Love & Politics

Our guest contribution comes from an alumnus of Johns Hopkins SAIS, and more specifically of the Southeast Asia Studies and International Economics programs. She now works with an organization delivering humanitarian assistance in Southeast Asia. Due to one of her various forms of paranoia, she remains reticent in putting her name to this post, though she hopes readers will forgive her and trust that she’s not Brian in female disguise.

Book Review
Twilight Over Burma: My Life as a Shan Princess
By Inge Sargent

Cross-border love affairs no longer surprise us. Technology and jet planes have collapsed space and allowed many people to meet, to fall in love, to spend their lives together—to the point where we almost take these get-togethers for granted. But it wasn’t so long ago that geography inhibited such matches. The odds were once stacked against two people of polar-disparate backgrounds ever meeting at all; if we added political complications to the equation, love became a real long-shot, and an enduring relationship even more so.

Twilight Over Burma is an autobiographical book about one of those unlikely and extraordinary mid–twentieth-century love affairs that politics managed to mangle.

Inge Sargent met Sao Kya Seng at a foreign students’ party in Denver, Colorado in 1951. Inge was an Austrian national, Sao hailed from the newly formed country of Burma. Burma comprises many ethnic groups, and Sao was of the Shan minority. Inge and Sao fell in love. Shortly after they married, Inge was stepping off a ship outside Burma’s capital, Rangoon, learning for the first time that her husband was not just a mild-mannered mining engineer but a Shan prince.

I can only imagine how excited and nervous Inge must’ve been when she first realized that she’d be living in a poor, new country so far from Europe and the States—and living not even in its capital, but in its remote northern states. As Inge writes, even the people of Rangoon expressed pity for her that she should be moving to the Shan states, “a dangerous place beyond civilization.” Then, to learn that she was married to royalty! What a thrill life must’ve been for her.

Burma earned its independence from Britain in 1948. The Second World War had reaped destruction throughout the country, and post-independence internal politics between the weak central government, many ethnic groups, and Communist Party were messy and murderous.

For a few years, Inge’s life was shielded from the political battling, and she was happy. She was given the name Thusandi and made a Shan princess in a grand traditional ceremony. She and her husband oversaw a number of development projects, and they had two daughters together.

But the tranquility couldn’t last. The army was growing stronger, and since his return to Burma, Sao had been openly defiant of military authority. Sao also enjoyed the respect of his peoples and other Shan leaders; all these qualities would make him a military target.

In 1962, General Ne Win fully took power. Since then, Burma—or Myanmar, as the military eventually renamed the land—has been ruled by one thuggish military clique after another. Well-meaning and educated leaders, as Sao and Thusandi had been, are few and far between.

Sao and Thusandi’s love story is poignant for being so intricately intertwined with the nation’s political upheaval. Twighlight Over Burma isn’t a pounding political diatribe against the military regime; it’s a personal tale, though of course politics plays an important part in it. Stories like Inge’s remind us of how real people’s lives can be so dramatically and sometimes devastatingly affected by the greater geopolitical forces surrounding them. It comes highly recommended.