Maung Lu Hmwe – When the Heat Brings a Burning Longing
MoeMaKa, April 1, 2026
When summer arrives and the midday heat bears down, one can do little but sit still. Even sleep doesn’t come easily. Just as sleep is about to take hold, the moment he remembers them, his heart jolts awake, and he can no longer sleep at all. If even Maung Lu Hmwe, with proper shelter and ventilation, feels the weight of this heat so intensely, how much more must those who are confined and imprisoned be suffering?
After finishing the day’s work, when Maung Lu Hmwe and others are exhausted, the summer evenings—especially at sunset—feel unbearably dull. Since giving up gatherings of eating and drinking that were once said to relieve stress, he now rests by reading in bed when tired. Or he chats with Mrs. Hmwe. They watch the sunset. Sometimes they walk out toward the edge of the village and just gaze into the distance. But whenever he wonders how they endure these burning, monotonous evenings—those heavy with longing—his chest aches.
One night, after a long conversation with a teacher friend, Maung Lu Hmwe didn’t return to his sleeping place until after 10 p.m. Under the moonlight, the fragile little houses were already asleep. There were no large trees in the compounds anymore.
“When our village was burned, all the big trees were burned down too. Since then, the village has become unbearably hot,” a local woman had told him just days earlier.
After the village was burned, people rebuilt their homes using only thin posts, hardly thicker than a forearm. They climbed into their homes using shaky little ladders. In the compounds, there were no longer any shade-giving trees. The newly planted ones were barely as tall as a person. It is far harder to restore old trees than to rebuild houses. That is why an elderly woman from Upper Myanmar once wept—not for her house that had been burned to ashes—but for the great tamarind tree that had stood in her yard since her childhood, now gone.
Under the spring night’s moonlight, a soft breeze moves through the air. Breathing in that fresh air while looking up at the sky brings a fleeting sense of peace. But only for a moment. Maung Lu Hmwe’s thoughts immediately turn back to them.
“They won’t be able to see the moonlight,” he says quietly to Mrs. Hmwe beside him.
After the junta staged its sham election and released some prisoners, most of Maung Lu Hmwe’s friends and former students were not among them. They were people who had actively resisted the military dictatorship. Why would they be released? he wonders.
In the early years, Maung Lu Hmwe did what he could to look after them. But in later years, as he became fully absorbed in work in revolutionary areas, there were times he felt frustrated with himself for no longer being able to check on them.
Every time he feels the scorching heat of summer, he remembers them with deep sympathy. For him, the hot afternoons of summer are times when a burning sense of longing rises up. How much more must their families be suffering from that same burning longing? And those inside the prisons—how much must they be enduring?
Some have already lost their lives because of this unbearable weight of longing. Others continue to survive, just barely. As long as the military dictatorship remains, the entire country will continue to burn with this same aching longing.