From the Land of Green Ghosts - Softcover

Thwe, Pascal Khoo

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9780007116829: From the Land of Green Ghosts

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007116829 ISBN 13: 9780007116829

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2003

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This text recounts the story of a young man's upbringing in a remote tribal village in Burma and his journey from his strife-torn country to the tranquil quads of Cambridge. In lyrical prose, Pascal Khoo-Thwe describes his childhood as a member of the Padaung Hill tribe, where ancestor worship and communion with spirits blended with the tribe's recent conversion to Christianity. In the 1930s, Pascal's grandfather captured an Italian Jesuit, mistaking him for a giant or a wild beast; the Jesuit in turn converted the tribe. (The Padaung are famous for their giraffe women - so-called because their necks are ritually elongated with ornamental copper rings. Pascal's grandmother had been exhibited in a touring circus in England as a freak). Pascal developed a love of the English language through listening to the BBC World Service, and it was while working as a waiter in Mandalay to pay for his studies that he met the Cambridge don John Casey, who was to prove his saviour.

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About the Author:

Pascal Khoo Thwe was born in 1968 in a remote part of Burma. How he developed a passion for English literature (specifically, James Joyce), became involved in the student resistance to savage military repression, escaped to Thailand and won an English degree at Cambridge University is the story of this remarkable book.

From Publishers Weekly:

Khoo Thwe, born in 1967, debuts with a remarkable portrait of his childhood in Phekhon, "the only Catholic town in Burma," among the Padaung people, a subtribe of the Karenni "known for what outsiders call our `giraffe women' because of their necks being elongated by rings." Modernity seeps into Phekhon slowly-only in 1977 did the locals learn, along with news of Elvis's death, that Americans had landed on the moon. The Catholic and animist fables that the author and his 10 siblings live by would be the emblems of a fairy tale life were it not for the violence and economic crises of the dictatorship of General U Ne Win. Khoo Thwe enters Mandalay University during the years when thousands of student activists were killed or imprisoned by the government. A charismatic student organizer, he is forced in 1988 to flee with fellow students to the jungles on the border of Thailand, where a stay with a Karenni rebel group makes him realize they too were "more interested in claiming leadership than in actually giving lead." But while a student, the author, working as a waiter, met John Casey, a Cambridge don who organized a miraculous rescue of the young man. Khoo Thwe's story ends with his studying English literature at Caius College, Cambridge. It is a heartbreaking tale-he is not able to return to Burma and only meets his family at the Thai border for a few hours years later-told with lyricism, affection and insight. Line illus.
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