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揭秘昂山素季的爱情故事
The untold love story of Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi
揭秘昂山素季的爱情故事
《每日电讯报》(The Telegraph) 作者/ Rebecca Frayn 译者/胡舒婷（参差博客编辑）
根据昂山素季生平改编的电影新近上市。影片讲述了她如何从一名牛津毕业生到家庭主妇，最终成为缅甸非暴力提倡民主的政治家。一部昂山素季的个人牺牲史。
四年前开始搜寻资料编写昂山素季的剧本之时，我从未想过会揭开这样一个凄美的当代爱情故事。既浪漫，又令人心碎，就像好莱坞伤情戏里的高潮：精致、矜持的东方女孩遇上了英俊、热情的西方青年。
对迈克·阿里斯来说，这段爱情就像闪电般，一下就击中了他的心。当时，阿里斯在不丹担任皇室家庭教师，在白茫茫的雪顶山间向昂山素季求婚。接下来的16年里，昂山素季生育了两个孩子，本分地做着贤妻良母。然而，一次短途回缅甸探亲途中，她却偶然卷入一场政治风波，再也没有回到丈夫身边。令人揪心的是，阿里斯奔走十年，只为确保妻子安全，却最终死于癌症，甚至无法道声永别。
而这一断肠爱情之所以不为人知，是因为迈克·阿里斯生前竭尽全力保护昂山素季全家，不让公众的视线触碰到他们。而现在，儿子已长大成人，阿里斯也久已辞世，亲眷朋友认为是时候公开他们的故事了。说到阿里斯这位无名英雄，他们也流露出明显的自豪。
昂山素季生于缅甸英雄之家。昂山将军被暗杀之时，小素季还只有2岁。特殊的家教，使她从小便拥有强烈的愿望要延续亡父的遗志。1964年，外交官母亲将昂山素季送去牛津，学习政治、哲学和经济学。在其监护人戈尔·铂斯勋爵的介绍下，昂山素季与迈克·阿里斯相识了。当时，阿里斯在牛津达勒姆学院学习历史，却一直对不丹充满激情，而昂山素季更让他体验到迷人的东方浪漫。但昂山素季在应允婚事之时，也提出了一个条件：如果缅甸需要她，她一定要回国。阿里斯欣然接受了。
婚后头16年里，昂山素季表现出了非凡的人格魅力，做着完美的家庭主妇。亚历山大和金出生后，她又成为了一位宠溺的母亲，细心张罗孩子聚会，认真烹饪美食。昂山素季甚至还坚持为丈夫熨袜子、亲自打扫屋子，这恐怕要让那些女权主义者失望了。
然而，在1988年的一个夜晚，正当昂山素季和丈夫以及两个12岁和14岁的儿子在牛津安静读书的时候，突然来了通电话，昂山素季的母亲中风了。
她立刻飞往仰光。昂山素季本只想呆上几周，谁曾想飞机落地，仰光已是一片狼藉。民众与军政权的暴力对抗已让缅甸完全停滞。当她赶到仰光医院照料母亲的时候，病房里已经挤满了负伤、将死的学生。由于禁止公众集会，这场群龙无首的革命便把医院当成了司令部。「英雄将军的女儿回来了！」的消息以野火之势在人群中不胫而走。
学者代表团邀请昂山素季领导这场民主运动，她暂时答应了，心想一旦完成选举，她就可以恢复自由身，重返牛津了。就在两个月前，她还是位专职太太，如今却要领导一场推翻野蛮政权的大革命。
英国，阿里斯只能焦急守在电视机前看新闻，看着妻子在缅甸巡回演讲，人气飙升。同时，军政府干扰着她的每一步行动，逮捕、拷打昂山素季的同党。阿里斯陷入了深深的恐惧，他害怕，昂山素季也会像她父亲一样被暗杀。1989年，昂山素季被软禁，阿里斯唯一的安慰就是，至少她是安全的。
如今阿里斯投桃报李，所有这些年都是昂山素季在为他付出，现在该是自己无私奉献的时候了。阿里斯开始为她在高层奔走，建立起昂山素季的国际形象，谅军方也不敢随意动她。但同时他又谨小慎微，不让自己的努力为世人所知，因为一旦昂山素季成为新的民主运动领袖，军政府便会揪住她嫁给外国人这一把柄，大做文章，并借机在缅甸媒体对她掀起猛烈、粗俗的诽谤中伤。
接下来的5年里，儿子逐渐长大，昂山素季仍被软禁，与世隔绝。她坚持学习如何打坐冥想，广泛阅读佛教经典，并潜心研究曼德拉和甘地的著作。在此期间，阿里斯只被获准与妻子见了两次面。事实上，当时昂山素季的监禁十分特殊，因为她大可随时要求被驱逐，飞回家人身边。
但夫妇俩谁都没考虑过要这样做。事实上，作为历史学家，即使迈克尔再痛苦，向幕后政客施加再多压力，他也清楚昂山素季是客观历史演进中的一环。妻子接到电话前在读的那本书，阿里斯一直放在那里，他重新粉刷了墙，挂上所有妻子至今赢得的奖项，包括1991年的诺贝尔和平奖。床头上，还挂着昂山素季的巨幅照片。
当然，长时间无法联络时，阿里斯也会担惊受怕，觉得妻子或许已经不在人世了。偶尔路人听到软禁的房子里传出钢琴声，才会让他内心有片刻安宁。但东南亚长期潮湿，钢琴再也发不出声来，阿里斯唯一的安慰也不复存在了。
1995年，阿里斯意外接到妻子从英国使馆打来的电话。她重获自由了！阿里斯和儿子获准签证，飞往缅甸。昂山素季惊讶地看到，自己的小儿子金已经长成了小伙子。她承认自己在大街上和儿子擦肩而过估计都认不出来。但多年的隔离让昂山素季成为了一个完全政治化的女人。她狠下心，留在缅甸，即使这意味着再一次与家人分离。
记者福高·基恩曾多次会见昂山素季，认为她是个十足的铁娘子。她焕发出的道德勇气让我钦佩不已，这也正是我写《昂山素季》剧本的最大动因。许多妇女听到她的事迹时，问的第一个问题是，她怎么离得开孩子。金轻描淡写地说：「这是应该的。」昂山素季本人拒绝讨论这个话题，但她也承认，她最沉重的时刻就是，「担心儿子会需要我」。
1995年的那次会面最终成了这对夫妻的最后相聚。三年后，阿里斯癌症晚期。他给昂山素季打电话通知这一噩耗，并立即申请签证，好与妻子当面道声再见。被拒签后，他又连续申请了30次签证，其间身体很快便垮了。一些知名人士，包括教皇和美国总统克林顿都替他撰文呼吁，但一切都是徒劳。最后，一位军政府官员拜访了阿里斯。他说，你当然可以和妻子告别，但那就意味着她必须要返回牛津。
家人还是国家？夫妻分居整整十年以来让她备受煎熬的隐性选择，现在已成为明确的最后通牒。她悲痛欲绝。如果离开缅甸，他们都知道这意味着永远的流放。也就是说，夫妻俩多年共同奋斗的一切都将付诸东流。昂山素季随时都可以到英国大使馆致电阿里斯，但阿里斯坚信，她根本不会考虑离开缅甸。
阿里斯的孪生兄弟安东尼告诉我了一件他从未和任何人提起过的事。他说，昂山素季意识到自己再也见不到阿里斯的时候，穿上了他最喜欢的颜色的礼服，在头上别了朵玫瑰花，前往英国大使馆，为他拍了段诀别影片，告诉他他的爱是她一直以来的支柱。这段影片被偷运出境，但到达时阿里斯已过世两天了。
多年来，缅甸的人权记录不断恶化，似乎阿里斯家族的伟大牺牲完全白费了。但近几周，军政府终于宣布进行政治变革的意愿。而昂山素季22年的坚守也意味着她是该变革独一无二的推动者，变革真的来临之时，昂山素季为缅甸做出的巨大贡献将完全堪比曼德拉在南非开启的新时代。
因为昂山素季和阿里斯始终认为，缅甸的民主梦想终将成为现实。
Aung San Suu Kyi, whose story is told in a new film, went from devoted Oxford housewife to champion of Burmese democracy - but not without great personal sacrifice.
When I began to research a screenplay about Aung San Suu Kyi four years ago, I wasn’t expecting to uncover one of the great love stories of our time. Yet what emerged was a tale so romantic – and yet so heartbreaking – it sounded more like a pitch for a Hollywood weepie: an exquisitely beautiful but reserved girl from the East meets a handsome and passionate young man from the West.
For Michael Aris the story is a coup de foudre, and he eventually proposes to Suu amid the snow-capped mountains of Bhutan, where he has been employed as tutor to its royal family. For the next 16 years, she becomes his devoted wife and a mother-of-two, until quite by chance she gets caught up in politics on a short trip to Burma, and never comes home. Tragically, after 10 years of campaigning to try to keep his wife safe, Michael dies of cancer without ever being allowed to say goodbye.
I also discovered that the reason no one was aware of this story was because Dr Michael Aris had gone to great lengths to keep Suu’s family out of the public eye. It is only because their sons are now adults – and Michael is dead – that their friends and family feel the time has come to speak openly, and with great pride, about the unsung role he played.
The daughter of a great Burmese hero, General Aung San, who was assassinated when she was only two, Suu was raised with a strong sense of her father’s unfinished legacy. In 1964 she was sent by her diplomat mother to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, where her guardian, Lord Gore-Booth, introduced her to Michael. He was studying history at Durham but had always had a passion for Bhutan – and in Suu he found the romantic embodiment of his great love for the East. But when she accepted his proposal, she struck a deal: if her country should ever need her, she would have to go. And Michael readily agreed.
For the next 16 years, Suu Kyi was to sublimate her extraordinary strength of character and become the perfect housewife. When their two sons, Alexander and Kim, were born she became a doting mother too, noted for her punctiliously well-organised children’s parties and exquisite cooking. Much to the despair of her more feminist friends, she even insisted on ironing her husband’s socks and cleaning the house herself.
Then one quiet evening in 1988, when her sons were 12 and 14, as she and Michael sat reading in Oxford, they were interrupted by a phone call to say Suu’s mother had had a stroke.
She at once flew to Rangoon for what she thought would be a matter of weeks, only to find a city in turmoil. A series of violent confrontations with the military had brought the country to a standstill, and when she moved into Rangoon Hospital to care for her mother, she found the wards crowded with injured and dying students. Since public meetings were forbidden, the hospital had become the centre-point of a leaderless revolution, and word that the great General’s daughter had arrived spread like wildfire.
When a delegation of academics asked Suu to head a movement for democracy, she tentatively agreed, thinking that once an election had been held she would be free to return to Oxford again. Only two months earlier she had been a devoted housewife; now she found herself spearheading a mass uprising against a barbaric regime.
In England, Michael could only anxiously monitor the news as Suu toured Burma, her popularity soaring, while the military harassed her every step and arrested and tortured many of her party members. He was haunted by the fear that she might be assassinated like her father. And when in 1989 she was placed under house arrest, his only comfort was that it at least might help keep her safe.
Michael now reciprocated all those years Suu had devoted to him with a remarkable selflessness of his own, embarking on a high-level campaign to establish her as an international icon that the military would never dare harm. But he was careful to keep his work inconspicuous, because once she emerged as the leader of a new democracy movement, the military seized upon the fact that she was married to a foreigner as a basis for a series of savage – and often sexually crude – slanders in the Burmese press.
For the next five years, as her boys were growing into young men, Suu was to remain under house arrest and kept in isolation. She sustained herself by learning how to meditate, reading widely on Buddhism and studying the writings of Mandela and Gandhi. Michael was allowed only two visits during that period. Yet this was a very particular kind of imprisonment, since at any time Suu could have asked to be driven to the airport and flown back to her family.
But neither of them ever contemplated her doing such a thing. In fact, as a historian, even as Michael agonised and continued to pressurise politicians behind the scenes, he was aware she was part of history in the making. He kept on display the book she had been reading when she received the phone call summoning her to Burma. He decorated the walls with the certificates of the many prizes she had by now won, including the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. And above his bed he hung a huge photograph of her.
Inevitably, during the long periods when no communication was possible, he would fear Suu might be dead, and it was only the odd report from passers-by who heard the sound of her piano-playing drifting from the house that brought him peace of mind. But when the south-east Asian humidity eventually destroyed the piano, even this fragile reassurance was lost to him.
Then, in 1995, Michael quite unexpectedly received a phone call from Suu. She was ringing from the British embassy, she said. She was free again! Michael and the boys were granted visas and flew to Burma. When Suu saw Kim, her younger son, she was astonished to see he had grown into a young man. She admitted she might have passed him in the street. But Suu had become a fully politicised woman whose years of isolation had given her a hardened resolve, and she was determined to remain in her country, even if the cost was further separation from her family.
The journalist Fergal Keane, who has met Suu several times, describes her as having a core of steel. It was the sheer resilience of her moral courage that filled me with awe as I wrote my screenplay for The Lady. The first question many women ask when they hear Suu’s story is how she could have left her children. Kim has said simply: “She did what she had to do.” Suu Kyi herself refuses to be drawn on the subject, though she has conceded that her darkest hours were when “I feared the boys might be needing me”.
That 1995 visit was the last time Michael and Suu were ever allowed to see one another. Three years later, he learnt he had terminal cancer. He called Suu to break the bad news and immediately applied for a visa so that he could say goodbye in person. When his application was rejected, he made over 30 more as his strength rapidly dwindled. A number of eminent figures – among them the Pope and President Clinton – wrote letters of appeal, but all in vain. Finally, a military official came to see Suu. Of course she could say goodbye, he said, but to do so she would have to return to Oxford.
The implicit choice that had haunted her throughout those 10 years of marital separation had now become an explicit ultimatum: your country or your family. She was distraught. If she left Burma, they both knew it would mean permanent exile – that everything they had jointly fought for would have been for nothing. Suu would call Michael from the British embassy when she could, and he was adamant that she was not even to consider it.
When I met Michael’s twin brother, Anthony, he told me something he said he had never told anyone before. He said that once Suu realised she would never see Michael again, she put on a dress of his favourite colour, tied a rose in her hair, and went to the British embassy, where she recorded a farewell film for him in which she told him that his love for her had been her mainstay. The film was smuggled out, only to arrive two days after Michael died.
For many years, as Burma’s human rights record deteriorated, it seemed the Aris family’s great self-sacrifice might have been in vain. Yet in recent weeks the military have finally announced their desire for political change. And Suu’s 22-year vigil means she is uniquely positioned to facilitate such a transition – if and when it comes – exactly as Mandela did so successfully for South Africa.
As they always believed it would, Suu and Michael’s dream of democracy may yet become a reality.
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发表于 2012-1-11 02:22
发表于 2012-1-11 11:03