American journalist Danny Fenster was in Myanmar during the 2021 coup. “I’d wanted to learn from journalists standing up to unimaginable repression,” he writes, but when he arrived in the country, he felt inexperienced and out of place. For a while, Fenster watched events unfold around him on his phone, until he was detained while attempting to board a flight out of the country. Co-created with cartoonist and graphic memoirist Amy Kurzweil, this collaboration at The Verge is a visually engaging and immersive digital reading experience. [Subscription may be required.]
There was a TV in our ward, but programming was limited, and all of it in Burmese anyway.
A Buddhist monk, one of the only English speakers there, told me they used to watch BBC and Discovery Channel. But on the morning of the coup, the TV signal was cut completely.
When it came back on, only state broadcasts remained.
“That’s how we knew the military had taken back control.”
One day, I noticed a prisoner fiddling with something.
The monk explained that for just a few thousand kyat or a handful of betel nuts, guards brought prisoners USB sticks full of Chinese action movies and Bollywood musicals, or TikTok reels of people being kicked in the nuts. Some even had small MP3 players they listened to illegal music on.
l began scheming immediately.
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