Myanmar: From Section A to 505 A
Insight Myanmar
“I could not stay under a military rule that’s been killing thousands of people,” Maple tells the Insight Myanmar Podcast, recalling the moment she chose open resistance over safety. “I cannot just sit and watch.”
Maple was studying Business Management and Entrepreneurship in South Korea when her country’s military seized power in February 2021. A scholarship student who had left an IT university in Myanmar years earlier, she had imagined building a financially sustainable venture abroad and one day channeling those resources into reforming the education system she had grown up under. That system, she says, was shaped by military logic long before the coup—hierarchical, punitive, and built on division.
In primary school, she watched classmates sorted into ranked sections. “The top students were in section A,” she explains, describing a system in which only certain groups were allowed access to facilities like the computer room. Competition was institutionalized. In fifth grade, only the top ten students each month were awarded a “talent” badge; those who fell behind were required to remove it publicly. “It’s not about learning,” she says. “It’s all about memorizing everything and just taking the exams in the best way possible.” Even as a child, she felt something was wrong.
That early awareness was sharpened by politics, as Maple was just eight years old during the 2007 monk-led protests in Yangon. She marched in the street with her parents, and later watched footage of beatings and killings at home. “I saw the bodies and everything,” she recalls. The vocabulary of martial law entered her childhood alongside fear of night raids, and by the time she left for South Korea in 2019, she was already thinking about education not simply as schooling, but as a mechanism of power.
When the coup trapped her in Myanmar during a visit home during the pandemic, her plans unraveled. Yet she was optimistic, and maybe a touch naïve, as she initially believed international pressure might reverse the seizure of power. This is because she was following United Nations statements closely and parsing their language, and appreciated what she read. “I was really focusing on the vocabularies,” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is a very strong statement!’” As she would find out later, none of those words translated into any meaningful protection from an armed and increasingly violent military.
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