You Can't Go Home Again

The ending line of Jessica Mudditt’s book, Our Home In Myanmar, puts a startling cap on her account of her life in Yangon in the 2010s. She writes, “Myanmar’s sudden returned to a dictatorship means that I have inadvertently written a history book.” This is the subject of the current episode, which charts Jessica’s hard-won attempts to live in Myanmar during the last decade.

Jessica was primarily motivated to come to Myanmar to witness and report on the 2015 election, arriving a full three years in advance in order to be better positioned to understand that historic event. The Burmese people’s jubilation over those election results of course ended with a crash in 2021.

Jessica has struggled to understand the extremes of humanity that are found in Myanmar. “I've never understood how you can have these two types of people in one geographic area,” she says. “You have these uncouth brutes who have no humanity. And then you have some of the most gentle people in the world....”

Of all the ongoing tragedies now facing Myanmar, the one that particularly grabs at her heart is the wholesale destruction of the journalism field. She bore witness to the tentative growth of an entire field as state censorship eased. It was exciting to see young Burmese reporters and photographers exploring what was becoming possible… and yet now this has all been crushed, with so many journalists on the run, imprisoned, or killed.

Still, Jessica reflects on the situation with optimism. “I believe that the people will get there in the end, because they are so determined… The alternative is to live a life of total darkness…I've heard people say, ‘Let's clear the decks of the NLD as well. Let's start again, build from the bottom, and a society that's inclusive, and we can avoid some of the mistakes of the past.’”