Word: padaung
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When Pascal Khoo Thwe was a baby, his grandmother spat three times on his head while muttering tribal incantations to protect him "from evil people and all misfortune." With all respect to the Padaung people of remotest Burma, the spit-and-spell routine didn't do much good. Poverty, dictatorship, sickness, war: Khoo Thwe had to overcome all manner of evils before finally escaping Burma to study at the University of Cambridge?the first Padaung tribesman to do so. Khoo Thwe tells the story of this escape in From the Land of Green Ghosts (Harper Collins; 304 pages), a memoir...
Khoo Thwe's final twist of good fortune seems better suited to the fairy tales he heard as a boy from the Padaung's bewitching tribeswomen, still better known today as "long necks" or "giraffe women" for the heavy brass coils they wear around their throats. They taught him their colorful creation myth: the tribe was born of a lovelorn she-dragon impregnated by the wind. One grandmother recalls a European journey that prefigures Khoo Thwe's own. In the 1930s she joined a troupe of Padaung women who toured England in a circus freak show?although grandma never doubted...
...Mandalay University, where he studies his first love, English literature, and meets his second, a feisty student called Moe. Instinctively, they keep their affair secret. She is a Burman, the nation's dominant ethnic group, some of whose members believe the government- propagated myth that "backward" tribes like the Padaung are cannibals. His family would have been equally shocked at his interest in a woman from "the land of green ghosts"?the Padaung name for the spirit-haunted Burmese lowlands...
...literature?quite literally?that saves him. In an astonishing climax, a desperate letter dispatched from Khoo Thwe's rebel camp somehow reaches Dr. Casey, who, with the help of an ex-SAS officer, smuggles the young Padaung out of his jungle nightmare and into the hushed cloisters of Caius College, Cambridge. A happy ending, then? Not entirely. As Khoo Thwe sadly (and guiltily) acknowledges, for each miraculous success story like his own there are thousands of bright young Burmese whose futures remain blighted by a repressive regime. Khoo Thwe is clearly still haunted by the "green ghosts," and not even...
...were swept up on a wave of Chinese tourists and carried along a winding path that led past wooden huts occupied by various tribespeople. There were two old Shan women flogging herbal medicines, as well as a large contingent of Padaung or Kayan women?known as "giraffe women" or "long-necks" for the brass coils stacked high around their throats. We crowded into a round hut to watch them perform a traditional dance, which involved the flicking of colorful hankies...
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