Word: shangri
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...time swallowed those Asian sexual Shangri-las, and history, in the form of prudish colonialism, religious movements and puritanical social engineers such as Mao and Pol Pot, managed to drown the roots of those liberated notions. The Asia of the second half of the 20th century was a fundamentally conservative place, albeit with variations. In the largely Roman Catholic Philippines, men frequently had more than one wife. Few places were as straight-laced as Singapore, but its drag queens thrived. You could be gay in Java - if you liked isolation. "Homosexuality is tolerated in Indonesia," says Dede Oetomo, an anthropologist...
Travel in Burma for long enough and you will eventually hear the name, often whispered with something approaching awe: Mongla. It sounds a bit like Shangri-la, and for some Burmese?who have lived under military rule since 1962?it is. "There are no soldiers there," marveled one Burmese friend. "There it is like," he struggled to find a word to describe a place without Burmese soldiers. "There it is like democracy...