From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey in Around the World

Aug 25, 2012 Rusalka rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: around-the-world, own, non-fiction, original-52-books-around-the-world, politics, religion, asia, memoir

Growing up, I knew of the country Burma. I knew of Aung San Suu Kyi and that it was terrible she was locked up in her house. I knew Burma was a dictatorship, and depending who you talked to, the word "communist" was thrown around now and then. And... that's about it.

So after my fail of a read for Burma earlier in the tour, I really wanted to make sure I read a book that taught me something about the country. So when someone in our Around the World group suggested a book written by a member of th Growing up, I knew of the country Burma. I knew of Aung San Suu Kyi and that it was terrible she was locked up in her house. I knew Burma was a dictatorship, and depending who you talked to, the word "communist" was thrown around now and then. And... that's about it.

So after my fail of a read for Burma earlier in the tour, I really wanted to make sure I read a book that taught me something about the country. So when someone in our Around the World group suggested a book written by a member of the Padaung tribe, widely known as the tribe where some women have brass rings lengthening their necks, I had to read it.

What we get is a beautiful, slightly poetical, incredibly South East Asian account of Pascal's life. We start with his life in the tribal hills with the Padaung, looking at the beautiful mix of missionary Catholicism with animist, Buddhist and tribal beliefs. Then his transition to seminary school in the city, to University student in Mandalay. You get a wonderful insight of the incredibly remote village boy changing to a city dweller.

This is where the story starts to change a bit from the usual coming of age story we are used to. While in university in the 1980s, Pascal is involved in the student uprising and demonstrations against the dictatorship. In the first third of the book, we had been given insights what it was like living under the regime, their propaganda and their whims and how this affected the Burmese. In the 80s, some students and monks protested against the regime and some people were shot. Then more protested, and more were shot, and so on and so forth. Then we have Aung San Suu Kyi enter on this wave of unrest and talk about democracy, and provided a united front to the people.

Pascal takes a while to come around to the movement and cause, but ends up being pursued by the regime. He ends up as a fugitive in the jungle, with other rebels who have been fighting the government for years with different causes, living on the Thai border. Eventually, after all of this, he gets rescued by a Don of English from a Cambridge college whom he met briefly in Mandalay before the trouble, and granted permission to travel to the UK and study English at Cambridge.

It's a book of contrasts in a way. Tribal verses city. Fugitive verses complying citizen. Seminary student verses other ways of life. Burmese verses UK. I must say it's the last contrast that does make me feel a bit ill. He talks about the way of living after he is rescued and it makes me sick with the extravagance compared to the poverty not only in the next country, but within Thailand. Having been there in the last year or so, it's apparent how much we have compared to every day Thais, let alone people who's entire country and economic status has be completely destroyed and devalued in the nation next door.

But this astonishment and even understandable bitterness is not displayed at all, if it is there, even when he talks about times of despair and depression. The book has this air of gratitude about it. Gratitude for being alive at all. For surviving childhood. For getting a chance at education. For being rescued. For having a chance a handful of his fellow countrymen have ever been offered in a foreign country. And I think that is the takeaway from this book. You should read it and understand the story of this country we all know little about, and the diverse cultures and traditions within it. Read it and be grateful that you are in a place where you can read these stories, that you are healthy, have means and education, and overall are safe. We are so very lucky for that.

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May 27, 2012 Maude rated it it was amazing

Shelves: war, maude-s-bookshelf, cambridge, burma

"In 1988 Dr. John Casey, a Cambridge don visiting Burman, was told of a waiter in Mandalay with a passion for the works of James Joyce. He visited the restaurant where he met Pascal Khoo Thwe. The encounter was to change both their lives."

"Pascal was the first member of his community ever to study English at university. Shortly after his meeting with Dr. Casey, Pascal's world lay in ruins. Economic crises caused by Burma's military dictatorship meant he had to give up his studies. As a result he ...more

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Apr 30, 2017 Amy Ariel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2017-challenge

Identity is always complicated. I've never, thank God, lived through a war. I've never survived uprisings and snack bites, seminary and river crossings. And still, I know identity is always complicated.

I am grateful to Pascal Khoo Thwe for taking us along on this often painful journey through his memories so that we can come that much closer to having some understanding of the experience of living in and leaving Burma as an ethnic minority in the 1980s.

My family is currently mentoring a Karen Identity is always complicated. I've never, thank God, lived through a war. I've never survived uprisings and snack bites, seminary and river crossings. And still, I know identity is always complicated.

I am grateful to Pascal Khoo Thwe for taking us along on this often painful journey through his memories so that we can come that much closer to having some understanding of the experience of living in and leaving Burma as an ethnic minority in the 1980s.

My family is currently mentoring a Karen refugee family who lived 22 years in a refugee camp in Thailand. They speak very little English, and it will be at least months and maybe years before we will have an opportunity to know their personal story.

I've read articles, but this is the first book I've read about Burma/Myanmar. It's shocking to me how often I'm struck by how little I know about the world.

Of course, every brutal regime is unique and every series of atrocities requires their own study - and how like reading about the Holocaust this was for me. Sure, jungle instead of shtetl. Burmese, Padaung, Karen, Thai - instead of Yiddish. Overall fewer numbers murdered and not a world war. But even the methods of murder - drowning in rivers, a crematorium, the talk of a person not being worth a bullet, grenades and land mines and weaponry from the Germans from WWII ... for me, a Jewish woman who has read more about the Shoah, the Holocaust, than I've ever wanted to ... there are so many echoes.

Some have commented on the prose and called it "stuffy." This man learned English vocabulary and the sound of English words put together reading Joyce, Dickens, and Shakespeare. What should his prose sound like? One reviewer wants Pascal Khoo Twe to sound more like a young Burmese activist. The thing is, I think he does. Or, rather, a Padaung activist from Burma. Or rather, I suspect, he sounds exactly like himself.

And, as identity is, his voice is complicated.

I'm so glad he survived, and I'm so thankful that he published part of his story.

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May 04, 2025 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: a-read-gelesen-2025, author-man, a-reviewed, zchallenge-readtheworld22, author-ofcolour, europe-uk, genre-memoir, author-hybridnation, theme-war, world-burma-myanmar

The best part of this book is its final section, where the author, after childhood and youth in the Eastern Burmese tribal region of the Padaung (where some of the women wear neck rings), years as a student in the city of Rangoon, and months of fighting in a civil war in the eastern rainforest mountains on the border between Burma and Thailand, comes to Cambridge in England to study English literature.

I live in Cambridge myself and have intimate knowledge of the college system of the University The best part of this book is its final section, where the author, after childhood and youth in the Eastern Burmese tribal region of the Padaung (where some of the women wear neck rings), years as a student in the city of Rangoon, and months of fighting in a civil war in the eastern rainforest mountains on the border between Burma and Thailand, comes to Cambridge in England to study English literature.

I live in Cambridge myself and have intimate knowledge of the college system of the University of Cambridge (where the author is enrolled). The memoir which recounts his studies in the early 1990s is redolent of the unthinking, self-aggrandising culture of masculinity and patriarchy that reigned (reigns still?) at this place. The author acknowledges how privileged he is but interestingly, at the time of writing, in the early 2000s, that word had different connotations from the ones it has accumulated since. In fact, the author is so grateful for his privileged life away from his still-fighting-and-getting-killed and suffering-from-malaria friends back in Burma, that it wrecks him with guilt and shame. He is clearly suffering from post-traumatic syndrome and is left to wrestle with the nightmares of seeing torture and killing and living with constant fear in his immediate past. The dons of Cambridge respond with their usual dry wit and tact and preposterous beliefs in the supremacy of their literary canon. Not a whiff of offering counselling or any kind of psychological support, just a lot of whiskey drinking. At one point, the young author locks himself in his room for days on end, in an effort to live like his imprisoned comrades back in Burma -- this is an extreme form of PTS and nobody seems to have noticed it at all!

It was painful to read of the author's admiration for the University of Cambridge, a university that I am deeply critical of and of whose blithe arrogance I have painful memories. At the same time, it was nice to read of places familiar to me (Maid's Causeway! Midsummer Common!) and to experience this city through the eyes of a fellow foreigner.

Oddly, the bits that promise to be more interesting due to their intrinsic unfamiliarity to me, that is, the author's life in Burma, were less interesting to read and at times even a bit of a slog. I attribute this to the summary style of writing. Swathes of events are described summarily, a bit like Proust's iterative style but with less panache (and I also struggle with Proust's iterative style, so that is me preferring spotlit unique experiences as standing in for repetition). Some of it reads like careful ethnographic description, at pains to explain his people's ways; at other times, there's a (to me boring) summary of Burmese history, drier than a Wikipedia entry. Still, even so, some take-aways stay with me, like the syncretic beliefs of the author's family (Catholicism x animism, in a nation where the dominant religion is a type of Buddhism); the inter-tribal animosities and non-understandings and vain efforts at unifying the tribes with hegemonic Burmese struggles, the very existence of these tribes (I had only heard of the Rohingya who don't figure in this memoir).

As my landscape theme this year is 'rainforest', I was particularly interested in the author's descriptions of life therein that is at odds with the kinds of explorer narratives I have been reading. The forest is alive with people and with spirits, and it offers plants and animals for humans to consume and live with. Real harm comes from military and anti-human rights actions.

I am attaching this book to the 2025 Diverse Reading challenge prompt 'country with ongoing genocide' It is also part of my continuing quest to read a book from every country on earth: Burma (renamed Myanmar by the military dictatorship in 1989). ...more

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