The stories here chronicle the memories of ordinary people whose voices were silenced for decades. They are a snapshot of history, taken as the country looks with hope to a more equal future.  

We are two storytellers with a great love of Myanmar. By sharing people’s recollections, we want to celebrate the country’s extraordinary diversity, show the many experiences and ideas that bind people together, and spark a discussion on the preservation of precious cultural heritage.

Perhaps the best explanation of the idea behind The Kite Tales is a quote by one of the first people we interviewed: 

“The real history lies among the people” - Aung Soe Min, Pansodan Gallery Yangon

Years of dictatorship silenced ordinary voices in Myanmar. We hope that these personal stories will help begin to fill that silence.

We started talking about The Kite Tales long before we knew it could become a reality. From cheerful chatter at noodle stalls to profound musings in sun-drenched paddy fields, we knew that there were so many ordinary people in Myanmar who had lived through — often endured — extraordinary times. While the struggles of the democracy movement have been rightly prioritised, the stories of ordinary people have often gone unheard. Theirs are tales of love, resilience and tragedy through war, two foreign occupations and military rule, which stifled information, turned neighbours into strangers and neglected important cultural heritage.  

But things are changing fast. 

As Myanmar embraces a more equal future after historic 2015 elections, we think this is a unique moment to democratise the telling of history and celebrate the country’s rich diversity.

So we took unpaid leave from our jobs, begged and borrowed enough funding to get us started and The Kite Tales took flight.

Myanmar is Thin Lei Win’s home; she was born and raised in Yangon and has maintained a strong bond with the country throughout her international journalism career. Thin set up Myanmar Now after returning to her home town after many years abroad working for Thomson Reuters Foundation, the non-profit arm of Reuters news agency, and specialising in humanitarian reporting. 

Kelly Macnamara was Agence France Presse news agency’s first international news editor in Myanmar, based in Yangon from 2014 working with a talented team of local journalists. She has written about Myanmar for six years, documenting the seismic political changes as well as the social and cultural developments that have touched ordinary people. She is a writer and video journalist with over a decade of experience in print and television news.  

Stories on our Burmese language site are edited by Naing Swan, while Eh Hser Wah and friends are our team of transcribers.

We chose our name because if you look at the country as a whole, with its diamond shaped northern region and slender tail in the south, it looks like a kite. And when people fly a kite in Myanmar, they say they ”hloot”, or “free” it.

While we have travelled to remote corners of the country by boat, bike and plane, we know that we can’t speak to everyone. We like to spend time researching who we will meet and then sit down with them for at least an hour, often much more than that. The interviews are presented with our observations and context and are edited slightly for clarity and flow. 

Each person we have spoken to should be seen as an individual telling his or her own story, rather than a simplified representative of a particular identity. But we hope that presenting their experiences will help will help promote diversity and add to the conversation about the preservation of unique cultural heritage. 

Thanks for reading!