My youngest presented me Zoya Phan's Little Daughter for my recent grand 60th birthday. She was at the MINES Big Bad Wolf book sales recently when she came across the title. Scanning through it she thought it is my kind of reading, and she was very right. I thoroughly enjoyed the memoir as I can very much relate to Zoya's experience with my early life and education, minus the war and the refugee camp living of course. Incidentally I have been saving the my early education story to be part of my Early Years series. This I never did find time to write just yet. A lame excuse indeed for being a retiree time is all that one has aplenty!
Though I did Southeast Asia History for my 1969 MCE (SPM equivalent), what Zoya endured was very much a relatively recent happenings (in history terms, that is). General Ne Win was a personality to reckon with in my history readings then. Reading Zoya, the general is not somebody you want to be associated with.
I have to plead ignorance of the plight of the Karen people. Before Zoya I thought Karen is just a minority ethnic community, very much like the Meo/Hmong tribe of Thailand. Indeed I am very wrong. I feel for them, to be denied their very own rights in their very own country is just beyond comprehension. To gradually lose their culture and with that ethnic knowledge cultivated over generations is a lost to all mankind. I pray that Zoya's struggle will not be in vain.
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