The by-election

The sun rises deep pink over the coconut trees. The birds screech in my garden. It’s another boiling day in Yangon, where life is still slow and people still smile at you in the street.

But the invasion of international journalists has begun. As we all knew it would, now that the government allows journalism visas. The NLD office is full of them. “The lady”’s house has a steady trickle of tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of her. The t-shirt printers crank out thousands of t-shirts with ‘the lady” and “Bo Jyo Aung San”, the father of the nation. Shwegondain junction stinks of die as the bright, cheap colours declaring, “We Will Win” dry in the sun.

But there is something glorious about it all. A picture that could get you thrown into jail last year is now everywhere. Reproduced a hundred times. Perhaps it’s a way of sticking your middle finger up at the regime – and declaring yourself free. Perhaps she is a symbol of this change. She represents the people. She represents the years of house arrests, in the years that people have spent in

The fear that is lifted over discussing NLD and politics and the love of the ‘lady’. It is a change. Myanmar has changed. And again and again I am told, that the changes have gone too far to turn back.

This week I sat in a meeting by the Ministry of Information and heard them declare that the censorship board will be dismantled as soon as parliament passes the new Press and media law.

I would not have believed it. We could not believe it. It’s a surreal, topsy turvey world, where the people who upheld a tyranny are now delcraing themselves victims.

“We have also lived under this regime for 50 years,” was the continual declaration of the Director General of Ministry of Information.

Of course there are concerns. The taxis have NLD stickers or flags. But when you ask people who they’re voting for when they vote for the NLD they say, they’re voting for the lady. The NLD is the lady. She has grown only bigger in stature – and the international community is as obsessed with her as the locals. Perhaps more so. “The lady” has stopped giving interviews. But, if anything that makes her more alluring - a mythological creature who will save Myanmar. A cult of personality – that people on the street declare, “Chi de..” I love her.

When I talk with the younger activists here I hear something else whispered. There’s an uneasiness about the cult of personality. There’s an uneasiness among the ethnic groups, who wonder where they fit in to the NLD’s policies? And we all wonder what it means for a party that has defined itself in opposition – what happens when it enters parliament? And needs policies? And needs to work with the USDP – the party that emerged out of the last government.

Even if it wins all 48 seats in parliament next weekend, it will not hold the majority. Even if it can persuade all the opposition groups in parliament to stand with it, it will not be powerful enough to change the constitution.

A tour bus offers a bus between the two Yangon monuments - NLD headquarters and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's home. Monuments that until last year were out of bounds.

I still shiver to approach the section of University Avenue, where now the red NLD flags fly - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's home - which until so recently was also her prison. 

It is a strange thing to return to a country on the cusp of change.

The youth are still cautious – uncertain of what they can do or say. The line of what is possible has shifted, but as yet, we don’t know where it is. 

But while we figure out that line, there is dancing in the street and foreign photographers to broadcast the scenes across the world.