monks took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the military government. This is the largest demonstration in Myanmar since 1988. The symbolic significance of the monks here has not only aroused widespread resonance in the country, but also won the attention of the international community. Since the founding of the nation in 1947, soldiers, students and monks have been the three most important pillars of the country, and now the latter two have blatantly opposed the first.

    Nay Pont Latt's blog has become an important window for the outside world to understand this movement. He was one of the first batch of bloggers in this country, and he also opened two Internet Cafés. This was a completely new thing in Yangon at the time, and it has not yet entered the eyes of the censorship department.

    Nay Pont Latt graduated from Yangon University of Science and Technology, but wanted to be a writer. The Burmese military government has the most rigorous and absurd censorship system in the world. As a young author, he found that he could not find a way to publish.

    When he went to work in Singapore, he found a blog. This city-state has the second largest overseas Burmese community after Thailand. Since the practice of "Socialism on the Burmese Road" in 1962, immigrants have become the best choice for the brightest and capable Burmese. The parallel story of Yangon and Singapore also symbolizes the dramatic transformation of Southeast Asia in the second half of the 20th century.

    From the 1930s to the 1960s, Yangon was the most affluent, prosperous, and cosmopolitan city in the region. The silent and elegant colonial-style buildings in the downtown area of Yangon are reminiscent of the Bund in Shanghai or the French Quarter in Cairo. When Lee Kuan Yew visited Yangon in the early 1960s, his dream was to turn Singapore into another Yangon. But half a century later, Singapore has shined, and Yangon has fallen into the ruins of history.

    "It seems that I suddenly discovered a new world. There was no censorship. No one told you what to delete. Write whatever you want." He recalled the initial pleasure. He not only experienced the thrill of freedom, but also found followers in overseas Burmese communities. His blog has become a window for many people to understand Myanmar. He paid the price for this: He was arrested in January 2008 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for a ridiculous and apparently fabricated crime. Next, many websites were banned and blogs were deemed illegal.

    "I have no particular worries, and I don't think I have to sit for 20 years." He said with a smile when he mentioned the trial six years ago. "Prison is a suitable place for writing. You can concentrate."

    Imprisonment also brought him great influence: PEN America awarded him the Barbara Goldsmith Award in 2010 (Ma Thida also won this award); Time magazine rated him as "the 100 most influential people." ; Novelist Rushdie wrote a recommendation for him, saying that he represents "a generation of Burmese people seeking their own voice in desperate censorship".

    Honor translates into international pressure. Four years later, he was released from prison, and an era of rapid change has arrived. Like many intellectuals and writers, he was involved in politics. In the just-concluded general election, he won a seat in the local council of Yangon as a candidate for the National League for Democracy (NLD). He is about to become a parliamentarian.

    What does it mean to be a councillor? Traffic jams, inadequate power supply, neighbourhood disputes, school funding, impeachment of corrupt officials...perhaps more. When we met on 19th Street, Nay Pont Latt had just escaped from a lengthy and perhaps boring training. This is one of the initiatives of the upcoming National League for Democracy. Like many countries that have undergone democratic transition, the rebels of power suddenly become part of the power. They have no experience or material support to run these powers.

    Nay Pont Latt is both excited and uncomfortable with this kind of other shore flower. He feels somewhat that he has lost a lot of freedom, and perhaps being a writer is more suitable for him.

    "Becoming another Singapore." He looked forward to Yangon in ten years. He said half-jokingly that Lee Kuan Yew was a dictator, but he was "the best dictator."

    Speaking of Bagan Bookstore, Hunny showed some kind of uncomfortableness. "That's not a real bookstore," he said. "If you want, I'll take you to a few nearby shops."

    For those of us outsiders, the Bagan Bookstore on 39th Street is a must-see attraction in Yangon, perhaps like the city lights of San Francisco and Shakespeare in Paris. They are all a window into the history, and they all appear. In "Lonely Planet".

    But unlike these famous independent bookstores in the world, Bagan Bookstore is famous for selling pirated books. From the British anthropologist's northern survey in the 1940s to Aung San Suu Kyi's latest album, this simple bookstore of no more than 15 square meters seems to collect all English books about Myanmar. Orwell's "Myanmar Years" and "Animal Farm" also occupy prominent positions. For many years, the Burmese believed that he knew the country better than anyone.

    These books are surprisingly cheap, because they are either printed quickly or simply copied, and the colors and paper have a cheap smell. But it is indeed a fascinating smell. For an outsider who does not understand Burmese, if you want to really understand this country, this seems to be a necessary journey.

    I can also imagine what it means for such a bookstore in an information-limited society. It is not only a window to the outside world, but also a new perspective to understand oneself through the eyes of others. Imagine if you were living in Beijing in the 1970s and suddenly found a corner that collected works such as Fairbank, Pearl S. Buck, Lin Yutang, CIA China Report, Mao Zedong's foreign biographies, and so on. What a joy it would be.

    Hunny is not going to share my joy, he even wants to avoid it. At the coffee shop in Shangri-La, I saw this young man with bulging cheeks. At the age of 30, he is already the country's most famous independent publisher, as well as a poet, and a participating writer in the International Writing Project of the University of Iowa. His real name is Myay Hmone Lwin, but he likes to be called Hunny by others. He has a gentle and capable wife who takes care of the daily affairs of the publishing house for him, and a well-known hip-hop brother who mixes traditional music with rap music.

    At the age of 17, he dropped out of college to open a small publishing house. His initial business was in jeopardy. He survived, and survived to the end of censorship in 2012. He suddenly discovered that he could publish anything he wanted. He even made a surplus because of the publication of a book. The memoirs of former Prime Minister Wu Nu sold 50,000 copies, which is an amazing achievement in the Myanmar book market where the general sales volume is 1,000 copies.

    Wu Nu is also one of the politicians he admires. At a certain level, he is like Zhou Enlai's character, representing the cosmopolitan, free and open side of Burma's founding generation. He was the first prime minister of this country, and he also supported literature, art, and publishing.

    Hunny is also the publisher of the memoirs of Ma Thida and Nay Phone Latt. After the abolition of the censorship system, the memoirs of the prison career have created a good category, which is also part of a country's self-healing.

    For Hunny, all this is just the beginning. I went to the bookstore he opened, like a temporary small warehouse, simple but thriving. I even saw a Burmese edition of Lu Xun's essays. If I guess correctly, it should be "Weeds."

       Among the friends I met in Yangon, Hunny had a rare international vision and a sincere curiosity about the outside world. He just returned from the Singapore Writers' Festival, where he shared his Myanmar experience in translation and publishing. He gave me two collections of essays, one is an English translation of his own collection of poems, and the other is an English translation of works by Burmese writers who have participated in the Iowa writing project since 1994. The atmosphere in it reminds me of the first appearances of Chinese writers in the West in the 1980s. Recalling his three-month experience in the United States, he said that the young people there didn't seem to worry about anything. But in Yangon, a young man has to spend too much time on daily life—traffic, food, and future. Worry seems to overwhelm everyone.

    Hunny is also quite enthusiastic about China. Hunny's uncle was a member of the Burmese Communist Party. When the organization was disintegrated in 1989, he moved to Kunming. In his letter from Kunming, he kept emphasizing how great China is, and Myanmar is failing everywhere. Hunny also talked about Jack Ma and Mo Yan, they are the two most known Chinese.