Ludu U Hla - Final Years

Final Years

U Hla was imprisoned for the fifth time in 1978, this time with his wife Daw Amar and their youngest son Nyein Chan (b. 1952) who were both released later than U Hla in 1979. His second son Po Than Gyaung had gone underground in 1976 to join the Communists like his brother before him. U Hla's death at the age of 72, in August 1982, was unexpected by most who knew him as someone who had always lived a healthy life, although he developed diabetes later in life. He was suddenly taken ill just as he was about to be interviewed by a Japanese woman researcher accompanied by the writer Maung Tha-ya, rushed to hospital, and he died the same evening.

U Hla was survived by his wife Ludu Daw Amar (b. 1915), daughter Than Yin Mar (b. 1943, rtd. professor of medicine who has started writing as well assuming the pseudonym Dr. Mya Myitzu), son Po Than Gyaung (b. 1945, current spokesman for the Communist Party of Burma), daughter Tin Win (b. 1947, in charge of Kyipwa Yay Press), and son Nyein Chan (b. 1952, a popular writer of short stories and travelogues, he started writing after his father's death under the name Nyi Pu Lay). Ludu Daw Amar (b. 1915) died recently on 7 April 2008 at the age of 93.

Ludu U Hla was a prime example of what an individual could achieve in a lifetime for the common good, although he would be the first to condemn one-upmanship. History is full of able men who fell by the wayside and lost sight of their own goals and forsook their own principles and convictions. U Hla was of the people, for the people, and never abandoned the people he loved and set out to serve from a very young age. To paraphrase one of his younger colleagues, Ludu Sein Win, even though U Hla had never taken up arms in the revolutionary struggle from colonial times, for he had such great compassion, and if his far-sightedness and forbearance were seen as ineptitude by young radicals, he was a "saintly revolutionary", to be compared with China's Lu Hsun, though not a revolutionary saint.