Though he had been a partner at large international law firms for almost a decade, Robert Pé might as well have been a first-year associate, given how nervous he was that Sunday afternoon in Yangon in October 2012.
It was his first face-to-face meeting with Nobel Peace Prize winner and longtime democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi. Pé, whose father fled the country then known as Burma over 50 years ago, had long admired Suu Kyi’s work from afar and dreamed of helping her somehow. In the years in which Myanmar was isolated from the rest of the world under a military dictatorship and Suu Kyi herself was under house arrest, that was, of course, impossible.
