Colorful People

The lives of renowned writer Khin Myo Chit and her husband Khin Maung Latt are celebrated in a new book released on the centenary of their birth

By NORA SWE / YANGON

Writers seek inspiration where they can, but rarely do strategies that don’t involve just buckling down at a desk actually work.

So it was when renowned writer Khin Myo Chit sought to ‘meet’ with ghosts of times past to help her write the book “Anawrahta of Burma.”

Alas, no ghosts appeared during Khin Myo Chit’s meditation sessions under a tree, says her grand-daughter Junior Win, who tried a similar gambit while rummaging about in history herself.

Researching the 100-year-old story of Daw Khin Myo Chit and her husband U Khin Maung Latt, Junior Win closed her eyes and tried “meeting them in a dream” to find out what they would like to say.

The ghost-summons attempt didn’t work for her either. So now she just has to hope that the couple, whose lives crossed many significant events in Myanmar in the previous century, would be satisfied with her efforts at “digging through their rubbish and memories, not knowing which should be disclosed and which kept secret.”

Junior Win’s self-produced book, “A Memory of My Grandparents,” to be released before Thingyan, opens in 1915, the year the couple were born within a few months of each other.

They met and married during the Second World War period, when times were exceedingly difficult. At one point during the Japanese occupation the cash-strapped couple tried their hand at selling slippers on the streets of Yangon.

But they were also close to many of the most significant figures of the day, including Bogyoke Aung San and other leading political figures, as well as many writers, poets and journalists.

Khin Maung Latt was a tall, bookish-looking man whose “smiling lips showed kindness and sympathy,” says his granddaughter. He was a teacher most of his life, and a chief editor of the Working People’s Daily from 1963 to 1968.

Khin Myo Chit, whose birth name was Khin Mya, had a “tall, slim and rather weak body,” Junior Win writes. “But her stern face, sharp eyes, and firm voice showed her strong mind and her stubborn spirit.”

She was a resolute nationalist and a longtime contributor from the late 1930s to publications such as Dagon magazine, The Burma Journal, Oway,

The Working People’s Daily and The Guardian.

In her fifties, when she began publishing books in English, Khin Myo Chit started to make a wider mark.

There were shades of Agatha Christie in the title of the book “The 13 Carat Diamond and Other Stories” that came out in 1969.

Later books such as “Colourful Burma” (1976), “Burmese Scenes and Sketches” (1977) and “A Wonderland of Burmese Legends” (1984) went on to find avid local and international audiences at a time when Myanmar was sinking deeper into isolation and censorship was curtailing the topics writers could tackle.

As writers and educators in difficult times, life was rarely simple or carefree for the couple, but their airy wooden house in a tree-filled compound on Pyay Road was always a rich site of teaching, talking and writing among family, friends and visitors.

Khin Maung Latt died in 1996 and Khin Myo Chit passed away three years later.

Their home remains almost as they left it; its legacy of ideas and intellectual life spanning much of modern Myanmar’s history is kept quietly alive today by family members who work as writers, editors and translators and who all took part in this memory-filled work of research headed by a proud granddaughter.

“A Memory of My Grandparents” by Junior Win will be in local bookshops before the Thingyan holiday.