Desire fulfilled is a dangerous thing, we are told by the moralists. Be careful of what you want, they warn. You might end up getting it. Once, when I was 20 years old and the thing I'd wanted above all else was suddenly granted me, I came to understand the truth in that warning.

Where does the desire of a lifetime begin? Mine began, I think, with snow. The earliest games I remember playing as a child in Rangoon involved snow. Our home in those days of the early 1950s was on two floors of a four-storey edifice called the Thomas de la Rue building. Money was minted in that building – or had been until just before the war, when the British were still running Burma. "Don't think money grows on trees!" my mother was fond of saying. Of course I didn't think money grew on trees. It was printed downstairs, on old machines. Upstairs, on the top storey, was the North Pole: a big empty loft where I would try to lead my playmates on pretend Arctic expeditions. Snow was a miracle, a chimera, that called me to impossibly distant places.

As I grew older, I listened, rapt, to stories brought home by my older siblings who had studied and travelled in America; by my father, describing his first opera while on a press junket to Europe ("Crying over a lost coat! Too funny!"); by multilingual friends whose parents were posted to places like Paris, Rome, Belgrade…

I couldn't wait for my turn, when I'd see for myself the wonders of a world as sprawling as the landscape in that fairytale, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon." At 16 – with school behind me and a music scholarship in California awaiting me; with my blue Samsonite suitcase packed and repacked daily, months ahead of schedule – it seemed my time had come.

Then, in March 1963, with only three months to go, everything changed. One night, a car drew up under our front porch and woke my mother. Seeing an army Jeep outside, she shook my father awake. He looked at his watch as he got out of bed. Three o'clock in the morning.

At the front door was a young man in uniform. "Uncle," said the captain, "let's go. And don't touch the telephone, please." When she looked out the window my mother saw that the house was surrounded. Apart from the Jeep, there was an open truck full of armed soldiers, and an army station wagon. In this station wagon our father was taken away.

Only later in the day, when we children woke up one by one, did my mother realise that not only could she not tell us where he had been taken to, she couldn't be sure who his captors were. The army, she assumed. But how could she be certain when there was nothing to go on: no charge, no warrant, no witnesses apart from herself?

Days passed, then weeks, then months – and still we were in the dark about where Dad had been taken, or when if ever we would see him again. One day, eight months after his disappearance, an official letter finally arrived. Editor U Law-Yone (my father was editor and publisher of the leading English-language daily, the Rangoon Nation) was "under protective custody". He would be allowed to write one letter home every other week. On alternating weeks he could receive one letter from home. No letter should exceed two handwritten pages. There was no mention of visits – then, or at any time in the five years to follow.

Not long after my father's arrest, I gathered the nerve to broach a difficult subject: my passport. My mother looked at me, uncomprehending. "What passport?" "Shouldn't we be applying for it?" I said. "We're running out of time."

My mother said, "You must be joking." Then, seeing I wasn't joking, "I can't believe this. Your father's in jail – or worse – and you're still thinking of leaving? You are that selfish?"

I was, in fact, that selfish. It seemed to me urgent to leave, especially because my father had been arrested. Something told me we weren't going to see him any time soon. Prime minister U Nu and his cabinet ministers had been picked up a year ago, when the military took over, and they were still in jail. More and more politicians, journalists and students were disappearing in the dragnet cast by the MIS – the Military Intelligence Service. Businesses were being nationalised or shut down without compensation. Foreign nationals – even those whose families had lived in Burma for generations – were stripped of their assets and ordered out of the country. Things were getting worse, not better, I reasoned; and what good was I to anyone if I stayed?

My mother ended our Mexican standoff with one of her edicts. "You're not going. And that's that." Then she burst into tears, and I went off to seethe with self-pity and impotent rage.

Months later, following her advice to "make the best of things", I was enrolled in Rangoon University. But halfway through the first term, both my mother and I were summoned to the registrar's office. There we were informed that, as the daughter of a political prisoner, I was officially barred from classes – at the university or at any other institute of learning.

I could see my mother biting her lip and hoped she wouldn't cry. When she did, I hated her even more than I hated the registrar, and shot her a look that said, "See? What did I tell you? And you wanted me to stay."

The pile-up of frustrations gave me licence, as I saw it, to sulk and mope. To escape the assaults of a large household, I locked myself in my room, emerging only for meals, bristling at the slightest taunt or tease from my brothers and sisters. The bed in my room was a pull-out sofa that I never bothered to pull out, sleeping uncomfortably on the narrow seat, my bed of nails. I fell into the habit of sleeping fully clothed, prepared to jump up at a moment's notice – and flee.

When not plotting revenge on one adversary or another, I was plotting escape. I had stopped playing the piano altogether (another act of protest which, maddeningly, no one seemed to notice), but on my portable record player I listened to the same handful of LPs – Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Eartha Kitt, a Segovia album – dreaming all the while of faraway places. In my fantasies, I drove the smooth highways of America in an open convertible. I roamed the cafés of Paris, rubbing shoulders with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I sat in the front row of a concert hall in Moscow, watching the hands of the great Sviatoslav Richter on the keyboard of a Steinway grand. I dreamed, like Bing Crosby, of a white Christmas.

One day I was invited to a piano recital at the Goethe Institute in Rangoon. The British Council and the Alliance Française had already begun to pull up stakes and leave, but the Germans still soldiered on in their cultural mission. During the intermission, I met an American couple who introduced me to their house guest, another American by the name of Sterling. We sat and talked for about 20 minutes. Then, when the concert was over, we went our separate ways: Sterling to San Francisco, where he was living at the time, and I to my bed of nails.

Six months later, Sterling and I were launched on a long-distance romance. The forbidden nature of it appealed to our mutual love of secrecy, danger and adventure. For the next year and a half, we wrote to each other almost daily. Our letters escaped the post office censors by coming and going through the diplomatic pouch, thanks to sympathetic embassy friends.

For the first time in a long while, I was no longer fixated on escape and flight. I was too busy composing letters that I hoped would impress Sterling, a journalist by profession, and the last word, it seemed to me, in epistolary savoir-faire. I sat at my grey Smith Corona, a dictionary by my side, a wheel-and-brush eraser at the ready. For hours I typed and erased, often tearing the onion-skin stationery that had quickly turned purple from my laboured prose.

We were married in Rangoon, two years from the date of our first meeting. I was 20, Sterling 10 years older. The wedding was a subdued and surreal affair, with the MIS tailing us to the courthouse and back – and many long faces in attendance as the day wore on and it became obvious that the authorities were not going to release my father for the occasion.

The ceremonies over, Sterling was once more obliged to leave: as a foreigner, he could only stay for the duration of a 24-hour transit visa.

Over the next few months, Sterling flew in and out of the country, while I tried repeatedly to apply for a passport – each time to no avail. It appeared that my chances were no better now that I was married to an American; if anything, they were worse. All Americans were potential CIA agents in the eyes of the MIS.

It was time, we decided, for me to take the "back door" – the underground route to Thailand favoured by smugglers, petty criminals and insurgents. Early one morning in May, I set out for the train station with my brother, Alban, and a gem smuggler who had agreed to lead us through the eastern jungles to a safe crossing at the border with Thailand.

We never made it that far. At the river port of Moulmein, on the very first leg of our journey, we were picked up by the secret police and brought back to Rangoon. Once at the MIS headquarters, my brother and I were separated and held in different rooms.

The interrogations lasted from nine at night to nine the next morning, the officers working in teams of four, changing shifts at 3am. For the next 10 days, the routine was unvarying: every night, just before nine, a guard would unlock the door to lead me downstairs, into the self-same office, where I was asked to take a seat across the desk from the interrogators. Just before 9am, I would be led back to my room.

Feverish with despair, I'd throw myself on to the cot that had been set up for me in the windowless office where I slept. "What makes you think," the colonel had said with a pleasant smile, when I had asked for the umpteenth time, "that you're ever going to be released?"

I was doomed, I now knew. Just as my father was doomed. I was never going to get out of jail. Nor was he. Every Christmas a card would arrive at our house from an organisation called Amnesty International, assuring the "prisoner of conscience" that he was not forgotten. And for a few weeks my mother would allow herself to hope that important people outside the country were busy engineering her husband's release. Now I saw that nothing could possibly come of any talk of release. Now I knew what protective custody meant. It meant you could be locked up one day just like that, and remain locked up until God alone knew when — and not a thing in the world could be done about it.

I made a vow to myself then: if, by miracle, I ever made it out of jail and managed to leave the country, I would never, ever, come back to live in such a wretched place again.

Miracles do happen, even in police states. Ten days after our arrest, without warning or explanation, my brother and I were allowed to go home. Even more astonishing, Colonel Chit Khin, the chief of Military Intelligence himself, put in a bouncy appearance to sign our release order. Reminding me that we had once played tennis to- gether, he then assured me that an exit permit would be granted me within 10 days.

In the event, 10 days turned into three months, as a wave of violent anti-Chinese riots brought the city to a standstill and martial law was declared. But against all odds, just as I was beginning to give up hope, a messenger cycled up to our front door one morning and handed me my ticket to freedom: an exit permit and a certificate of identity, the stateless person's passport.

On the night of 15 July 1967, I drove to Mingaladon airport in the spooky atmosphere of a war-time blackout. Because a curfew was still in effect, nobody came to see me off, but our driver, Maung Thein Htun, tried in his quiet way to make up for the lonely send-off. He had brought me as a going-away present a small paperback, a Burmese cookbook. Whenever I felt homesick, he said, I could follow one of those recipes. Then maybe I would think of him a little, too. From my seat in the back I could see the sad movement of his Adam's apple.

The airport seemed utterly deserted and for once even the MIS were out of sight. Then a Thai International attendant appeared, led me to the ticket counter and before I knew it I was being escorted aboard Thai International Flight TG304, where I discovered that I was the one and only passenger.

It was my first time on a jet and I was white-knuckled: not from fear of flying, but from fear of flying back. Just before boarding I had overheard an exchange between two members of the ground crew. Point of no-return, was what one of them had said jokingly. Something about how on a short flight like the one before us (we were flying from Rangoon to Bangkok, an hour-and-a-half away), there was no point of no-return.

No point of no-return! But what did that mean? That the plane could be ordered to turn back at any time, right up to the verge of landing? The alarming paradox held me in thrall for the rest of the flight – until the plane touched down at Don Muang International airport right on schedule, the wheels skipping a little before coming to a stop. Out on the tarmac, two strangers were waving to me. One of them, I realised with a start, was my husband.

Endings, like beginnings, are never as clear-cut as we wish them to be. One life had ended for me, thank God, and a new life had begun. The commercials on the television sets in Bangkok all seemed to shout out my hard-won status. FREE! FREE! FREE! The world was my apple. The sky was the limit. And I soon found out that my persistent nausea was not just a case of nerves: I was pregnant.

There was a small problem of how we were going to live, for we had no money. Sterling had quit his job with a San Francisco television station to "spirit" me out of Burma, as he put it, and I, of course, had no credentials, no "marketable skills". But we were rich, we felt, in other ways. And we would soon be rich in the usual way, too, for someone at MGM was "wildly excited" about a script that Sterling had written. We flew to Los Angeles and found a cheap apartment in West Hollywood, near enough to the studios to facilitate negotiations. (Daryl, the MGM executive, turned out to be a bankrupt shyster who was using stolen MGM stationery – but that's another story.)

The apartment had a large plastic tree that took up half the living space, but we could hang things on it: clothes, large paper clips to hold newspaper clippings, even a stuffed mouse with enormous ears, a gift to me from Sterling, named Mousey Tung.

It was Mousey Tung I clutched to my belly when the cramps began one night. I thought at first it might be indigestion from the excess of Kraft's Green Goddess salad dressing I'd poured on my iceberg lettuce, but the cramping continued for hours before letting up and allowing sleep. I felt fine the next day – until late evening, when the cramps returned with a vengeance. This time they lasted most of the night. Poor Mousey Tung's wire ears were misshapen by morning. On the third night, when the dread signs began, Sterling borrowed a friend's car to drive me to the hospital. The young resident who examined me said, "You're trying to abort." "No, I'm not!" I snapped, mistaking the diagnosis for accusation. He gave me an injection and sent me home to rest.

I got into the back seat of the car so I could lie down. We drove out of the hospital and on to roads where the signs and billboards flashing by were exactly like the neon-lit vistas I had imagined as a teenager, when I drove the open highways in my daydreams. But before long I could think of nothing but the pain tearing through my abdomen. Once, when it seemed as if we had been driving for hours, I screamed for Sterling to stop, for God's sake, and do something, but we were on one of the great freeways of southern California, caught on a particularly long stretch between exits, and when Sterling screamed back, "What do you want me to DO?" I feared an accident and went back to moaning and writhing and clawing the air.

"We're almost home, almost home," he kept saying, and I had ceased to believe him when suddenly we were stopped right in front of our apartment – and suddenly, miraculously, the pain stopped, too.

I was trembling with relief as I got out of the car – and still trembling when I felt the important gush between my legs that told me it was all over now, there was nothing to be done about it.

Once in bed I was overcome with relief that bordered on euphoria. The pain was gone, and I was alive. Things happen for a reason, I told myself. The baby was not meant to be, clearly. The pregnancy must have been doomed from the start. Or maybe it was just that a price had to be paid for the freedom I'd won – and this was the very price. I felt calm, even peaceful, as I accepted my loss. Then I felt weak with hunger. I had a powerful craving for my mother's chicken stew. One thing I could say about my mother: no matter how busy she might be, or how angry at me, I could always count on her special chicken stew to speed up my recovery from any illness. I remembered a story she'd once told me about the child she had lost – and suddenly it was as if she was sitting on the edge of my bed, telling me the story again.

"Alban was just a baby, your father's deaf aunt was helping to take care of him, when his little brother was born – 31 January, I still remember the day. We named him John. When the baby was eight months old, he suddenly got very sick and broke out in sores. The doctor came – and just stood at the door to the bedroom. He took one look at the baby and wouldn't come any closer. "Take him to the hospital right away," was all he said.

"I suppose I knew at the back of my mind that there was a smallpox epidemic going on, but I refused to let myself think about it. In the hospital, of course, there was no escaping the horror. All around us people were dying and being carried away. I stayed with the baby day and night for I don't know how many days. I remember hearing somebody say that human saliva could cure those sores, so I kept on licking the baby's hot little body all over, praying and praying for a miracle.

"I don't even know how they managed to get me away from the baby when it died, how I was able to leave him there. But I remember coming home and the dog going wild. It just knew, I suppose. It kept jumping all over me, licking me and making crying noises. I remember sitting in the living room and staring at nothing for a long, long time, just like that. Daddy brought me some ice cream, but I couldn't touch it, I couldn't look at it."

When Sterling came to kneel by the bedside and comfort me, saying, "We'll have another; it will be all right," I didn't know how to tell him that what I wanted at the moment was not to have another child – it was to go home and tell my mother I was sorry.

Three months later, our Hollywood illusions behind us, we moved to New York City, where I found a job, a minor clerical position, with a big German firm. My boss, a salesman by the name of Eugene Koch, seemed like the kindest man on earth. I celebrated my first white Christmas with a beautiful Douglas fir tree that someone had left on the street. I hadn't met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but I had seen Julie Christie browsing in a tiny boutique in Sausalito. And I hadn't yet heard Sviatoslav Richter play, but the mother of a friend of ours had two extra tickets to the Metropolitan Opera, where I slept soundly through The Ride of the Valkyries.

It was spring of the next year, and I was pregnant again when I received a pile of mail that had been forwarded along to me from one past address to another. In it was a letter from my father, sent from 116B University Avenue, Rangoon, and dated 4 March 1968.

My darling daughter,

As soon as I came home we dashed off a cable to you. You must be footloose somewhere because you have not yet responded. But everything here reminds me of you: even this typewriter which was clogged up with your old eraser shavings…

Wars and rumours of war; men withering away in expectation of what shall befall them. There has been no change since I went in…

You are old enough and sensible enough to know that my imprisonment has been a blessing in disguise. We have all recovered from the ordeal we have been through. Other families lose the head at one fell swoop – in our case there was a dress rehearsal to prepare everyone for the day when the show opens in earnest,

Daddy

But the show had already opened in earnest for me. I was a grown-up now. And if I didn't jump up and down in exultation at the news of my father's release, it was because I had learned that beginnings, like endings, are never as clear-cut as we imagine.