Myint Myint Khin (writer)
Through her books and interviews, she advocated for more openness and transparency in the country, and spoke out about the regression of women's rights in Myanmar.
[1] The oldest of three siblings, she grew up in the nearby delta town of Henzada (Hinthada), before moving to Rangoon (Yangon) as a teenager.
[1] She was not yet 15 when she enrolled at the University of Rangoon in 1938[2] to study English literature, and there she became "obsessed" by the works of poet John Donne.
[note 1] After the war, she completed her original major, receiving a BA in English literature in 1946, and then promptly continued her medical education at the just reopened Faculty of Medicine, graduating with an MBBS in 1950.
After starting out as a staff physician (Civil Assistant Surgeon) at Rangoon General Hospital in 1950, she did her residency at the University of Pennsylvania medical school, and received an MD in 1955.
[1][4] She graduated ahead of her husband San Baw, the medical school classmate she married in 1953 who received an MD and an MS in 1958, also from Penn Medicine.
Their only son Myint Zan, who had returned from Los Angeles to see his dying father, was locked up in political detention without charge and trial by the BSPP government.
[1][note 4] He was placed in solitary confinement in the notorious Insein Prison, and given no contact with the outside world, including his mother.
After a few months, she moved to New Delhi to become a consultant in the World Health Organization’s Southeast Asia regional office.
[3] She said that she kept her love for poetry a secret from everyone including her husband and son; she continued that given her no non-sense public persona, her students would have been surprised by her "sentimental and emotive" side.
[12] Frustrated by the dismissive attitude of the officials, and the low reported percentage of HIV infections in the country, she called for an expansion of general health education with "openness and transparency".
One such example is as follows:[1] But close to my heart is a treasure trove, To draw upon if I chose Happiness shared, joys that glow And tenderness, I only know It turned out to be her last published book.
According to Thane-Oke Kyaw Myint, a retired paediatrician and founder of the Alumni Myanmar Institutes of Medicine Association (AMIMA), "she had openly written articles in the newspapers on what was wrong with educational systems in Burma, never hesitating to openly criticise the present and the past governments, a stand that very few of us could or dare to do so publicly".
[1] For example, in 2004, she gave an interview to The Irrawaddy, then an exile run media outlet, in which she, quoting Orwell, highlighted the general lack of openness and transparency in the country as the root of many of its problems.
As chief of orthopedic surgery at Mandalay General Hospital, San Baw "pioneered the use of ivory hip prostheses to replace ununited fractures of the neck of the femur.
"[1][note 5] Their only child Myint Zan is a former professor of law, who taught at universities in Malaysia, Australia, the South Pacific and the United States from 1989 to 2016.
