A Story of Pickled Memories

From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey – A Remarkable and Moving Memoir from Hill Tribe to Cambridge by Pascal Khoo Thwe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Burmese Odyssey reminded me of অক্ষয় মালবেরি, also a memoir, written by the Bengali author Manindra Gupta. Both the books started with giving an overview of the cultural heritage, with grandma’s storytelling, life in the village. Memories were pickled into words. Reading them felt like revisiting the fondest memories from my own childhood.

Pascal, the author, introduces us to his tribe in Myanmar, the Padaung, their culture, lifestyle in the 70s and 80s. The remote hills they lived in, the waterfall that marked his sense of territory, the nearest town that was the farthest place he knew in the world. The children’s game they used to play amidst nature. The faiths they believed in. From the remote hills, his story took a bus along the sinuous roads to the plains in Mandalay. From village life’s naivety to government propaganda. Co-incidents, historical turmoils, revolution, rescue—without lengthening the book, Pascal delivered it all. The memoir looked back into the important historical events as they appeared in front of Pascal’s view, without doing much postmortem. I loved the book more because of this reason, that the author did not lean on any side and gave as unbiased an account as he could.

Apart from it being on the news for civil wars and lately the Rohingya crisis, Myanmar, our neighboring country, was very less known to me. Reading From the Land of Green Ghosts, I realized how similar our culture is - the habit of eating rice, the habit of wearing longyi. Some things, like some food habits vary due to demographical reasons, I suppose. In both cultures, father-in-law and brother-in-law terms are used for swearing. I was smiling when I read how a crow is called the messenger of death in Pascal’s tribe, Padaung. It reminded me of how crows had also been permanently associated in my memory as messengers of bad news, since a relative preached this thought to me in my childhood.

The student uprising in Myanmar in 1988 made a big turn in Pascal’s life. Reading this part was so familiar to the July 2024 uprising here in Bangladesh. When the police opened fire on peaceful protesters including students, monks and civilians, it could have been the description of either uprising, sadly.

My paperback got too many dog-eared pages, leaving some of the quotes here from the beginning part of the story.

…we entered into the mythic world of the stories they told over ten years in the evenings after dinner.
And why should we not enter it? It was a world where our own tribe was important, and our group of related peoples also important. It explained and justified our way of life. It was very different from another sort of history in which we were marginalised, eccentric and even an embarrassment — a history which contained plenty of mythology of its own.

About the ‘giraffe necked women’ of the Padaung tribe, who adorned their necks with rings,

Our grandmothers would allow us to touch their ‘armour’ when we were ill. One should touch them only to draw on their magic — to cure illness, to bless a journey. They were portable family shrines.

One of Pascal’s grandmothers, Mu Tha was brought to a circus in England, to display her rings and tall neck. Her view of the West is common to many of us Asians.

‘The English are a very strange tribe.’ said Grandma Mu Tha. ‘They paid money just to look at us — they paid us for not working. They are very rich, but they cannot afford to drink rice-wine. Their trees are unable to grow leaves during the rainy season. They say “Hello”, “How are you” and “Goodbye” all the time to one another. They never ask, “Have you eaten your meal?” or “When will you take your bath?” when they see you.’

When the grains had been collected, the harvest was stored in the silo of the house and topped with the shells of the tortoises, which were believed to slow down the consumption of rice. This was yet another example of our symbolic way of thinking. The tortoise is a slow moving creature; therefore, we reasoned, to cover our grain stocks with its shells would induce us to measure out our use of the grain.

The hardworks we Asian kids do for grandparents stories…

We had to massage her before she consented to begin her stories. It sometimes seemed to take hours of massaging before the story came, almost as though we were getting the spirits to come to a shaman. If we stopped massaging her she would stop telling the story. Often she would fall asleep in mid-flow, and we would have to wait for the next night. It was a bit like the Arabian Nights.

The way a small town teenager’s sense of territory changes when they leave for university…

My sense of direction was going astray. The sun seemed to set on the wrong side of the horizon, for I was used to seeing it sink behind the hills. Up to now the east had signified to me ‘beyond the lake’ and the west meant the hills. Before the blanket of darkness fell, the long anticipated royal city of Mandalay came into view.

A great memoir to discover Myanmar beyond the newspaper!


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