Friday, May 1, 2015

The Irrawaddy Magazine

The Irrawaddy Magazine


At Ethnic Summit, UWSA Backs Rebels in Conflict With Govt

Posted: 01 May 2015 04:21 AM PDT

Aung Myint, a United Wa State Army spokesman, delivers opening remarks at an ethnic summit in Panghsang, Wa Special Region, on Friday. (Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy)

Aung Myint, a United Wa State Army spokesman, delivers opening remarks at an ethnic summit in Panghsang, Wa Special Region, on Friday. (Photo: JPaing / The Irrawaddy)

PANGHSANG, Wa Special Region — The United Wa State Army (UWSA) has a relationship akin to "a jaw and its teeth" with a trio of ethnic armed groups engaged in active hostilities with the Burma Army, its leadership said at the opening of a conference of ethnic leaders here on Friday.

The solidarity pledge between the UWSA and the three other ethnic groups, who are attending the summit against the government's wishes, illustrated just how far Burma may be from a nationwide ceasefire agreement that Naypyidaw has said is on the horizon.

Palaung, Arakanese and Kokang armed rebels have continued to clash with government troops in recent weeks, even as momentum has appeared to build toward the signing of a nationwide peace accord. The 16-member Nationwide Ceasefire Coordinating Team (NCCT) that has negotiated that agreement does not include the UWSA, which made clear on Friday that it would not abide a selectively applied definition of peace in Burma.

"We invited to this meeting our brotherhood of ethnic armed groups who are in ongoing fighting [with the Burma Army]. We are like a jaw and its teeth, which cannot be divided," said Aung Myint, a spokesman who was reading a statement on behalf of UWSA chairman Bao Youxiang.

Only a complete cessation of hostilities between the Burma Army and ethnic rebel groups would legitimize the government's long-sought nationwide ceasefire agreement, Aung Myint said.

"Unless fighting stops in the whole of the country, a nationwide peace agreement is just a piece of paper."

The UWSA, Burma's largest ethnic armed group with a fighting force estimated at 20,000 soldiers, reached a ceasefire with the government in 1989 and renewed the accord in September 2011 as President Thein Sein jumpstarted peace negotiations with ethnic armed groups nationwide.

At what he termed a "confusing" time in Burma's reform process, the chairman called on all of the nation's ethnic rebel groups to choose their own future by asserting their political rights. Saying ethnic armed groups had been "fighting for a long time for our rights" against an "oppressive" Burmese government, Aung Myint said the goal of the Panghsang summit was "to produce one peace paper agreement."

"There will be disagreement from our discussion, but let us keep tolerance and seek agreement," Aung Myint said.

The Ta'ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), Arakan Army and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) have all clashed with the government in recent weeks, with fighting in northeast Burma some of the deadliest in years. In February, the government said Wa rebels and "Chinese mercenaries" were among those backing MNDAA insurgents in the Kokang Special Region.

Against this backdrop, the government and the NCCT came to a tentative agreement on a nationwide ceasefire accord on March 30, with ethnic representatives pledging to convene a meeting to discuss the deal before committing to a final accord. Following the agreement, the UWSA—which skipped the talks, citing in part the government's accusation of Wa involvement in the Kokang conflict—invited ethnic leaders to its Panghsang headquarters to discuss its terms.

The summit began on Friday and is expected to run through May 6.

Twelve ethnic armed groups joined the meeting on Friday, with many key leaders of Burma's biggest ethnic armies attending. About 50 ethnic leaders have traveled to Panghsang, many of whom serve as chairmen or deputy chairmen of their respective ethnic armed groups and will be key voices in the debate over whether to sign the nationwide ceasefire accord.

Representatives of the dozen ethnic groups began arriving a day earlier, checking in to hotels where a tightened security presence awaited.

At a press conference on Thursday, San Khun from the UWSA's Foreign Department said the Wa rebels had only invited eight media outlets to the conference, citing concerns about the ability of many news organizations to report in an unbiased manner. He added, however, that the cost of opening the conference up to all press would have been prohibitive.

Asked by The Irrawaddy if reports were true that the UWSA had acquired shoulder-fired surface-to-air rockets capable of repelling an aerial assault, he told assembled media not to ask about military-related issues at the conference. He added that journalists were not to attempt to visit the UWSA's military installations.

He did not directly respond to The Irrawaddy's question, offering no explicit rejection of the reports' veracity. Details on the powerful Wa army's arsenal have always been difficult to ascertain, but the group is believed to possess sophisticated Chinese-supplied weaponry, with reports that it has purchased a "large number" of anti-aircraft hardware, helicopter gunships and—rather inexplicably, given the land-locked geography of the Wa region—a submarine.

San Khun told journalists that he would be happy to instead field questions about the economic development that the autonomous region has seen since the signing of a ceasefire with the government more than 25 years ago.

Situated on the Sino-Burmese border, Panghsang is a former headquarters of the Burma Communist Party (CPB). The UWSA was founded in the Wa Special Region, home to about 600,000 people, out of the ashes of the now-defunct CPB.

The post At Ethnic Summit, UWSA Backs Rebels in Conflict With Govt appeared first on The Irrawaddy.

30 Graves Found at Suspected Thai Trafficking Camp: Police

Posted: 01 May 2015 03:24 AM PDT

An 18-year-old Rohingya who cannot walk and whose body is pocked with fly-blown sores from months of immobility, rests on a makeshift bed at a mosque near Songkhla after he escaped from a Thai trafficking camp February 12, 2014.

An 18-year-old Rohingya who cannot walk and whose body is pocked with fly-blown sores from months of immobility, rests on a makeshift bed at a mosque near Songkhla after he escaped from a Thai trafficking camp February 12, 2014.

BANGKOK — Thai police on Friday found at least 30 graves believed to belong to migrants from Burma and Bangladesh at what authorities say is an abandoned trafficking camp in a remote jungle in Thailand's south, police said.

Illegal migrants, many of them Rohingya Muslims from western Burma and Bangladesh, brave often perilous journeys by sea to escape religious and ethnic persecution and to seek jobs in Malaysia and Thailand, a regional human trafficking hub.

Four bodies had been exhumed so far, said Police Colonel Anuchon Chamat, deputy commander of Nakorn Si Thammarat Provincial Police. A total of at least 30 graves were found in a "well set up" smuggling camp.

"There are at least 30 graves that have been place marked. We exhumed four bodies today and will continue to exhume bodies," Anuchon told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The graves were the first discovery of its kind in Thailand, said Anuchon.

Two other bodies that had not been buried and were left to rot in the open were also found, he said. One survivor was rescued from the abandoned camp and taken to hospital in nearby Pedang Besar.

Around 200 soldiers, police and rescue workers were at the site on Friday, said Sathit Kamsuwan, a volunteer rescue worker.

The discovery highlights the brutal nature of the trafficking trade in which hundreds are believed to have died in camps or at sea.

Every year, thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshi boat people arrive in Thailand, brought by smugglers. Many are taken by road to camps in the jungle, where traffickers demand a ransom to smuggle them south across the border to Malaysia.

Last year, Thailand was downgraded to the lowest tier on the US State Department's influential Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, which annually ranks countries by their anti-trafficking efforts.

The post 30 Graves Found at Suspected Thai Trafficking Camp: Police appeared first on The Irrawaddy.

In Bagan’s ‘Pagoda Slaves,’ a Devout and Discriminatory Legacy Lives On

Posted: 30 Apr 2015 06:00 PM PDT

Women known as 'paya kyun' sit outside the Shwezigone pagoda in Bagan. (Photo: Sai Zaw / The Irrawaddy)

Women known as 'paya kyun' sit outside the Shwezigone pagoda in Bagan. (Photo: Sai Zaw / The Irrawaddy)

BAGAN, Mandalay Division — At dawn, the elderly woman prepares to go to work. Hers has been a lifelong career, but she wishes it wasn't so.

At the Shwezigon Pagoda in Nyaung-U, the main tourist town for visitors to the temples of Bagan, there are many old women like Khin May, sat around the sacred site to pray—and ask visitors for money.

Khin May looks older than her 67 years, the many wrinkles etched into her face, and clothes faded to a color that would best be described as "dull," betraying a hardscrabble life.

"I started doing this job when I was a child," she says. "I started doing this with my grandmother, so I can't remember when I started."

Khin May is a so-called paya kyun ("pagoda slave"), a sizeable but shrinking population that inhabits a village of some 100 households near the Shwezigone Pagoda. Some, but not all, of the villagers depend on other people's generosity to sustain their existence as keepers of the thousands of pagodas that dot the arid plain of Bagan.

At the height of the Pagan Empire, Bagan is said to have boasted up to 10,000 pagodas and temples, most built between the 11th and 13th centuries. Today more than 2,000 remain, as does a surviving contingent of paya kyun, who carry on a tradition born nearly a millennium ago.

Bound by a sense of duty and the deeply held Buddhist belief in karma, generations of paya kyun have served as the custodians of Bagan's temples. A day's work includes cleaning the faces of the Buddha statues housed in the shrines, sweeping the floors and setting out foodstuffs and water as offerings to the Buddha. With little compensation for their efforts, many are forced to beg for a living.

"Beggar," however, is not how they prefer to be viewed.

"We are su taung sar, not thu taung sar," Khin May says proudly, the latter being the Burmese word for "beggar" and the former meaning a person who prays for someone else and is given alms in return.

"We do this career because it is our tradition and also because we have financial problems."

The story of Bagan's paya kyun spans centuries, with popular perception and their societal station having seen ups and downs. Changing local attitudes in recent years and growing opportunities resulting from a tourism boom appear to leave a brighter future for the paya kyun of Bagan, but with the changes could come an end, for better or worse, to the tradition itself.

Whence the Paya Kyun?

Paya kyun first appeared when the elite classes of the Pagan Empire, such as kings, their relatives and other high officials of ancient Burmese kingdoms, built pagodas and also donated paya kyun to maintain the shrines, according to stone inscriptions etched on many of Bagan's pagodas.

One engraving on the Temple of Four Faces, dated the year 585 in the Burmese calendar or circa 1223 AD in the Roman equivalent, states that the donor's objective in supplying the shrine with paya kyun was so the servants could "do good deeds in my stead, such as chores, sweeping and serving monks."

In those days, society did not view paya kyun as inferior to the average layperson. There is even evidence that some donors who built pagodas had then committed themselves to the task of maintaining the structure.

A stone inscription dated 541 (circa 1179 AD) at the Chaut Pagoda east of Bagan town reads: "I, A Bi Nanda Thu, donated myself, my wife, my older daughter, my younger daughter and my mistresses [to serve as servants of the pagoda]."

The well-known historian Than Htun writes in the book "Ancient Burmese History" that the pre-colonial meaning of "slave" in the Burmese language did not carry the negative connotation of its post-colonial and modern iterations. This is borne out by the modern day Burmese words for "I" (kyun-no for a man and kyun-ma for a woman), which closely resemble the word "slave" (kyun) and in the modern Burmese language are meant to convey humility when referencing oneself.

Toe Hla, a retired history professor, tells The Irrawaddy that at the advent of the paya kyun tradition, Burma's devout Buddhist laypeople saw no shame in being a "slave" to the Buddha, thus the paya kyun's equal stature in the society of the times.

In those days, paya kyun did not beg, but rather farmed as a means of livelihood, often on land given to them for such a purpose by the same donor who commissioned them to serve as paya kyun.

As wars, invasions and leadership shortcomings brought about the decline of the Pagan Empire, prisoners of war, convicts and other undesirables gradually began to fill the ranks of Bagan's paya kyun. By the dawn of Burma's last dynasty, the Konbaung kings who ruled from the mid-18th century to 1885, paya kyun had come to be seen as a societal blight, and many began begging to survive, according to the historian Toe Hla.

Asked whether she remembers a time when her family worked the land to make a living, 72-year-old Mya Thaung demurs.

"When we were young there was no work for us. So we depended for a living on money we got from burying coffins at the cemetery," says May Thaung, adding that the income was supplemented by what they were able to earn from begging.

Her family lived inside the Tharabha Gate until the 1960s, when the government, seeking to market Bagan as a tourist destination, forced them to move to the village near Shwezigone Pagoda.

It is only in the last two decades or so that wider society's views on the paya kyun have begun to soften. Discrimination since the colonial period had previously prevented paya kyun from getting jobs, and friendships between an average layperson and a paya kyun were rare and discouraged.

One might assume that generations of such treatment would lead some to leave the pagoda behind and lead a more conventional life, if not in Bagan than elsewhere in Burma. But a long-held belief leads many to remain paya kyun: that to renounce one's paya kyun heritage is to invite leprosy upon oneself.

While there is no reference to such a fate in the historical record—and no scientific basis for the belief—the fear persists, perhaps fed by the history of the paya kyun village itself. Until the government moved them elsewhere more than 50 years ago, leprosy patients were rife in the village the paya kyun inhabit today, though there are not believed to be any present-day cases.

Min Naung, the 30-year-old president of the Bagan Lovers Association, tells The Irrawaddy of one woman who appears to have clung to the leprosy myth.

"Twenty years ago, I became friends with one woman, very close with her. She was like my aunty," he says. "She was very rich and owned many gold canes, but she sometimes went to beg, disguising herself so that friends wouldn't recognize her face."

Gradually, however, this belief may be losing currency.

"Now I don't have that kind of superstition and we only beg because we have financial problems. Some of my rich relatives don't beg anymore," says Mya Thaung.

There have been efforts to rehabilitate the image of the paya kyun, including a speech in 1948 by the first president of Burma, Sao Shwe Thaike.

"From today, I repeal the orders of ancient kings that designated some people as deserving of beggardom," he said. "They have the right to choose the work that they like. According to the Constitution of Burma, citizens must have equal rights."

And in 1955, Social Welfare Minister U Ba Saw led a conference that aimed to liberate the paya kyun and address their widespread poverty through various means, including dispensation of loans and compassion payments, and trainings to provide the skills for alternative means of livelihoods.

But due to bureaucratic red tape and poor management of the programs, the plans were largely ineffective.

"I had the chance to attend that conference," says Khin May, the Shwezigone Pagoda paya kyun who was a primary school dropout and laments that the outcomes of the conference did little to help her get ahead.

Today, there is perhaps new hope for a turnaround in the lives of Bagan's paya kyun. With Burma's opening to the Western world and a surge in foreign tourists, a growing number of jobs in the hotel, construction and restaurant industries are offering a chance at a new life.

It may be too late for 76-year-old Daw Kywe to make the change, but not for her grandchildren. "Now my older grandson works in construction and my younger grandson is attending school," she tells The Irrawaddy.

"The young people want to work and if you want to dispel the begging and rumors that we are a cursed generation, you need only to create more jobs," Daw Kywe says.

Yan Naing Tun, a 40-year-old self-employed owner of a car-hire service who was born and lives in Nyaung-U, says the village is no longer home exclusively to paya kyun, with other laypeople buying up property and moving into the neighborhood. It is a sign, he says, of a growing but not yet total tolerance for the once ostracized community of pagoda caretakers.

"They are no longer seriously discriminated against as in the past," says Yan Naing Tun. "They can get jobs, but the local people still don't want to marry the paya kyun generation."

The post In Bagan's 'Pagoda Slaves,' a Devout and Discriminatory Legacy Lives On appeared first on The Irrawaddy.

Operation Dracula

Posted: 30 Apr 2015 05:30 PM PDT

Click to view slideshow.

Soon after the first Japanese planes strafed Yangon in December 1941, Theippan Maung Wa, like other residents of the colonial capital, grew gloomily accustomed to the frequent sound of warning sirens and the subsequent dash to underground bomb shelters.

A distinguished writer who also worked for the civil service from 1929, Theippan Maung Wa kept a diary from January 1942 until his death some six months later.

"It's only when there's a good moon that they come and drop their bombs," he wrote on Jan. 6. "Bright moonlight used to be something to be happy about, but not now."

The writer, who evidently did not view the Japanese as would-be liberators, foresaw but could not avoid the violence and disorder that would grip the country.

He was murdered by bandits near Kanbalu in Sagaing Region in June 1942, only two months after writing, with eerie prescience: "In this present crisis, what everybody is afraid of is not so much the Japanese enemy, as the criminals among our own people."

The Japanese invasion, undertaken with the symbolic assistance of Aung San's "Thirty Comrades" who would form the nucleus of the Burma Independence Army, did not immediately herald the country's much-hoped for independence.

Instead, Myanmar was dragged inexorably into the Second World War, becoming, as the academic Donald Seekins put it, "like grass trampled by fighting elephants."

Hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops and Allied forces drawn from regions as diverse as Nigeria and Nepal, Canada and China, fought in Myanmar's cities and towns, on the dry open plains, along mountaintops and in thick jungle.

But while military and political leaders pored over strategy and geopolitical objectives, ordinary citizens, caught in a cycle of invasion, occupation and invasion, were more focused on the daily necessities of survival.

Daw Khin Myo Chit, a prominent writer who was scathing of the Japanese interlude, wrote in "The 13-Carat Diamond" of a promising family life that was shattered by the war.

"We found ourselves without a home, without jobs, in fact without anything except a mischievous toddler who was always hungry […] We were lost in the great maze of wartime life."

Retreat

When Allied forces reclaimed Yangon from the Japanese, 70 years ago this month, it was not the fierce and bloody battle they might have expected.

Against Tokyo's orders, Japanese commander Heitaro Kimura—who would later be hung as a war criminal by the victorious Allied powers—ordered the evacuation of the bombed and battered city on April 23, 1945.

Among the first to know were the hundreds of Allied prisoners of war in Yangon Central Jail who found a handwritten note left by their Japanese captors at the compound's main gate.

"[W]e hereby give you liberty […] to leave this place at your own will," it read in part. "We shall continue our war effort eternally in order to get the emancipation of all Asiatic races."

Opting to remain within the relative security of the prison walls but wary of "friendly fire," the POWs painted the messages "JAPS GONE" and "EXTRACT DIGIT" (wartime slang for "hurry up") in large white letters on the jail's roof.

Among the convoy of troops and officials that fled to Mawlamyine via Bago, shadowed by Allied bombers throughout the two-week journey, was the head of the Japanese-backed puppet government Dr. Ba Maw and the country's future prime minister U Nu.

In his memoirs, Dr. Ba Maw—who would eventually escape to Japan where he lived in a Buddhist monastery before being briefly imprisoned by the Allies—claimed to have played a role in dissuading the Japanese hierarchy from defending Yangon to the last, including a plan to turn the Shwedagon Pagoda hill into a militarized defensive post.

'Operation Dracula'

When first devised by the supreme Allied commander in Southeast Asia Lord Louis Mountbatten in mid-1944, the plan for an air and amphibious attack on Yangon before the next year's monsoon season appeared ambitious.

However, major Allied gains in central Myanmar under Lt.-Gen. William Slim—the same commander who had overseen the British withdrawal in 1942—meant the Yangon offensive, codenamed "Operation Dracula," could swing into action.

The huge invasion force that assembled near the mouth of Yangon River, including aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and battleships, would make the largely unimpeded offensive appear almost anticlimactic.

With a battalion of Gurkha paratroopers sent ahead of the main force on May 1, Allied troops began landing along opposing banks of the river the following day.

By May 3, more than three years since it had fallen to the Japanese, the country's colonial and commercial center had been reoccupied.

Although the city was spared the worst excesses of the war, much of its infrastructure lay in tatters. Major structures including the port, the central railway station and buildings of Yangon University were damaged or destroyed.

Historical photographs show the city's devastated dockside strewn with rubble and twisted metal. Piles of rice sat rotting on the wharves and now useless Japanese-issued currency was scattered on the streets.

The retaking of Yangon may not loom large in the collective memory of its residents today, but various sites and structures—reconstructed, absent or neglected—evoke the period when the city stood at the crossroads of conflict, colonialism and independence.

The Botahtaung Pagoda, destroyed by a misguided allied air raid in November 1943, was rebuilt and today attracts worshippers of a spirit shrine dedicated to the woman who led its restoration.

The city's central railway station, the largest in the country, was also rebuilt while the Yangon Central Jail, with its long prison wings arranged like the spokes of a wheel in the same architectural model as the notorious Insein Prison, has since been demolished.

Many of the former capital's colonial edifices—including the famed Secretariat building that Theippan Maung Wa worked in before the war—while scarred, remain intact.

While Operation Dracula's success did not signal the immediate end of the war in Myanmar, the Japanese occupation was effectively broken. But although the British were back and claiming, according to Lt.-Gen. Slim, that their return was welcomed "almost without exception," the colonial project was terminal.

This article first appeared in the May 2015 edition of The Irrawaddy magazine.

The post Operation Dracula appeared first on The Irrawaddy.

A Safe House of One’s Own

Posted: 30 Apr 2015 05:00 PM PDT

Author, journalist and former political prisoner Khet Mar who was a writer in residence as part of the City of Asylum, Pittsburgh, program from 2009-11. (Photo: Khet Mar / Facebook)

Author, journalist and former political prisoner Khet Mar who was a writer in residence as part of the City of Asylum, Pittsburgh, program from 2009-11. (Photo: Khet Mar / Facebook)

When I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an American city known for its universities and museums, a few months ago, I heard about a "Burma House" associated with a program for exiled writers called City of Asylum. I took a bus across one of Pittsburgh's many bridges and walked a few blocks to a narrow, quiet street called Sampsonia Way. Chinese calligraphy in white paint adorning one house and colorful images of rice farmers, a monk and a soldier on another indicated that I had found the right location.

Inspired by a program founded in Europe by Salman Rushdie which offers safe havens for writers in danger, Diane Samuels and Henry Reese established City of Asylum/Pittsburgh (COAP) on Sampsonia Way in 2004. The program's first writer in residence was Huang Xiang, a Chinese poet who expressed his joy at finally evading censorship by covering the front of his house with his poems.

COAP now owns a series of houses on the street and presents outdoor jazz concerts, readings and other events, as well as publishing Sampsonia Way magazine. Exiled writers in residence live there for two years rent-free with their families and receive other support from the program, including medical benefits. The current writer in residence is Yaghoub Yadali, a novelist from Iran.

Khet Mar, a former political prisoner who is the author of fiction, nonfiction and poetry was COAP's third writer in residence, from 2009 to 2011. Her husband, artist Than Htay, painted the exterior of their house (now the program's headquarters, called Pittsburgh-Burma House) with a vivid mural based on her text about a dream of floating through a white light which symbolized the unity of all beings and transcendence of suffering.

"In the bright light of Pittsburgh, nothing was preventing me from experiencing the world unfiltered, uncensored. I felt freedom in Pittsburgh, and this feeling extended into my very dream," she wrote. With reference to Picasso's "Guernica" the side of the house depicts Burma and the front of the house, Pittsburgh. Major rivers of both places, the Irrawaddy and the Allegheny, join at the corner.

Khet Mar is currently a journalist with Radio Free Asia. Her literary works include the novel "Wild Snowy Night" and the limited edition artist-printed book "The Souls of Fallen Flowers." In 2014 COAP published her novel "Night Birds" (which had been banned in Burma in 1993). Recently this contributor interviewed Khet Mar about her COAP experience.

How did you go from Burma to Pittsburgh?

I didn't know about COAP when I applied for a residency at Scholars at Risk. They and COAP informed me that I was selected as a writer in residence at COAP. I went to Pittsburgh with my family directly from Burma in 2009.

What was it like to live in that house on that street?

It was like I was in a safe and warm place where I could also write many stories. I didn't need to worry for my sons in that street as everybody knew who we were and as all of them took care of us with warm hearts. It was the most peaceful time in my life for my family although I still had to worry and feel sad for my friends and my people back home.

Did you produce written work while you lived there?

I wrote a lot while I was there, short stories, essays and poems. It was a good atmosphere for a writer. The difficulty of writing for me there was not because of the atmosphere, but because of my feeling for my country and people.

You've said that "being homesick can be a good thing for a writer." How did such feelings affect your writing in exile?

I missed my country and people when I saw the similarities and differences in nature, culture and other things. When I saw these similarities and differences between my country and America, I wanted to write about what was similar or what was different between the two places where I have lived. Most of my writings in Pittsburgh were based on my homesickness. If I didn't have homesickness, I couldn't write that much.

How long did it take for the painting/story to be completed on the house?

I wrote that short essay soon after my arrival in Pittsburgh. I read it at the Jazz Poetry Concert in 2009 and after that, Henry Reese, founder of COAP asked my husband to illustrate it on the house where we lived. He started painting it in late summer of 2009 and had to stop due to the cold in winter. He painted it again in the spring of 2010. It took about four months in total. He painted it by himself with no help.

Did you meet other writers and artists when you lived there?

I met a lot of writers and artists when we lived there as COAP has reading series' every month and I was invited for readings by universities in Pennsylvania and sometimes out of state.

What is your impression of the literary and arts scene in Burma these days?

Writers can do many literary talks, discussions, poetry readings and literature festivals that we couldn't do in the past, but there is less space for them in magazines and journals. For the artists, they also have more opportunities to show their art works and they can express their [artistic] abilities.

Do you have advice for young writers from Burma, living in Burma or overseas?

I don't think they need my advice as I am not a special writer. I have opened my eyes, ears and heart to receive and to write, it is enough for me. They would be the same if they do the same as me, I guess.

Edith Mirante is the author of "The Wind in the Bamboo" and founder of Project Maje.

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