From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey - Tapa dura

The astonishing autobiographical story of a young man’s upbringing in a remote tribal village in Burma and his subsequent journey from his strife-torn country to the tranquil quads of Cambridge.

In lyrical prose, Pascal Khoo-thwe describes his childhood and early days 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 (and head of the clan) 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 Bertram Mills Circus in England as a ‘freak’.)

Paschal developed a love of the English language through listening with his father to the BBC World Service, and it was while earning money as a waiter in a restaurant in Mandalay to pay for his studies that he met the Cambridge don, John Casey, who was to prove his saviour. The brutal military regime of General Ne Win cracked down on ‘dissidents’ in the late 1980s.

Pascal’s girlfriend was raped and murdered by soldiers, and Pascal, by now a student leader, took to the jungle along with an army of students. How he was eventually rescued with Casey’s help is a dramatic part of the story, which ends when Pascal is admitted to Cambridge to study his great love – English literature.