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If you want to get a letter out of a Burmese prison, do not give it to the guards.
Perhaps this is obvious, but when they told me I could write two a month — one to my embassy and one to Juliana — I was naive enough to try.
"All night," I wrote to Juliana.
“A fluorescent flood light illuminates the clouds of mosquitoes feasting on me, which makes it hard to sleep, and when the mosquitoes retreat, the ants crawl in — in pulsing veins along the cell wall and floor, over every inch of skin all day.”
I filled every centimeter of the official letter form they gave me.
“But it’s all fine. I’ve already gotten used to it by now. I just want to see you.”
“Write bigger. And don’t say there are ants here.”
“Ju- I love and miss you so much. I am doing well physically and feeling more or less healthy — but mentally things are obviously rough…”
I first landed in Myanmar in early May 2019, just in time for World Press Freedom Day.
A decade earlier the country's military leaders had begun a partial democratization process that notably included the end of pre-publication press censorship.
After elections in 2015, in which the military government had been trounced by the now-fallen democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, they'd began handing over chunks of government to her quasi-civilian administration.
Though representative, Suu Kyi's administration proved nearly as intolerant of its critics as the military had been, even if it still maintained wide public support.
When I arrived, Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had been sitting in the city's Insein Prison for two years.
The year they were arrested, in 2017, I was earning $12 an hour reporting for a rural Louisiana newspaper…
...while our newly elected president channeled fury toward press pools at the back of his convention halls.
American journalism was facing its gravest threats, pundits were saying, and it wasn't even paying a living wage.
I came to Myanmar because, if our worst fears were coming to pass, I thought its journalists might have something to teach me.
If I had come to Myanmar looking for lessons, Juliana had come hoping to simply grin and bear a consular posting that was not her first choice.
“Hi Peidão*” (*person who farts a lot)
On our first date, over a shared bottle of beer, we lamented the rise of a global far right, and pined for the lost optimism of our youth.
She quoted Gramsci and Marx, and I pretended to have read them. I rushed the bill as soon as the beer finished, nervous about showing my ignorance.
On our next date, we both confessed we'd wanted to order another bottle that night.
Juliana lived alone in an airy, three-bedroom apartment paid for by her country's foreign service.
I lived downtown with a 6’3" Brit who taught English three days a week and spent the other four ranking his all-time favorite black metal albums in YouTube videos.
