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Different
world:Pascal Khoo Thwe´s
people, the Padaung, are famous for their neck rings
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"The Land of Green Ghosts the title
of my book, comes from the Burmese belief that if someone dies
violently, they tend to turn into green ghosts and they're very
vicious and we believe that green ghosts live in Burma and they're
still having an effect on the people." Pascal Khoo Thwe
In the Oxford English dictionary, the word
destiny is described as: predetermined events; power that
foreordains; an invisible necessity. The chance meeting, the
profoundly altered course of events, the emergence of a new future
all these can be put down to destiny. And all of them can
be applied to the extraordinary story of Pascal Khoo
Thwe.
He was born amongst the Padaung people, a small
tribe from Shan State in southeastern Burma. The Padaung are best
known to the outside world for the neck rings worn by some of their
women, that stretch their necks high above their tiny
shoulders.
Deep memories
"I remember Shan State
as colour and smell," says Pascal "it has its own particular smell
that I vividly remember especially the smell of flowers and
the earth after it rains. I also remember the sounds of birds. Most
of all, I remember the sounds of people when you go to market,
people haggling, sounds of festivals where people were playing
music and dancing these are memories that still live with
me."
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 Listen to the full Vox Humana
programme, as featured on Radio Netherlands. (29.24)
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Pascal eventually left his jungle home for Mandalay
where he enrolled as a student of English Literature. At first he
thought he'd arrived in a metropolis. But university life in Burma
is a disappointing affair for a young man hungry for intellectual
stimulation.
He found that students were expected to memorize
the handful of essays given to them by their teachers and
regurgitate them word for word in their exams. Any deviation would
be punished by failing marks; students who had too many questions,
or resisted the propaganda of the teachers were sent to prison
camp. Books, aside from pro-government leaflets, were a rarity, and
library shelves were bare. Students passed around shabby
cyclostyled copies of a few haphazard titles and copied them out by
hand, to be read and passed around again.
Literary waiter
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Pascal Khoo
Thwe
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An unlikely environment to foster any kind of love
or insight into literature. Yet somehow Pascal managed to find and
devour the occasional literary text. Meanwhile, demonetizations of
the Burmese currency forced him to find work as a waiter in a
Chinese restaurant.
Finally Pascal was at a point in his life where
his destiny could begin to unfurl.
Dr John Casey, elegant Cambridge don, was also
on a date with destiny. On his way to Japan, he decided to make a
stop to Burma. He met friends who advised him, if he was ever in
Mandalay, to look up the Chinese waiter who liked James Joyce.
Intrigued, Dr Casey went to the restaurant and waited for an
elderly Chinese gentleman to emerge. Instead, he met
Pascal.
Later Pascal took him to meet some of his
student friends at the university. Dr Casey was astonished by their
hunger for knowledge, their love of literature, their desperation
to talk to him about books.
Brutal repression
They parted and
went their separate ways. Weeks later the 1988 insurrection broke
out in Burma. Anti-government protesters poured on to the streets
and were brutally dealt with. Pascal's young girlfriend was among
them. He heard later about her arrest, rape, torture, and eventual
murder by government forces. A military coup crushed the rebellion.
Pascal, who had joined the student protests, returned to his home
in Shan State. With government soldiers hot on his tail, he joined
a group of students who fled to the jungle hideout of Karen rebels
near the Thai border.
From here he had a chance to secrete a letter to
Dr Casey in England. "He wrote a very moving letter about what had
been happening to him" said Dr Casey, "and I noticed how, though
his English was shaky, it was real English . . . it was genuine
poetic and full of feeling, written by someone who didn't
have experience of writing the language but had a very strong
feeling for words."
Escape
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John Casey
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A strange correspondence began between the jungle
fugitive and the ivory tower academic. While one hunted frogs and
snakes for food and languished during ever-worsening malaria
attacks, the other hatched a plan to get him out to safety. How the
plan unfolded is not a part of this particular tale; it only need
be said that it worked, and Pascal took one almost seamless jump
from jungle hardships to the luxury of embassy life in Thailand
where he marvelled at plumbing, carpets, and clean sheets.
After Pascal had assured Dr Casey that yes, he
did want to continue his studies, he found himself to England. Dr
John Casey, mover of mountains, had enrolled him to "read" English
Literature at Cambridge University.
Destiny, chance, coincidence, and good luck can
however only take one so far. After that, only individual will can
complete the transformation.
Jungle to library
In Burma, Pascal
had read probably not more than a dozen books in English. A
Cambridge degree in literature demands a journey through the
history of literature until the present day. So Pascal the Padaung,
who spoke English as his third language, systematically made his
way through medieval and renaissance texts, Greek tragedies and
realist dramas, he read Shakespeare and Chaucer and Ibsen and wrote
essays where, for the first time, he was forced to think for
himself about a text. During the day, he learnt to fit in with the
young English students around him biking around town, going to the
pub and to university functions. At night, he dreamed of the jungle
sounds of home, resisted the images of the killings and deaths he
had witnessed, longed for his family.
Pascal passed his degree, and wrote his life's
experiences in a book, "From the Land of Green Ghosts." The book
went on to win the Kiryama Prize for non-fiction in 2002. He lives
in London, still dreaming of one day returning to his country. Dr
Casey still teaches at Caius College in Cambridge
University.
It's a strange thing, destiny.
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