[Music]
some of you know I speak a bit of
Burmese and I regularly find myself in a
Yangon taxi talking to the driver
I’m an English girl I married a Burmese
man and they got aa car later and I said
please put your hands back on the
steering wheel oh he’s like a light dad
and Abu ZAR you are later can take on
air so what are we talking about there a
little bit of Burmese napoo your
forehead SAR writing you are is a
village and let it is to go around so
what they’re saying to me is you started
off in one village you went all around
the houses and eventually you arrived in
Yangon and met the man of your destiny
the man of your dreams lastly yeah I
guess so he’s sitting somewhere down
there so which village did I start off
in so I was born actually in the US but
I grew up in Oxford in a university town
my my parents were academics and I went
from Oxford over to Cambridge studied
pathology and then to University of
Chicago and it was after that that I
joined the Foreign Office I became a
diplomat I arrived in Rangoon on my
first posting 1990 and I’ll come back to
how I got there but in the meantime my
destiny my nipples are was born in a
small village called medleague on in the
north of the Delta Irrawaddy region and
he had a normal boy’s life already
showing artistic tendencies and as a
result they sent him to Rangoon study
law because that’s the way it works here
and he was in Rangoon University in 1988
and being the way he is he got involved
and being the way he is he got thrown
out and so he was very much part of
those student demonstrations in 88 which
then when the military took over took
him on a very long journey first to the
Indian border to mana poor and then to
the Chinese border and then back and
then through three jails and eventually
he ended up
Kim yang-gon where he met and married
the British ambassador which obviously
was where you would expect him to end up
and that was me so what started me on
that journey to Rangoon was a lighthouse
it was actually two lighthouses at
opposite ends of the earth one is
lighthouse off the coast of Scotland hi
recalled the scare of all it was built
in about 1844 and then about 20 years
later in the colonial times they used
the exact same model to build a
lighthouse off the coast of Burma now
I had an early boyfriend don’t tell my
husband that but I had an early
boyfriend whose father was the trustee
of the Scottish lighthouse and the two
of them were lucky to get a visa in
about 1985 to come out and visit the
sister lighthouse in Burma and they
brought all of the spare parts that they
found in the back of the Scottish
lighthouse because actually turns out
you could use them all in Burma even
though they were 20 years out of date
back in Scotland so they came over on
that trip and showed me the photos when
he came back and I’d never heard a Burma
I had no colonial grandfather I had no
uncle who died in World War two but
those images of Faneca of houses on
stilts at the Delta and the White House
really stuck in my mind and as a result
when I came to join the Foreign Office
two or three years later and they put in
front of you a list and they said where
do you want to go first what language
did you want to learn and it was Moscow
Beijing Tokyo Athens Lagos and then
there was Rangoon and at the time it
felt random I just ticked the box
rangoon I now realise all of this was
preordained but as a result they sent me
off to learn Burmese in London for a few
months and I came out here in July 1990
was full monsoon I was sweating just
like I am now
sweating in the humidity tain Lyn I
think was a lot hotter and stickier he
was at that time up on the Indian border
and I got on with my job and one day the
new lights what actually was the working
people’s daily in those days for a name
the working people’s daily our daily
government newspaper came through the
door and we read about a press con
France now this was a press conference
about and given by students who had fled
to the border and who had come back and
they told these terrible stories of
torture of executions and how they’d
survived
and we in the embassy and indeed most
people in Burma read in thought you know
more military propaganda we couldn’t
believe it we thought this was just a
way of undermining the cause of a
democracy but actually it was a great
deal worse and what I didn’t also
realize at the time was that the young
man that you can see sitting on the edge
of the row that was miner poozer and he
also didn’t realize that the second
secretary in embassy was the woman
destined for him so he went back to his
village I left Rangoon I went to
Brussels six years there and I came back
in 2002 as ambassador so at that stage
tain Lin had gone into his jail career
it was by that stage he was at Maui our
jail back in the Delta and when I went
to present my credentials to the senior
General which was on the 31st of
December 2002 which was tain Lin’s 36th
birthday by chance I was 36 – I was one
of the youngest ambassadors and I
presented my credentials the photograph
was showed in the newspaper and a few
days later the newspaper was smuggled
into miaow miaow jail as often happened
and all the political prisoners had one
of their sort of regular political chats
and they decided to pick for today’s
topic
why has Britain sent an ambassador to
Burma the US have not done it and nor
should the Brits and talen was
absolutely adamant that this was a case
fortunately my government was not
listening to him so I was there I got
the job I tried to do what I could to
support the cause of democracy they were
difficult times and often we would find
people turning up at our door and
announce mostly undercover journalists
to to ask us about this and one day I
got a call from reception a woman called
Lindell was sitting there Lindell are
you out there somewhere she should be
somewhere out there so Lindell I didn’t
know I’d heard of her she came up and
she said you got you got to help me
you’ve got to help me there’s
amazing amazing paintings you’ve got to
put them somewhere safe we’ve heard you
do that kind of thing I said maybe tell
me more
so she told me and she showed me the
leaflet of an exhibition by a recently
released political prisoner called tain
Linh and she said these are paintings
which are painted on prison uniforms
they’ve all got stamped on the back
property of the prison Department we
need to get them out of here otherwise
they’ll get seized soon can you help and
I said okay look send him round and I’ll
see what I can do so one afternoon he
came round to my residence and I
remember as we sat there drinking tea
and we were drinking it from the
gold-rimmed teacups and I remember
looking at his head which was quite
shaven that time we’re thinking gosh
there’s some interesting scars on that
head I wonder where they came from and
so I learnt more about his story he in
turn was looking at me and thinking gosh
when we read about the British
ambassador we’d assumed she was some old
crone of 60 and this chick seems quite
young so we got talking I took his
paintings I packed them and sent them
off to Amsterdam where there’s an
archive which keeps some of the sort of
social history of me and Marr safe and
we used to meet up from time to time
talking about language talking about
politics talking about art and over the
following sort of six or so months I
sponsored his art exhibition at the time
he was so poor he had to paint on
recycled paper he painted my portrait
and we used to talk about art and
artists and one night we were sitting
there watching a DVD about Jackson
Pollock in my residence and then he
didn’t go home now dr. tough so in me
and my culture it’s really quite simple
you hang your lone Gees on the line
together it’s an established
relationship when you’re an ambassador
it’s a bit different number when you
don’t do your laundry okay but number
two you know when your lover is
potentially an enemy of the state and
you know you have a certain position you
wonder what you’re meant to do so I
turned to the diplomatic practice guide
to see what I could find
it wasn’t in there so I thought to
myself okay what should we do well I’ve
been told that in my staff there is
bound to be an informer for military
intelligence everybody’s told me they’re
telling mi all the visitors coming to
your house each day and even actually
there were people who refused to come to
my house because they insisted that
there was somebody sitting with a camera
in one of the towers of the Methodist
Central Church across the gate so I took
the band’s found that sooner or later
because they would see Tanglin coming in
and out every morning going to his
English classes going to his studio but
the week’s went on and it was quite
clear that the word was not getting
through and I felt somewhat so
disappointed by this so I thought I can
let me at least put the word out to my
embassy so we were doing a blood
donation and I I took tainment along you
know work it out for yourselves guys
which my embassy staff being smart
people did not military intelligence
however so then we thought okay Tanglin
was going to get a passport he actually
went and told the agent that he was
going out with a British ambassador ago
I didn’t take notes so then we went to
his village and we had to put in a
diplomatic note because they had to
arrange a security detail and so you
know the word was now official and then
we went off to UK for the first time now
along the way there had been somebody
who’d worked it out Tsar Ghana a friend
of both of ours
who had given tain Lynn to green silk
lounges matching salt lounges for his
marriage and he’d given them to me it
said wear these when we get married and
I said yes but you do wonder our British
traditions have to firstly ask me but I
put them to one side so I took him to a
friend’s wedding and let him do a little
bit of research into these quaint
English customs and so he discovered the
concept of the proposal and then we went
to Cornwall and in Cornwall I discovered
everywhere
Taylan goes art follows or comes along
in the car with us and in this
particular case I was sitting there on
the beach and reading the newspaper and
he was scuffing around and he told me to
go up to the top of the beach and say
you know what do you think and I said
you’ve got the grammar wrong
and then I said okay let we let week
so we returned and by that stage the
word had got out and the senior general
had called in the forest minute whose
minister who was from the village and
said what’s going on the British
ambassador’s marrying somebody in your
village find out about it
so the forest minister went rushing back
and fortunately our visit had been
documented by security and put all
together in an album called moments of
wonderfulness and so every step of our
visit was there and he was briefed and
he reported back and it but the general
said have they got married yet have they
got married yet we need to know now we
hadn’t at that stage got married we did
then go on to marry many many times for
various religious bureaucratic and
social reasons including at the mahadji
monastery and what we found at our
marriage was that we didn’t have the
relatives to fill the kind of the
groom’s photo or the groom’s family the
bride’s family but we had enough from
Yaya Jail we had enough for mandalay Jo
we had the jungle we had the 88
generation and as a result we had
special branch outside clicking all the
time as a backup set of wedding photos
so we married and there are many others
in my situation I think many other
Western women who have married Burmese
men so I asked them what’s been the
biggest challenge for you because for me
it was actually the bureaucracy in the
paperwork of getting the visas they said
the main challenge for us is usually the
in-laws and it’s more specific than that
it’s usually the washing machine why
because in Myanmar custom men’s and
women’s undergarments are not meant to
be mixed it’s bad for the man it affects
his masculinity his poem and some of my
friends say that they’d found their
in-laws looking through the laundry
basket to see whether the lazy wife was
mixing it up now I am very very relieved
that my mother-in-law has never to my
knowledge looked in my washing machine
her reaction on us marrying is oh my god
thank God my son is going to eat finally
because she had seen
you know a Sun in the jungle in jail and
then she was expecting him to be a
penniless artist so marrying an
ambassador she thought is going to get
him at least three square meals a day
which it certainly has we found that
actually through a shared art and
culture and a shared commitment to
things like freedom of expression there
hasn’t really been that much difference
in our two cultures and tane Lin himself
is a very adaptable person so wherever
he goes he uses art and so my friends
would ask him how’d she find London now
that you’re living there and he would
paint it he would mix up looking out on
top of Nelson’s column and he did the
same for Amsterdam for Brussels for
Venice and so on so it’s been art
culture language which has brought us
together but there has been one other
group which has had a different
narrative the military government we
discovered this the other day we met a
Frenchman who had been detained by
military intelligence and they said to
him do you know Vicki Bowman and he said
well I think I’ve met her at a
conference or two and they said you know
what she did she kidnapped or Miam our
artist and she took him to London I
think it was destiny there was no there
was no struggle on my hands we were
destined to marry it was on Naboo sir
thank you very much
[Applause]
[Music]
some of you know I speak a bit of
Burmese and I regularly find myself in a
Yangon taxi talking to the driver
I’m an English girl I married a Burmese
man and they got aa car later and I said
please put your hands back on the
steering wheel oh he’s like a light dad
and Abu ZAR you are later can take on
air so what are we talking about there a
little bit of Burmese napoo your
forehead SAR writing you are is a
village and let it is to go around so
what they’re saying to me is you started
off in one village you went all around
the houses and eventually you arrived in
Yangon and met the man of your destiny
the man of your dreams lastly yeah I
guess so he’s sitting somewhere down
there so which village did I start off
in so I was born actually in the US but
I grew up in Oxford in a university town
my my parents were academics and I went
from Oxford over to Cambridge studied
pathology and then to University of
Chicago and it was after that that I
joined the Foreign Office I became a
diplomat I arrived in Rangoon on my
first posting 1990 and I’ll come back to
how I got there but in the meantime my
destiny my nipples are was born in a
small village called medleague on in the
north of the Delta Irrawaddy region and
he had a normal boy’s life already
showing artistic tendencies and as a
result they sent him to Rangoon study
law because that’s the way it works here
and he was in Rangoon University in 1988
and being the way he is he got involved
and being the way he is he got thrown
out and so he was very much part of
those student demonstrations in 88 which
then when the military took over took
him on a very long journey first to the
Indian border to mana poor and then to
the Chinese border and then back and
then through three jails and eventually
he ended up
Kim yang-gon where he met and married
the British ambassador which obviously
was where you would expect him to end up
and that was me so what started me on
that journey to Rangoon was a lighthouse
it was actually two lighthouses at
opposite ends of the earth one is
lighthouse off the coast of Scotland hi
recalled the scare of all it was built
in about 1844 and then about 20 years
later in the colonial times they used
the exact same model to build a
lighthouse off the coast of Burma now
I had an early boyfriend don’t tell my
husband that but I had an early
boyfriend whose father was the trustee
of the Scottish lighthouse and the two
of them were lucky to get a visa in
about 1985 to come out and visit the
sister lighthouse in Burma and they
brought all of the spare parts that they
found in the back of the Scottish
lighthouse because actually turns out
you could use them all in Burma even
though they were 20 years out of date
back in Scotland so they came over on
that trip and showed me the photos when
he came back and I’d never heard a Burma
I had no colonial grandfather I had no
uncle who died in World War two but
those images of Faneca of houses on
stilts at the Delta and the White House
really stuck in my mind and as a result
when I came to join the Foreign Office
two or three years later and they put in
front of you a list and they said where
do you want to go first what language
did you want to learn and it was Moscow
Beijing Tokyo Athens Lagos and then
there was Rangoon and at the time it
felt random I just ticked the box
rangoon I now realise all of this was
preordained but as a result they sent me
off to learn Burmese in London for a few
months and I came out here in July 1990
was full monsoon I was sweating just
like I am now
sweating in the humidity tain Lyn I
think was a lot hotter and stickier he
was at that time up on the Indian border
and I got on with my job and one day the
new lights what actually was the working
people’s daily in those days for a name
the working people’s daily our daily
government newspaper came through the
door and we read about a press con
France now this was a press conference
about and given by students who had fled
to the border and who had come back and
they told these terrible stories of
torture of executions and how they’d
survived
and we in the embassy and indeed most
people in Burma read in thought you know
more military propaganda we couldn’t
believe it we thought this was just a
way of undermining the cause of a
democracy but actually it was a great
deal worse and what I didn’t also
realize at the time was that the young
man that you can see sitting on the edge
of the row that was miner poozer and he
also didn’t realize that the second
secretary in embassy was the woman
destined for him so he went back to his
village I left Rangoon I went to
Brussels six years there and I came back
in 2002 as ambassador so at that stage
tain Lin had gone into his jail career
it was by that stage he was at Maui our
jail back in the Delta and when I went
to present my credentials to the senior
General which was on the 31st of
December 2002 which was tain Lin’s 36th
birthday by chance I was 36 – I was one
of the youngest ambassadors and I
presented my credentials the photograph
was showed in the newspaper and a few
days later the newspaper was smuggled
into miaow miaow jail as often happened
and all the political prisoners had one
of their sort of regular political chats
and they decided to pick for today’s
topic
why has Britain sent an ambassador to
Burma the US have not done it and nor
should the Brits and talen was
absolutely adamant that this was a case
fortunately my government was not
listening to him so I was there I got
the job I tried to do what I could to
support the cause of democracy they were
difficult times and often we would find
people turning up at our door and
announce mostly undercover journalists
to to ask us about this and one day I
got a call from reception a woman called
Lindell was sitting there Lindell are
you out there somewhere she should be
somewhere out there so Lindell I didn’t
know I’d heard of her she came up and
she said you got you got to help me
you’ve got to help me there’s
amazing amazing paintings you’ve got to
put them somewhere safe we’ve heard you
do that kind of thing I said maybe tell
me more
so she told me and she showed me the
leaflet of an exhibition by a recently
released political prisoner called tain
Linh and she said these are paintings
which are painted on prison uniforms
they’ve all got stamped on the back
property of the prison Department we
need to get them out of here otherwise
they’ll get seized soon can you help and
I said okay look send him round and I’ll
see what I can do so one afternoon he
came round to my residence and I
remember as we sat there drinking tea
and we were drinking it from the
gold-rimmed teacups and I remember
looking at his head which was quite
shaven that time we’re thinking gosh
there’s some interesting scars on that
head I wonder where they came from and
so I learnt more about his story he in
turn was looking at me and thinking gosh
when we read about the British
ambassador we’d assumed she was some old
crone of 60 and this chick seems quite
young so we got talking I took his
paintings I packed them and sent them
off to Amsterdam where there’s an
archive which keeps some of the sort of
social history of me and Marr safe and
we used to meet up from time to time
talking about language talking about
politics talking about art and over the
following sort of six or so months I
sponsored his art exhibition at the time
he was so poor he had to paint on
recycled paper he painted my portrait
and we used to talk about art and
artists and one night we were sitting
there watching a DVD about Jackson
Pollock in my residence and then he
didn’t go home now dr. tough so in me
and my culture it’s really quite simple
you hang your lone Gees on the line
together it’s an established
relationship when you’re an ambassador
it’s a bit different number when you
don’t do your laundry okay but number
two you know when your lover is
potentially an enemy of the state and
you know you have a certain position you
wonder what you’re meant to do so I
turned to the diplomatic practice guide
to see what I could find
it wasn’t in there so I thought to
myself okay what should we do well I’ve
been told that in my staff there is
bound to be an informer for military
intelligence everybody’s told me they’re
telling mi all the visitors coming to
your house each day and even actually
there were people who refused to come to
my house because they insisted that
there was somebody sitting with a camera
in one of the towers of the Methodist
Central Church across the gate so I took
the band’s found that sooner or later
because they would see Tanglin coming in
and out every morning going to his
English classes going to his studio but
the week’s went on and it was quite
clear that the word was not getting
through and I felt somewhat so
disappointed by this so I thought I can
let me at least put the word out to my
embassy so we were doing a blood
donation and I I took tainment along you
know work it out for yourselves guys
which my embassy staff being smart
people did not military intelligence
however so then we thought okay Tanglin
was going to get a passport he actually
went and told the agent that he was
going out with a British ambassador ago
I didn’t take notes so then we went to
his village and we had to put in a
diplomatic note because they had to
arrange a security detail and so you
know the word was now official and then
we went off to UK for the first time now
along the way there had been somebody
who’d worked it out Tsar Ghana a friend
of both of ours
who had given tain Lynn to green silk
lounges matching salt lounges for his
marriage and he’d given them to me it
said wear these when we get married and
I said yes but you do wonder our British
traditions have to firstly ask me but I
put them to one side so I took him to a
friend’s wedding and let him do a little
bit of research into these quaint
English customs and so he discovered the
concept of the proposal and then we went
to Cornwall and in Cornwall I discovered
everywhere
Taylan goes art follows or comes along
in the car with us and in this
particular case I was sitting there on
the beach and reading the newspaper and
he was scuffing around and he told me to
go up to the top of the beach and say
you know what do you think and I said
you’ve got the grammar wrong
and then I said okay let we let week
so we returned and by that stage the
word had got out and the senior general
had called in the forest minute whose
minister who was from the village and
said what’s going on the British
ambassador’s marrying somebody in your
village find out about it
so the forest minister went rushing back
and fortunately our visit had been
documented by security and put all
together in an album called moments of
wonderfulness and so every step of our
visit was there and he was briefed and
he reported back and it but the general
said have they got married yet have they
got married yet we need to know now we
hadn’t at that stage got married we did
then go on to marry many many times for
various religious bureaucratic and
social reasons including at the mahadji
monastery and what we found at our
marriage was that we didn’t have the
relatives to fill the kind of the
groom’s photo or the groom’s family the
bride’s family but we had enough from
Yaya Jail we had enough for mandalay Jo
we had the jungle we had the 88
generation and as a result we had
special branch outside clicking all the
time as a backup set of wedding photos
so we married and there are many others
in my situation I think many other
Western women who have married Burmese
men so I asked them what’s been the
biggest challenge for you because for me
it was actually the bureaucracy in the
paperwork of getting the visas they said
the main challenge for us is usually the
in-laws and it’s more specific than that
it’s usually the washing machine why
because in Myanmar custom men’s and
women’s undergarments are not meant to
be mixed it’s bad for the man it affects
his masculinity his poem and some of my
friends say that they’d found their
in-laws looking through the laundry
basket to see whether the lazy wife was
mixing it up now I am very very relieved
that my mother-in-law has never to my
knowledge looked in my washing machine
her reaction on us marrying is oh my god
thank God my son is going to eat finally
because she had seen
you know a Sun in the jungle in jail and
then she was expecting him to be a
penniless artist so marrying an
ambassador she thought is going to get
him at least three square meals a day
which it certainly has we found that
actually through a shared art and
culture and a shared commitment to
things like freedom of expression there
hasn’t really been that much difference
in our two cultures and tane Lin himself
is a very adaptable person so wherever
he goes he uses art and so my friends
would ask him how’d she find London now
that you’re living there and he would
paint it he would mix up looking out on
top of Nelson’s column and he did the
same for Amsterdam for Brussels for
Venice and so on so it’s been art
culture language which has brought us
together but there has been one other
group which has had a different
narrative the military government we
discovered this the other day we met a
Frenchman who had been detained by
military intelligence and they said to
him do you know Vicki Bowman and he said
well I think I’ve met her at a
conference or two and they said you know
what she did she kidnapped or Miam our
artist and she took him to London I
think it was destiny there was no there
was no struggle on my hands we were
destined to marry it was on Naboo sir
thank you very much
[Applause]
[Music]
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