‘He wasn’t a great father but he’s my hero’: A coup helped Hnin to know her dad

Burmese Australian activist Hnin Win never really understood her father until after Myanmar’s military overthrew the country’s democratically elected government.

“The way I like to explain it is: he wasn’t a great father but he’s my hero,” Hnin told the ABC.

“I never met him until I was 12, and we never really connected.

“But during the coup, I became less bitter towards him. I was able to understand why he left me behind and became the activist that he was.”

Hnin was living in Myanmar’s biggest city, Yangon, when on February 1, 2021, the country’s top generals arrested leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior government figures.

Hnin had moved there from Melbourne in 2015 and opened Father’s Office, the first female-run pub in the city, inspired by Australia’s pub culture.

Myanmar had been enjoying an economic boom after opening its borders to the world and had just had its first democratic election.

“There was a rumour going around that there would be a coup but, my friends and I, we were in denial,” she said.

“Like, who is dumb enough to do that?”

The morning after the coup d’etat, Hnin and her then-partner went for a walk.

To stifle dissent, the junta had cut electricity and mobile internet data, but she said the streets felt strangely “normal”.

“It was quiet. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Maybe there was a group of people making speeches in the corner but that was it.”

Protests erupt

The quiet did not last. 

Days later, thousands of protesters turned to the streets nationwide.

Myanmar’s young people dressed in bold outfits, held aloft tongue-in-cheek posters, and demanded for civilian rule to be reinstated and Aung San Suu Kyi to be released.

People from all walks of life — health workers, bankers, doctors, teachers — joined the civil disobedience movement.

Everyone held their three fingers up in a Hunger Games-style salute. People banged pots and pans and cars honked in protest.

Hnin told her father Htun Htun Lay Win, who had moved back to Myanmar in 2016, that she was going to join the protests.

He replied: “I’m coming with you!”

Swept up in the resistance

“The next thing you know, the military was brutally beating and shooting people,” Hnin said.

The first fatality was Mya Thwe Twe Khainga, a 20-year-old woman who was shot in the head.

Hnin knew she had to do something.

Her home, which was already a hang-out spot for journalists, artists, musicians alike during the pandemic, became a house of resistance overnight.

“The adrenaline was so high and we were all on our toes,” Hnin said.

“We hid people in my home, we handed out tear gas masks, VPNs, sim cards.”

It became a revolving door for protesters.

“People came over, smoked, drank, organised, rested, and left,” she said.

They ran first aid training for 500 people. By the third session, they were instructing people how to carry bodies from the front line.

Journalists risked their lives documenting the unfolding events, many without media press jackets.

Hnin’s father offered to help and pulled out his old screen printing kit.

Together they made seven hundred media press jackets which were sent across Myanmar.

As daunting and frightening memories of the coup were, it also transformed Hnin’s relationship with her father.

“I reconnected with my dad because of the revolution,” she said.

Resistance in her blood

In his youth, Htun Htun Lay Win was an artist and a political activist.

In 1988, when he was 26, he and other university students rose up against military brutality and corruption, which sparked military retaliation and killed between 3,000 and 10,000 people.

He produced resistance art, and was part of the All Burma Student’s Democratic Front.

Hnin was 48 days old when her father fled Myanmar to escape imprisonment following what was known as the “8888 uprising” and her mother followed a year after, leaving baby Hnin in her grandmother’s care.

After her grandmother passed away in 1999, Hnin met her parents for the first time in the Tham Hin refugee camp in Thailand.

Two years later, the family resettled in Reservoir, Melbourne, along with Hnin’s two youngest sisters.

Like for so many, starting over was difficult for Hnin’s father.

“He was an absent father. Always out. And when he lost his second job, he became very depressed.”

He took drugs to dull his pain.

In Yangon, Hnin said she and her father bonded over the protests.

“We talked about the resistance — the differences between his 8888 Uprising and my generation’s Spring Revolution,” she said.

“We had phones. The internet. They didn’t. We were better at organising. Their protests were made up of students. We had people from all walks of life.

“He’s the only person in my family I could talk about the revolution with.

“My sisters were in Australia and they didn’t go through what we did.”

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

Four years on from the coup, Hnin has committed her life to the cause.

A few months after the coup in April 2021, Hnin left Myanmar but instead of moving back to Australia, she went to Thailand to continue to support the resistance.

Now living in the northern city of Chiang Mai, she founded a creative collective called A New Burma.

They hold exhibitions and document atrocities in Myanmar as well as the people’s resilience through art and creativity.

Since 2022, they have worked with more than 100 artists and showcased exhibitions in Bangkok, London, Manchester, and Melbourne.

They have exposed the military’s air strikes and bombings of schools, religious buildings and villages, and spotlighted the courage of frontline medics saving lives in war zones in Karenni State.

Hnin has also travelled overseas to discuss her work on international panels, highlighting the plight of Myanmar’s people and calling for international sanctions.

This year, A New Burma’s art exhibition will honour the heroes of the four-year civil war. For the Love of Heroes will be part of their annual event Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop in Chiang Mai between February 19 and 22.

It will also feature a food and crafts market, film screenings and a live music concert to mark their people’s resilience, culture, and identity.

“It’s been four years now. We don’t know when we can go home,” Hnin said.

“But we are sustaining our revolution and our fight this way. We have to. We must not lose who we are.”

Sadly Hnin must carry on the fight without her hero. 

Htun Htun Lay Win passed away from a heart attack in 2023 at age 61.

“I really wish he was here,” Hnin said.

“He’s the one in the family who would understand what I’m doing now.

“But I know he’s definitely proud of me.”