Pascal Khoo Thwe told his dramatic life story of going from tranquil village life to rebel hideouts to Cambridge classrooms in the acclaimed 2002 memoir “From the Land of Green Ghosts.” Returning to Myanmar in 2012, he now works on sustainability issues. This week he came to Yangon for a reading at the British club and took the time to chat with us about the book and what he has planned next. If you didn’t get a space at the British Club you can attend his reading at Pansodan Scene on Sunday at 4pm.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
“From the Land of Green Ghosts” came out in 2002. Looking back on it now from the vantage point of 14 years later, what do you think about the book? Would you change anything?
I wouldn’t change my view of the country’s politics. I would change some content, not change, I would like to add some content and also I would love to have taken the opportunity to really widen the topics, so to say. There’s a chapter on childhood memories in the early part. That part needed to be researched quite extensively. But I feel now that I didn’t say enough about the culture. Having said that the form of the book does work, but now I’m thinking of when I write another, where should I put this context also in connection with the old book.
Can you talk a little about your next book?
If I have time to write the book – at the moment I’m busy with a couple of things – but I would love to write about the rebuilding process. More on the process of psychological rebuilding rather than physical. Quite a lot of things are based on the daily basis. The difficulty is that daily activities have that really strong psychological impetus behind them and that’s what I’m interested in.
And I will look through what happened over the past 50 years, and look throughout history and look at the present and try to combine the Land of Green Ghosts with why the country has gone bad or in some areas hasn’t been impacted. It’s connected with me but I try to talk more impersonally. I will wind the story with a personal story to make it united in terms of structure and its impact. I will definitely look through what happened since I came back and what’s happening now so far. I will examine more of why it happened but without having to tell everything.
Your book was published in Burmese in 2014. Have you had a chance to read it and what do you think about it?
I read it and it’s quite a good translation. But I think there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. There are a couple places where you really need to nail the English words I use because they are quite difficult. There are certain words in English, you can’t say one word for one word, you have to explain it in a roundabout way. So I understand the translator’s point of view. But for the time being he is very good at popularizing the book.
Is there a problem with translated literature going into Burmese or out of Burmese?
I think it’s worse on the Burmese side. English literature going into Burmese. Because the English people, even though not many English people know about Burma, there are some English experts who know about the Burmese situation. Therefore they can pick. But there are not many Burmese authors who understand [the situation in England or abroad], because of the shutting down of the country since 1962, so with some words they haven’t really understood the scenario. There are also a lot of Biblical allusions in the book and they haven’t read the Bible.
Who do you think of as your audience?
My audience could be anyone. But there are some slight differences from one chapter to another. For example, the fighting scenes, I want to show the young people the atrocities. There are certain things the young people don’t understand, they fantasize about fighting, they commit atrocities because they don’t understand the impact of the violence. So when it comes to family life it’s general, I just want to retell. In a sense it’s much more for the future generations.
If you could recommend one book on Burma that isn’t yours what would it be?
I would say not only Burma but the whole Southeast Asia, one book in particular, Tiziano Terzani’s “A Fortune-Teller Told me.” If you want to learn about both Burma, Thailand, everywhere. I think that’s the best book I’ve read recently. Tiziano manages to describe Burma in quite a balanced way, not too academic and not to shallow or cliché. That’s a book that always comes to my mind.
What do you think about fiction that has a Burmese setting written in English. “Burmese Days,” for instance?
I love it! It doesn’t get the entire picture of the Burmese but the one thing is the author tends to pick particular things to make a point whether we like it or not. But at the same time it depends on your knowledge, your in-depth knowledge about the culture and the outside world. I think Burmese Days kind of inadvertently manages to describe the Burmese characteristic a bit which most people don’t like if you are Burman or Burmese because it hits you where it hurts. You see many characters like that in power, in the criminal world and things like that.
But having said that, I don’t think it’s such an honest depiction of the country because he based it on his hatred of colonialism and his hatred of the natives too, I presume. But he managed to describe how one culture can step on the other culture’s toe and how tragedy can come.
Other novels, I’m thinking of Burma, “The Glass Palace,” that has quite a nice touch but it has its own leanings. There’s a quite obscure one called “The Lacquer Lady,” that’s about the last king of Burma and the fall of Burma. The author, she based her novel, 90 percent on real events. It’s very interesting history. But if the characters are based too much on real people you haven’t got that spice of the novel.
Not so long ago Aung San Suu Kyi complained that the youth aren’t reading so much because of the growth of mobile phone use and the internet. Do you agree?
At the moment, she is correct. What I’ve seen so far, people are just interested in mobile phones. Not only mobile phones but they are using it as a kind of weapon to attack people [on social media] and that’s very sad.
What do you think about the state of Burmese literature and writing?
The writing is there but it’s very hard to assess it. I notice that with the relaxing of freedom of speech rules, it has helped people to write but there is a lack of a systematic way to improve the quality. Not the writing quality but editing mostly. Or channels that you can really bring the good stuff to. To get a voice to make it happen. The cutting edge is missing at the moment. It could be from governmental but it could be institutional too.
What do people in your village in Shan State think of your book?
Some have read it, they like it, some of them say ‘oh that’s not true’ because I said something they don’t like. There’s someone who tried to kill me during the uprising in 1988 and he said ‘no it’s not true I didn’t do that I was just doing my duty’ or whatever, just security services. So that’s the kind of thing. But the literary side of it, people love it.
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