Word: shan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Well, not quite. Situated in Burma's Shan state, less than a mile from the Chinese border, Mongla is ruled by a brutal heroin trafficker and has an unsavory reputation as a freewheeling center for gambling and prostitution. Yet, curiously, the Burmese regime is promoting it as a model town. Why? To find out, I hired a car and driver and set out for Mongla?the town that drugs built...
...Until very recently, it was just an insignificant village in a sparsely populated area of northeastern Burma. It owed its remarkable transformation?and its notoriety?to a Shan Chinese druglord called Lin Mingxian. Lin had been a field commander in the Communist Party of Burma, or CPB, a formidable insurgent group that once occupied a large swath of northeastern Shan state. When the CPB collapsed in 1989, Lin led a breakaway faction of over 3,500 soldiers, taking control of an opium-rich wilderness bordering China, Laos and Thailand...
...faux-tribal dress blowing wearily on a conch shell. All the exhibits in this museum were alive, of course, although there was a lot of cheating. The young woman in Akha tribal costume standing at the gate?the one playing the Game Boy?was a local Shan. So was the Lahu girl sitting on the motorbike next...
...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...
Another character, called "you," is on a quest to reach Lingshan, "ling meaning spirit or soul, and shan meaning mountain." He, "you" is told, will find this place at "the source of the You River." Along the way, he meets a woman, called "she," who morphs throughout the book into many different women, sometimes married, sometimes not, who have in common a pronounced tendency to whine: "She says she never wants to grow up and yet she also wants to grow up. She wants to be loved, wants everyone to look at her, but she's afraid...