In 2021, when Myanmar’s generals staged a coup, she was 11 years old. With the nation’s economy shattered, there was no choice but to stop school and start working.
So the girl, Ma Moe Moe San, found an occupation of sorts: she began detangling human hair, sold by the ponytail or from brushes by women as desperate for pennies as her family is. For eight hours a day over the past five years, she has smoothed hair into bundles for wig makers, earning a daily wage of about $2.50. Elsewhere in this township that was once the constituency of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader overthrown by Myanmar’s military junta, people have sold their kidneys.
Survival in this Southeast Asian nation, fractured by civil war and the site of unlikely elections starting on Sunday, sometimes comes down to salable body parts.
“I have to work,” Ms. Moe Moe San said. “We don’t have money.”
Nearly half the country is impoverished, according to the United Nations Development Program’s figures, double the percentage of six years before. Foreign investment has plummeted, and cities like Yangon, the commercial capital, are punctuated by half-built skyscrapers and transport projects that were suspended five years ago.
Seeking legitimacy, or at least relief from international financial sanctions, Myanmar’s military junta announced three rounds of elections from Dec. 28 to late January. But the vote, the first since the 2021 coup, has been almost universally dismissed as political playacting. After all, the nation’s most popular party, the National League for Democracy, has been disbanded, and its leaders, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi included, remain imprisoned. There will be no voting in more than half of the country, as an armed resistance battles the junta’s forces and the military responds by bombing civilians.
While the military flaunts the trappings of elections — party billboards, new voting machines, observers from countries like China and Belarus — its professed path to “disciplined democracy” is neither free nor fair. Using the word “revolution” in campaign speeches can be grounds for imprisonment. Other breaches of the electoral law can result in a death sentence.Given these conditions, Myanmar’s government in exile and members of the country’s millions-strong diaspora have called for an electoral boycott.
Traces of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party have been excised from the landscape. Her local office in Kawhmu, right next door to where about 20 girls and young women toil over heaps of hair, is gone. Still, U Win Htein, a candidate in Kawhmu for the military’s proxy party, acknowledged the accomplishments of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected administration.
“I believe her government ruled democratically and did as much as it could,” he said.
Mr. Win Htein enumerated the problems now facing the township — which he, as the military’s candidate, will need to tackle if he wins a seat in Parliament. Since 2020, roughly half of local farmers have sold their rice paddies to make ends meet. Many young men and women have left for jobs overseas, some because they fear being drafted and turned into cannon fodder in Myanmar’s civil war.
While the military’s proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party is the only party assured of winning these elections, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s dissolved National League for Democracy still casts a big shadow. One political party, for instance, has copied the N.L.D.’s logo, a fighting peacock, presumably in hopes that it can draw more votes.
In Yangon, Daw Nan Su Thazin Aung, a wealthy former sex education vlogger known as VV Chen, is running for Parliament representing an industrial district that raised some of the fiercest resistance to the coup — and paid the biggest price, with dozens of people killed in a single-day massacre by security forces. Her mannerisms, posture and intonation evoke those of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, whom she says she idolized as a teenager. She notes that her nickname is Su, like the N.L.D. leader.
“I’m inspired by her, but I’m not copying her,” Ms. Nan Su Thazin Aung said.
The decision to participate in these elections is contentious. Ms. Nan Su Thazin Aung said her mother, who now lives in Thailand with her siblings, does not support her decision.
“But if I don’t join, we cannot make it better as soon as possible,” she said. “I have to try.”
Another polarizing candidate is U Ko Ko Gyi, a former student activist and a longtime political prisoner. A mere three days before the election, the People’s Party that he founded was given permission to hold a rally in South Dagon, a township in Yangon. A screechy sound system was procured. People in yellow shirts baked in the hot sun and waited for their free lunch. Military intelligence officers openly took video of the foreign journalists covering the event.
Daw Nwe Ni Kyaw, the local candidate for the People’s Party, dabbed the sweat from her upper lip. She owns a minimart, and she said she was horrified that the price of eggs, oil and rice have doubled or even tripled since the coup. She worries about the exodus of youth from the country.
“So many young people have moved to other places, and I want to reunite families so they can sit and eat dinner together again,” she said.
Mr. Ko Ko Gyi, the People’s Party founder, took the stage. Rather than giving a careful speech, Mr. Ko Ko Gyi repeated the word “revolution,” an election no-no in Myanmar. One of his party’s candidates, already facing charges for daring to use the word in his campaigning, could be sentenced to prison in January.
Earlier in the week, members of an urban guerrilla unit opposing the junta detonated a bomb at a People’s Party office in Yangon, part of a string of explosions that has targeted those seen as either supporting or insufficiently opposed to military rule. In a few weeks’ span in 2021, in South Dagon, the township in Yangon, 16 administrators associated with the military were killed by urban militias, according to local officials.
“We view them as those who side with injustice over justice, and that is why we are carrying out actions such as bomb attacks,” said Bo Kauk Yoe, a spokesman for the militia that claimed responsibility for the People’s Party detonation, which did not injure anyone.
The military has imprisoned and tortured thousands of people and launched airstrikes on thousands more civilians in schools, houses of worships and sites of celebration. Aerial bombardment of a hospital in western Myanmar this month killed at least 34 people.
Mr. Ko Ko Gyi said his nearly four decades in Myanmar politics, most of it under full military rule and a chunk of it in prison, have left him exhausted.
“I’m not saying the elections are the best choice,” Mr. Ko Ko Gyi said. “I’m saying they are the only choice.”
On the road from Yangon to Kawhmu, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s former constituency about two hours away by car, security forces guarded checkpoints. The nation remains on a war footing. Motorcycles are not allowed on this road because they have been used by assassins looking for military targets.
In Kawhmu, as Ms. Moe Moe San pulled through tangles of hair, her fingers already twisted from five years of labor, another young woman arrived at the workshop with her husband of two years. He works in construction, but the job is not steady. The woman, Ma Yamin Htwe, 19, unfurled her hair, and it cascaded down her back. She was ready to sell.
As the scissors snapped near her head, she blinked back tears and touched her neck. Then she pulled on a hat and clutched the $60 she earned from her hair. It would keep the family going for a few more months.
Hannah Beech is a Times reporter based in Bangkok who has been covering Asia for more than 25 years. She focuses on in-depth and investigative stories.
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