Burma Writer - Khin Myo Chit

Biography of KhinMyoChit

KHIN MYO CHIT

writer and journalist

(1915-1996)

‘sometimes I lose, sometimes they win.’

စာေရးဆရာမၾကီးေဒၚခင္မ်ိဴးခ်စ္ ၏ ေမြးေန႕ ေမလ ၁-ရက္ေန႕အမွတ္တရ

အျဖစ္ ေဒါက္တာခင္ေမာင္၀င္းေရးသားေသာ La Grande dame de la Myanmar Writing

ကိုအဂၤလိပ္လုိအတုိင္းတင္ဆက္လုိက္ပါသည္။

La Grande Dame de la Myanmar Writing

By Dr.Khin Maung Win (son of Khin Myo Chit)

Very few people know thqt her real name is Ma Khin Mya.Her close relative and

friends call her by her real name.Young people call her Ma Ma Mya or Aunty Mya.

Older people call he Ma Khin Mya.But to most people she was known under her

pen name, Khin Myo Chit.

She was born at the time when people generally had low expectations of women,

when no parent would hear of a young respectable lady entering a profesion and

a humanitarian education may be permitted , but only to be able to write B,A under

one’s name and make impressions on people. ‘What a pity she ‘s a girl’ that’s what she

always heard people saying all the time.

Her grandmother had been a maid of honour at the court of King Mindon.Many times

she recounted to her the events leading to the mass excution of King Thibaw’s royal

relative by the Queen Suphayalatt.’It’s a blot on our hitory’.She used to say.She then

related to her how the great warrier prince like Prince Kanaung,the Thonsaire Minhagyi

(literally translated the great Prince Thirty, so named because he could climb up a wall of

thirtyyards in height using his bea hands and feet) and many others were executed

duringan internal intrigue.’We lot all the great warrier princes, so that when the British

marched to the capital city of Uupper Myanmar , there was not even one person

to throw a stone at the invaders.’

She asked,’Do you mean to say, grandma, that if these warriior princes were there,

Upper Myanmar would not have fallen unde the british Rule ?’ ‘No’ , said her grandmother.

‘We would still loe the war, for, at that time, no one could stop the riing of the British Empire.

But at least the batle of Upper Burma could have earned a place in the annals of war like

Hnnibal’s fight against Rome, or King Arthur’s fight against the Saxons, or King

Harold’s fight against the invading Normans’ .

Her literary career began in 1932 when she translated a poem of Sir Walter Scott and sent to the Yangon University magazine.But she didn’t put her name, being kind of shy to do that. The poem was about Patriotism and when it was published , the editor put the pen name – Khin Myo Chit (meaning lady who loves her country or Miss Patriot).

That was how she made her debut in the literary field,and arned her pen name.But all was not well at home. With her father’s obstructiveness and her mother’s disapproval of ‘clever girls’ , thingsgot from bad to worse.She was not allowed to do any writing in peace . Her mother scolded her more and more.Her father threatened to burn her pjapers.She had to hide them and do her writing when everyone was in bed.

I shall not dwell too ,uch on the story of her unhappy childhood and her ecape from the tyranny of her father.It could have made something torn from the pages of a Dickens novel and could hzve eaned her a nick-name like ‘female David Copperfield’.

Regarding her meeting with my father, U Khin Maung Latt(1915-1996),whom she refered to as ‘Ko Latt’, she wrote in her autobiography as follows :

‘’He was theboy next door.He had left college, an undergraduate, not being able to continue his studies because of the decline in family fortunes.He was having a short lull at home while looking for a job.

He was a voracious reader and we sharedthe same interestsin books.I read the books he recommended and he returned the compliment . We read ‘Little Women’ , one of my favourite books and he called me teasingly ‘Jo’.We had a fine time talking of books.It seemed that we had launched on a long and timeless talk which could lead to one thing a life-long alliance.’’

Regarding her political invilvements of 1937 and afterwards, she wrote:

“Had this even tenor of our way gone on for a few months or so, Ko Latt and I might have sipped quietly into mqrried life. My rosy dreams of the future during the interval of a few months before our marriage tuned out to be a nightmare of tormy incidents.It was the fate of the country that swept most of our dreams away.By a cruel trick of fate, we became part of that mighty tidal wave which we were but a tiny ripple. ”

She recountd the part she played in the demonstration of 1938 as follows;

“Three girls and I happened to be in front of line right after the standard bearers.It was a rude shock when we found ourselves confonted by baton weilding policemen, some mounted on horseback.All of a sudden like a sequence on a cinema screen everything became a confusion of horses’legs and batons.To my horror, I saw girls falling in pools of blood.As I tried to pick them up, blows fell on me.”

She lived through the stormy times of the British Regime; the Japanese Regime;the Struggle for independebce;sharing the joys and sorrows of the political figures .

Also in her autobiography , she recounted a difficult phrase of her life in the following way.

“Now,I have come to oneof the most difficult chapters of my life,for it was then that my misadventures strayed into the realms of faith and religion.

I was prejudiced against meditatio of wny religious practice which I took to be only for people who had nothing better to do or those who wanted to put on ais of holiness or those who had no change to face life….I thought.”

The story of how her meeting with two monks changed her outlook and made her regain her faith in Buddhism cannot be told here, for that alone would have made treatise on Buddhism.

She became a mother-in-law in 1967, a grandmother of twins,a boy and a girl,in 1968.In an interview with a writer,Alex wood,in 1970,she said,”I am proud of being a good grandmother and housekeeper,but I have never let this interfere with any of my cultural interests.I am glad that I rediscovered the art of Myanmar Zatpwe(a kind of a mixture of play,concert and opera)in time to stop me from becming an intefering mum-in-law and an over doddering granny.Friends rubbed their hands when the twins were born and said it would be the end of my freedom.But of course,it wasn’t.I’m organising myself better and witing more than before.”

The landmarks of her literary career may be summed up in the following way:

Biography of Khin Myo Chit(1915-1999)

Khin Myo Chit was born on may 1, 1915 in Sit Kaing(Upper Burma).

1932…………….Patriotism(a poem that earned her pen name)

1963…………….Collge Girl(a novelette for serialization in ‘The Sun’ a daily paper)

1963 to 1968..: Heroes of Old Burma ,

…………………. : Quest for Peace (an autobiography)

(Both serialized in ‘The Working Peoples’Daily.’)

1970…………....:Her Infinfite Variety

(a prize-winning short story in the ‘Horizon’ magazine short story competition.)

…………………….:The Four Puppets

(included in ‘Folk Tales of Asis’,UNESCO)

……………………:Anawrahta of Burma

(publication of ‘Heroes of Old Burma’, which was later re-printed under the titles,

‘Anawhta’ and ‘King Among Men’)

1976…………..:Colourful Burma

(a pratical and poetic guide for the visitors who wants something better than

a tourist view of Burma.Later reprinted under the ‘Colourful Myanmar’.)

1977…………..:Flowers and festivals round the Burmese Year

………………….:Kyaikhtiyo

(a short history of Kyaikhtiyo Pagoda,published in the Asia magazine)

1981…………..:A Pagoda Where Fairy Tale Characters Come to Life

(A tale-loke description of Mai La Mu Pagoda in the outskirts of Yangon,

published in the Asia Magazine)

1984………….:A Wonderland of Burmese Legends

(published by the Tamarind Press in Bangkok , later reprinted in Burma under

the title ‘A Wonderland of Pagoda Legends’)

1995…………:Gift of Laughter

(on the picturesque speech of the people of Hla Daw,

A village in Central Burmam , selection of which have been published

In the ‘Pyinsa Rupa ‘ magazine)

Conclusion

During the last years of her life, deblitating and disfiguring arthrithic

pains made her spend most of her time in bed.Regarding her fight

against the spasms of pain , she remarled,”Sometimes I lose, sometimes

they win”.Quite surprisingly, compared to what she suffered,she died in peace.