American author on her Burma rebel leader mother and feeling disenchanted with Aung San Suu Kyi
Actress-turned-novelist Charmaine Craig’s mother – who went from beauty queen to resistance fighter – was the inspiration behind a 15-year project to ‘better understand Myanmar’s present through the past’
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It’s strange to be something that no one else has heard of, and you don’t see anyone else from that community around you. You might as well be saying, ‘I am from Mars.’ When I was a little child, that’s what it felt like: ‘I am ‘The Other.’”
When bestselling novelist Charmaine Craig tells me this, speaking from her home in Los Angeles, in the United States, my initial response is to raise an eyebrow. Craig’s outsider credentials are not immediately obvious. An actor by training, she possesses movie-star good looks and, as her literary career attests, a powerful intellect to match. The author of two acclaimed novels, The Good Men (2002) and Miss Burma (2017), she supplements her writing by teaching literature and creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Away from work, Craig is married to fellow writer Andrew Winer and is mother to two daughters.
However, this blissful summary barely touches the complexity of Harvard-educated Craig’s family history, the roots of which reach across the Pacific to the minority Karen people of Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta.
Craig is the daughter of Louisa Benson Craig, a woman of Karen and Jewish ancestry, two-time winner of the Miss Burma beauty pageant (in 1956 and 1958), once the country’s most famous film star, the (falsely) rumoured mistress of military dictator General Ne Win and a Karen resistance hero.
Louisa married Brigadier General Lin Htin, commander of the Karen National Liberation Army, in 1964. After his assassination the following year, she attempted to unify the many and diverse pro-democratic groups in Burma (now Myanmar) while under constant threat to her life from the ruling military government. The risks eventually grew so pressing that Louisa fled her homeland in 1967, settling eventually in the US.