"I like realism, I like to write about politics. I didn't worry about the censors," Soe Thae Mon tells me as we sit sipping sweet milk tea.
Thae Mon is a short story writer and one of Burma's youngest published authors. She wrote her first story when she was 16 years old after visiting her father - a well-known fiction writer himself - in Burma's notorious Insein Prison. The story is about a star that falls from the sky.
Ten years later I sit with both father and daughter in a tea shop in downtown Yangon. Thae Mon seems to embody the slow creep of western cultural norms. She is wearing designer jeans and a name brand blouse, but her quick smile and chalky, thanka-flushed cheeks are distinctly Burmese. Her father, U Tint Lwin, is of an older generation--he wears thick round glasses and a white button-down shirt tucked into a dark blue longyi. Despite their differences, in face and facility with words Thae Mon is clearly her father's daughter.
During the years of military rule, shops like these were notorious for government spies. Today, over tea and rice pudding, Thae Mon and Lwin speak openly about prison, writing under censorship, and what it is like be an author in the new, nominally free Burma.
In January, the Burmese government - 26 months after holding the country's first democratic elections since 1990 - officially dissolved the Press Scrutiny and Registration Department. The previous military government used the department to aggressively control and curate public content. Journalists, poets, and fiction writers alike were forced to submit their work for strict review by the military junta. Those that published unapproved material that was perceived to be subversive faced harsh penalties. Numerous writers, such as blogger Nay Phone Latt and poet Aung Than, were imprisoned for years for attacking the government's policies through print.
Like many authors of his generation, Lwin challenged this censorship in subtle ways, using symbol and allegory to tell stories about living under the regime.
"The story that I am most well-known for is about a hat," he tells me. "The commanders of the Tatmadaw all wore a certain type of hat--my readers understood that the story was about the army."
In 1998 Lwin was arrested for distributing a friend's booklet that was critical of the government's management of the economy. Charged with Acts of Defiance Against the State, Lwin spent five years as a political prisoner.
A decade after his release, the country has changed dramatically. The new government has released most of the remaining political prisoners. Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition group the National League for Democracy, now sits in Parliament. Moreover, the new government has significantly relaxed restrictions on writers.
Earlier this year, the country hosted the first annual Irrawaddy Literary Festival. The event brought together poets, journalists, and fiction-writers from around the world. Discussions, in both Burmese and English, focused on a range of topics, from censorship to postmodernism, political violence to poetics.
The festival organized a contest for high school students. The first prize winner wrote a story about the violence in Kachin State and the everyday trauma of war.
"Look at this festival," Shwegu May Hnin, another writer who spent years in prison, told me. "Before we had no opportunity to invite you or participate ourselves in a program like this. We only have this opportunity because of how things have changed."
Yet writers still struggle against restrictions on speech. The most recent draft of the new media law, which was presented in Parliament in March, bars publishers from printing articles that "oppose and violate" the military-drafted 2008 constitution and those that could undermine "law and order and incite unrest." After significant criticism from local media and human rights organizations, the government agreed to continue to revise the legislation. A new draft will be considered in June.
Years of overt censorship have also left a lasting impression on the literary culture of Burma. Fearing that the government will backslide on reforms, many authors self-censor their material. The result is a literary community that continues to struggle to find the words to articulate all the range and complexity that their stories deserve.
"There is a blank space in our literature," Lwin says. "Most stories are very funny, not serious."
For his part, Lwin continues to write about politics. He recently published a story about a Burmese girl sitting on a bus between a Chinese and Indian man--an allegory for the geopolitical jostling of Burma's more powerful neighbors.
"Everyone in the bus sees the Chinese man being a bully, but says nothing," Lwin chuckles.
"One or two years ago, this could not be printed."
In contrast, Thae Mon's fiction has become less subversive. She is part of a new generation of writers--one that has the liberty to more openly comment on the country's politics, but also the freedom to not be defined by it. Her latest story is about a young girl who rejects an unfaithful lover.
But I still wonder what compelled her to follow her father in the first place--to write a story, particularly about prison life, knowing what was at stake.
"After 12th standard I had a long holiday from school, so I asked my father what I should do. He told me I should write a story," Thae Mon tells me.
Were you worried about the censors?
"Why?" she giggles, glancing at her father. "I was just writing about a star."