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This is the delightful story of an eighteen-day bus pilgrimage to sixty pagodas across Myanmar. As the author settles into her seat, the aisle blocked with luggage, she trains our eyes on the collection of characters that, like it or not, will be her traveling companions for the whirlwind tour. This native tourist amuses us with her adventures of eating at roadside cafes, climbing up pagodas, bathing in rivers, shopping at markets, and sleeping on temple floors. Along the way, she encounters deeply rooted cultural values and develops camaraderie with strangers that become like family for the duration of her travels. Ma Thanegi is a painter, writer, and journalist who was born and educated in Myanmar. She lives in Yangon (Rangoon) and is a contributing editor of the Myanmar Times and editor of Enchanting Myanmar, a travel magazine. She was detained for three years in Insein prison for her involvement in the 1988 uprisings as a personal assistant to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
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"When Ma Thanegi was taken to Yangon's Insein Prison after working as a personal assistant to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, she used every scrap of strength she possessed to adapt to incarceration without succumbing to despair. The women prisoners who surrounded Ma Thanegi in Insein joined together, sharing food, support, and humor to get them through the ordeal they all faced. Buddhism helped then to view their jailers with equanimity and the Myanmar values they had absorbed from birth allowed them to carry out a subtle form of protest -- fashioning a nurturing community in a place that was designed to quell any sort of enjoyment. From prostitutes to pickpockets to political prisoners, these women ...
Myanmar artist and author of The Native Tourist, Ma Thanegi is always hungry-for food, conversation, and a good story. Not the sort of woman to settle into a comfortable middle-aged existence of tending to her knitting while watching soap operas, she decides to satisfy a life-long dream and travel the thirteen hundred-mile length of her country's Ayeyarwaddy River. Taking little with her but her red lipstick, her curiosity, and her unquenchable sense of humor, she sets off on a journey that Paul Theroux or Redmond O'Hanlon would envy. Traveling on any boat that will let her come aboard, sleeping on wooden decks, and eating with strangers, Ma Thanegi observes Myanmar with the eye of an artist and the insight of a lifelong resident. Stalking dancers at a Kachin festival, careening down the rock-infested white- water gorge of the perilous First Defile, traveling with relief expeditions into the Nargis-ravaged delta region, feeding a dragon that lurks at her journey's end, Ma Thanegi savors every adventure that comes her way and shares the details in her own inimitable, opinionated and thoroughly delightful style. Book jacket.
The story of eight years in the brief life of Journal Kyaw U Chit Maung, a courageous Burmese journalist and editor. His political analyses helped guide the nation during a turbulent era marked by internal struggles to establish a democracy independent of Britain in the late 1930s and the Japanese Occupation of the 1940s. The memoir is written by U Chit Maung's wife, Journal Kyaw Ma Ma Lay, a resilient woman whose deep admiration and love for her uncompromising husband are captured here.
More than entertainment, Burmese marionettes were used as a means of educating the audience in literature, history, religion, customs and current affairs.
Asian theatre is usually studied from the perspective of the major traditions of China, Japan, India, and Indonesia. Now, in this wide-ranging look at the contemporary theatre scene in Southeast Asia, Catherine Diamond shows that performance in some of the lesser known theatre traditions offers a vivid and fascinating picture of the rapidly changing societies in the region. Diamond examines how traditional, modern, and contemporary dramatic works, with their interconnected styles, stories, and ideas, are being presented for local audiences. She not only places performances in their historical and cultural contexts but also connects them to the social, political, linguistic, and religious mov...
From the winner of the National Book Award and the National Books Critics’ Circle Award—and one of the most original thinkers of our time—“Andrew Solomon’s magisterial Far and Away collects a quarter-century of soul-shaking essays” (Vanity Fair). Far and Away chronicles Andrew Solomon’s writings about places undergoing seismic shifts—political, cultural, and spiritual. From his stint on the barricades in Moscow in 1991, when he joined artists in resisting the coup whose failure ended the Soviet Union, his 2002 account of the rebirth of culture in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban, his insightful appraisal of a Myanmar seeped in contradictions as it slowly, fitfull...
No country in Asia in recent years has undergone so massive a political shift in so short a time as Myanmar. Until recently, the former British colony had one of the most secretive, corrupt, and repressive regimes on the planet, a country where Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was held in continual house arrest and human rights were denied to nearly all. Yet events in Myanmar since the elections of November 2010 have profoundly altered the internal mood of the society, and have surprised even Burmese and seasoned foreign observers of the Myanmar scene. The pessimism that pervaded the society prior to the elections, and the results of that voting that prompted many foreign observer...