Summary Of San Suu Kyi's Fourteenth Letter

If you have ever sat in a hospital, waiting for a baby to arrive, you must have experienced more or less of the emotional rollercoaster that was the night of my niece’s birth. Everyone will forget those grueling hours of stiff chairs and twinges of worry when you think it has been too long. What everyone, or at least I, will not forget, is the wash of emotions when seemingly out of thin air appears a new presence in the room- one that is simultaneously tiny and so extremely big. Some of the weight of humanity and the sense of my own mortality on my eighteen year old shoulders was immense when I was the first one to hold the new child, but not as much as the sheer beauty that was a clean slate in front of me. And to think, that is how every human being begins. It is easy to dehumanize a group of already marginalized people in our own …show more content…
This is why despite the 13 previous letters that Aung San Suu Kyi had written beautifully depicting her home and its very relatable citizens within political and social turmoil, her fourteenth letter stood out to me in stark contrast. It is a letter about an infant- something so personal, joyful, and sacred that it called attention immediately to the similarity and differences between us and the citizens of Burma. The pristine description of her friends’ newborn baby girl dressed in white was alarmingly followed by statistics of mortality rates for infants, children, and mothers, yet there was emphasis on joyful hearts and the clean slate which was this new life. She writes, “Is it not the thought of a life stretching out like a shining clean slate on which one day be written the most beautiful prose and poetry of existence that engenders such joy in the hearts of the parents and grandparents of a newly born