In 2015, Esther Htusan travelled more than 3,000 miles from home to sneak around a remote Indonesian island and interview men in cages. Many of them were her countrymen, and all of them had been trafficked into a life of slavery serving Thailand’s notorious fishing industry.
If that description sounds like an unusual way to spend one’s time, it might help to know that the 29-year-old Htusan has a habit of entering dangerous situations. As a journalist for the Associated Press, she had already made a career covering natural disasters, drug trading and ethnic conflict when she set out for Benjina, a sparsely populated speck of landmass near Papau New Guinea.
But this investigation — which would lead to a speedboat chase and armed stalkers — was bigger than all the others. Over a period of nearly two years, Htusan and her colleagues Martha Mendoza, Robin McDowell and Margie Mason would publish a series of stories that exposed how slavery had infiltrated the supply chain of major international food companies. Their reporting led to the release of more than 2,000 slaves (90% of them Myanmar nationals), the arrests of a dozen people and the introduction of legislation in the US Congress to demand more transparency from food suppliers.
For their efforts, all four women received a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, making Htusan Myanmar’s first-ever Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter — and forcing a tough conversation with her mother.
“After the Pulitzer announcement, some local journalists came to my apartment and did some interviews,” she says, grinning as she remembered the immediate aftermath of her achievement. “My mom was listening from the back door, and she was like, ‘um, sorry? What were you doing in Indonesia again? I thought you were in Jakarta the whole time!'”
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Before she was an award-winning reporter, Htusan was just another Kachin kid growing up in Myitkyina, the Kachin State capital. There she took judo classes and played football, competing against two brothers and refusing to fit into “girly woman” stereotypes.
“My dad always treated me the same as boys,” she said. “Nobody in my family really criticized the way we grew up, so we had a chance to grow up however we wanted.”
In her case, the “be who you want to be” upbringing allowed her to pursue an interest in social justice and human rights, despite the fact that such topics were taboo under what was then a military regime. After graduating Kachin State University with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics — “social justice and human rights… those weren’t [subjects] you could choose” — she moved to Yangon and began rigorous self-education in English at the American Center.
At the same time, she started attending underground political science classes offered by the British Council, under the auspices of “programs for capacity building”.
“It’s not like this anymore but at that time, under Than Shwe, you could get arrested for learning political science,” she said.
Through the secret classes, she fell in with a group of like-minded individuals and helped launch a voter education campaign during the lead-up to 2012’s by-election. Back then, she considered herself an activist, but she’d also picked up work editing an English-language learning magazine for children and writing at the Myanmar-language Politics Journal.
When the TheinSein administration opened Myanmar up to foreign journalist in 2012, she jumped at the chance to work as a fixer, someone who could help the influx of clueless foreigners access a country that had long been walled off.
“Hundreds of foreign journalists poured into Myanmar without knowing what to do,” she said. “This country was full of spies. You could walk around and sit in a tea shop and there would be two or three guys in the corner watching you.”
Within a year she had worked with 15-20 journalists and organizations, honing her chops and earning a reputation as one of the country’s most reliable resources for foreign news organizations. The Associated Press hired her in 2013.
“For the first time, I thought not as an activist but as a journalist,” she said.
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In just a few years, the ambitious reporter has risen to the top of the AP’s Myanmar office.
When you enter the bureau’s high-rise newsroom in Yangon’s Sakura Tower, you find a small operation humming along under Htusan’s guidance. She puts together story proposals and coordinates trips for herself and the AP’s in-country photographers and reporters, factoring in costs and safety concerns as well as managing the day-to-day reporting on stories from around the country.
“I wouldn’t call myself a ‘bureau chief,'” she says, humbly. “But I get to run this bureau by myself.”
It’s a remarkably swift ascension in a male-dominated industry. Though the overall female labour force in Myanmar makes, on average, 40% less money than their male counterparts and face rampant discrimination and sexism, Htusan says that her gender has never stopped her from pursuing her own reporting goals.
“In the AP [Myanmar bureau], I am the only woman journalist,” she says, gesturing at the staff around her. “And yet I’m the only person who goes to the front line — none of these guys go. So… women should just go and do and prove that we can do it. Otherwise there’s no way the change the mentality of the men leading this society.”
When I bring up State Councilor Aung San SuuKyi, she clarifies her point.
“Oh this country is run by women,” she says. “Without women this country would be, I don’t know, twenty years behind? When I say men lead the society… all the credit is taken by men.”
All the credit — aside from Htusan’s Pulitzer, tangible proof that the age-old power dynamic may be shifting. The award is also a status symbol that has completely altered Htusan’s life, landing her speaking opportunities at the International Office of Migration and the United Nations, as well as with the Myanmar Foreign Correspondent’s Club.
“Before that [Pulitzer], I was seen a little bit more as a kid,” she says, adding that she’s struggled with confidence issues in the past. “But then all these things happen… and it makes me a bit more mature and gives me self-confidence. It really helps me to believe in myself.”
Not that anyone else has any doubts.
