Stone Age

Whenever I visit Burma, I have a ritual: I look up a name in the Rangoon telephone book. Every year a new directory is published, but the listing remains "Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw," followed by Rangoon's most famous address "54 University Avenue" and a telephone number. The number never seems to work. When I tried it during my recent trip, the Nobel laureate and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) was enduring her third stint under house arrest since 1989. But seeing her celebrated name in the book always seems both extraordinary and reassuring.

I...

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