Cuộc giam giữ kéo dài 19 năm của bà không thể tính bằng những lợi lộc chính trị. Đúng hơn, dáng đứng can trường của bà phải được coi như là ngọn hải đăng đạo đức, trong một thế giới hư ruỗng, và càng làm cho chúng ta thấy, tự do dân chủ cần thiết, và quí giá biết là chừng nào. Như Vaclav Havel đã từng nói, khi tiến cử bà vào danh sách những người xứng đáng Nobel Hòa Bình, đây là một thí dụ hiển hách của "quyền lực không quyền lực".

On July 20, 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi, the forty-three-year-old wife of an Oxford academic, was placed under house arrest in her family home in Rangoon. And there, apart from a brief spell in prison, and short periods of partial freedom, she has remained, cut off from the outside world, a constant reminder and potent symbol of Burma's enduringly repressive regime. Repeatedly offered her freedom in return for permanent exile, she has simply refused.
   It is not easy to write a conventional biography of a figure both so public and so  private, whose fame resides less in action than in what she stands for. For Perfect Hostage, his Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Justin Wintle was unable even to contact his subject; indeed, he has no idea whether or not she knows that he has written this book. Inevitably, the result is less a Life than a history, in which the story of Aung San Suu Kyi and her remarkable father, Aung San, architect of Burma's independence, runs like a thread through a dense and detailed narrative.
   Aung San Suu Kyi barely knew her father. Aung San, a left-leaning pragmatist for whom the need to free Burma from imperial rule was more important than any political creed, led Burma's independence movement through confrontations with the British and the wartime Japanese occupiers, but did not live to see the results of his achievements. Six months before formal Burmese independence in 1948, he was assassinated by his political rival, U Saw (who was later tried and executed). Aung San Suu Kyi, then three years old, grew up as the only daughter of a man revered throughout a country riven by political infighting and ethnic divisions. Her mother, a former nurse, was made ambassador to India, and Aung San Suu Kyi accompanied her to Delhi, before going to university in England and taking a job with the United Nations in New York. Her much loved younger brother was drowned as a child; relations with her older brother were never good. In 1972, she married Michael Aris, an academic specializing in Asian history, by whom she had two sons. She stayed away from Burma.
  In 1962, a coup led by General Ne Win had brought to an end the squabbles crippling Burma. In their place had come total military repression. When, in 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Rangoon to nurse her dying mother, she found the country in the grip of police and army brutality, torture, corruption and censorship. Following the resignation of Ne Win, a popular uprising calling for democratization was savagely put down on August 8. Protesters were rounded up and disappeared into detention, some never to remerge. Later, it was said that 10,000 people had been killed by the security forces of the new military junta. It was perhaps inevitable that the survivors, especially among her father's former comrades and among students, would now look to Aung San's daughter for leadership. The rambling old family house in University Avenue in Rangoon became the centre of a growing opposition to the military dictatorship, calling for dialogue and democracy. Faced with what soon  seemed inevitable arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi merely grew bolder. She took to addressing rallies; finally, the military acted. Her house was cleared of her friends and supporters, the telephone was cut off and she was forbidden to leave the compound. Henceforth only her sons and her husband, very occasionally, would be allowed inside. Early in 1990, longawaited elections finally took place. Aung San Suu Kyi's political grouping, the National League for Democracy, scored an overwhelming victory. But the generals and the State Law and Order Restoration Council remained in power; and Aung San Suu Kyi remained in detention, her only contact with the outside world a small short-wave radio.
     The story of her last nineteen years is quickly told. Freed after 2,191 days, she was soon rearrested; freed nineteen months later, she was locked up again. She had used her moments of freedom to preach democracy, forcefully and to as many people as she could reach. Cut off from the world, she became, like Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, an increasingly famous figure. Award followed award; in 1991, she was given the Nobel Peace Prize. The cost of her isolation has, however, been extremely high. She has seen
neither of her sons grow up, and for most of the time she has been alone, except for the presence of an elderly maid. Visits from her children and her husband have been short and infrequent. When, in 1997, Michael Aris was diagnosed with incurable cancer, he was refused a visa to Burma to see his wife; together, they agreed that she would not come to England to see him, since that would mean no return to Burma. Aris died two years later without seeing her again. From time to time, over the past eighteen years, photographs of Aung San Suu Kyi have appeared: elegant, frail, staunch, with the flowers in her hair that have become part of her image. She is known to have been ill and to sustain herself on the Buddhist faith, leamt from her mother, that taught her selflessness and discipline. All this material is largely in the public domain; family friends and colleagues, if approached, have contributed little to make her come to life.
  Not until the very end of his long and scholarly book does Wintle address the question of what Aung San Suu Kyi's lonely stand has achieved. Burma and its repressive rulers are widely known today, he suggests, largely because of her tenacity and courage. But, he points out, their dictatorial ways have not been curbed. Isolated from the West, pariahs in human rights terms, they have survived economically by selling off their rich reserves of teak, oil, gas and gems, by their close links to China, and by their flourishing narcotics industry; in the process, driving dissidents over the borders into refugee camps in Thailand, and enslaving thousands of Karens, Karennis, Mons and other ethnic minorities to use as child soldiers and labourers to build roads and to work in mines. Even tourism, which has been condemned by Aung San Suu Kyi, is now picking up pace.
    But all this is, as Justin Wintle himself recognizes, beside the point. The nineteen years of Aung San Suu Kyi's detention cannot be measured in terms of political gains. Rather, her brave stand should be seen as a beacon of morality in a world better known for corruption and pusillanimity; and as a reminder of the crucial importance of democracy. As Vaclav Havel said, when nominating her for the Nobel Peace Prize, she is an "outstanding example of the power of the powerless". If Perfect Hostage tells you disappointingly little about Aung San Suu Kyi's real character or personal life, it provides a remarkable picture of what one individual can come  to symbolize, given courage and endurance.