Myint Schwe was a political prisoner in Burma, at the height of that country's bitter civil unrest. He does not talk about jail much. He lives here now. He came as a refugee. He studied journalism at Ryerson; recently he took journalism's steepest plunge. Myint Schwe is the proprietor of Toronto's newest paper, the Burma Herald. He writes, edits, and publishes from his apartment on the 10th floor of a high-rise near the corner of Jane and Finch.
His office is his living room. He keeps a shrine with an apple, some flowers, and a small Buddha by the window; nearby is a shelf of Burmese phone books. His computer is just off the kitchen. Actually, everything is just off the kitchen. It is a small apartment.
At this stage, so is the paper.
"This issue I did 16 pages. It comes out once a month. I printed 2,000 copies." Where is it available? "I drop 20 copies at the Burmese Buddhist temple, 100 at the Burmese-Chinese Association downtown, 200 at the monastery, and 150 at the Burmese grocery on Bloor near Lansdowne." He also mails copies to embassies around the world.
The price? "It's free; who's going to buy it?" That's a problem. The Burmese community is small, and life here is expensive. If he hasn't sold many ads, and if his income from single-issue sales is zero, how can he afford to publish? It seems the Herald has some angels in the ranks of the Burmese diaspora.
"A friend in the States donated $600. Another donated $500. A friend from Vancouver donated $100. Someone from New Jersey gave me $50 for six issues. And my credit card is overloaded, ha, ha." The laughter was that of a man facing long odds with a large fund of goodwill.
Myint has correspondents in Asia, the United States and Canada. They file their copy free. And he is now looking for a part-time job. "I'll take anything part-time. I need a survival job." Myint Schwe, meet Conrad Black.
He said: "I went to Thailand for five months recently. I had an internship at the Bangkok Post. In four and a half months, I wrote six feature articles." His chief objective in Bangkok was not the internship.
Thailand shares a long border with Burma. Did the prisoner-turned-journalist try to get back into his former country? He shrugged. "I tried with the help of a rebel leader. As you know, there is a ceasefire agreement. I traveled to the Burmese border three times. They said it would be better to go home and try to get in from Ottawa. If I had gotten in and been caught, it would have been jail for me, at least seven years." He's been there, and had that done to him.
He said: "I went to the refugee camps along the border. The largest has 20,000 people, maybe more. The people are hanging on with NGO (relief agencies') food. Most of them have day jobs in Thailand as labourers or selling groceries for pennies. They are frustrated. They have no future. They live in constant fear of being sent back to Burma. There is also friction between the Muslim minority and the Christian majority. Only last month there was a brawl." The rest of the world pays little attention.
The Burma Herald does contain a few pages of English. In the latest edition there was an editorial analysis of the new-found friendliness of Burma's military governors; Myint does not trust them an inch.
There was a report on a summit meeting of some 1,000 Buddhist monks who met recently in Rangoon; and another report on the disarray of Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, while she remains under house arrest.
In a concession to the tabloid nature of the times, and thanks to the presence of a reporter on the scene, the paper also carried a concert review. The young Burmese pop star Tint Tint Htoon performed in Los Angeles a while ago. Htoon sang and danced and shared the stage with some local dancers. As she told her interviewer later, "If our shakes were in disharmony, it is because we did not have enough time for rehearsal."
The paper also reported: "Fans were not allowed to shoot for memory but nobody obeyed. Cellphone cameras flickered in the night. The show started at 2 in the afternoon, carried on till 8.30."
The gyrations of pop stars and the machinations of despots; such are the editorial burdens of the modern publisher.
Why does Myint persist?
"We are a tiny minority. There are only about 2,000 Burmese in Toronto. All the other minorities have radio, TV and newspapers, but we are invisible." Less so now.