The irrepressible wit

November 1967, Rangoon

Khin Myo Chit was writing an editorial for the Working People's Daily. She hoped it would be her last piece for the government-sponsored paper. She strongly willed it to be so. Outside her window, she noted with some satisfaction, Saladin, her many-horned cactus was in bloom. The King of the Desert looked regal standing atop the rock garden she had had constructed from some ancient grindstones she discovered in a corner of their plot of land.

But it would not do to get distracted. Her fingers flew over the keys of her old trusty Remington, a name so glamorous that it could be paired with ease with an Olivetti or a Marilyn, she thought.

As she wrote she could not suppress a chuckle. Ko Latt (U Khin Maung Latt), her husband of many years and party to many of her hare-brained schemes, cocked an enquiring eyebrow from across the room where he sat reading on a deckchair. She noticed he looked faintly worried and returned to his book with a slight frown creasing his forehead.

Khin Myo Chit was writing an editorial she had titled Writers and Awards. It was a time when authors and poets were called literary workers and encouraged to write extolling the socialist state. Of late the Ne Win government had announced national literary prizes for writing taing-pyu pyei-pyu or “nation-building” literature. As it turned out, it was an ambitious euphemism for propaganda literature, inspiring some worthwhile literature but also a spurt of unctuous if poor quality writing.

Khin Myo Chit, aware that it would not do to blatantly condemn the Ne Win government, instead turned a jaundiced eye on the earlier colonial regime.