Episode #619: “My motto is love is the most powerful magic,” says Elizabeth Yee, a Burmese medical doctor, writer, and activist who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement after the 2021 coup. Now living in Thailand, she works with the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) on mental-health and psychosocial support, while also branching into art.

As a child, Elizabeth devoured Chinese martial-arts novels that inspired her belief in justice and self-discipline. The work of one Burmese author, a physician-novelist, persuaded her to enter medical school, where she had the thought to “become a doctor and then write a lot of books.” Supported by Chinese-Burmese parents who broke with tradition to favor their daughter— based largely on her father’s belief that she was the reincarnation of his father— she excelled and became an assistant surgeon. Yet she rebelled against Myanmar’s military-controlled, politically-entangled medical system. She refused to take its restrictive exam and instead studied for the UK’s MRCP (Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians) qualification.

During the COVID pandemic, she began exploring digital education and saw the regime’s inefficiency firsthand. When the coup erupted, she resigned to join the protests. She was cited under Article 505A—effectively her arrest warrant. She fled her Yangon apartment and went underground while continuing to provide medical aid at demonstrations. Eventually, she fled to the countryside. After a year treating rural villagers, she crossed into Thailand, determined to stay there and not to abandon the revolution.

At AAPP, she combines medicine, psychology, and activism, learning from political-prisoner survivors and discovering feminism, which she defines as “justice with love.” She is now a dedicated artist, using AI to help compose music, and creating paintings that express her feelings and passions around the themes of feminism, ecology, and resistance. Art, she says, is both healing and defiance. “We need to fight until we are done,” she says quietly, “because there are so many unjust things.”