Quotes of the Day

When Pascal Khoo Thwe was a baby, his grandmother spat three times on his head while muttering tribal incantations to protect him "from evil people and all misfortune." With all respect to the Padaung people of remotest Burma, the spit-and-spell routine didn't do much good. Poverty, dictatorship, sickness, war: Khoo Thwe had to overcome all manner of evils before finally escaping Burma to study at the University of Cambridge—the first Padaung tribesman to do so. Khoo Thwe tells the story of this escape in From the Land of Green Ghosts (Harper Collins; 304 pages), a memoir as heart-wrenching as it is amazing.

Khoo Thwe's final twist of good fortune seems better suited to the fairy tales he heard as a boy from the Padaung's bewitching tribeswomen, still better known today as "long necks" or "giraffe women" for the heavy brass coils they wear around their throats. They taught him their colorful creation myth: the tribe was born of a lovelorn she-dragon impregnated by the wind. One grandmother recalls a European journey that prefigures Khoo Thwe's own. In the 1930s she joined a troupe of Padaung women who toured England in a circus freak show—although grandma never doubted who the real freaks were. "The English are a very strange tribe," she concluded, amused by her hosts' attempts to appease the spirits by drinking huge quantities of tea.

Khoo Thwe captures the rhythms and rituals of village life with a humor and affection one might not expect from a narrator who confesses, "I was desperate to shed my tribal traditions." That process begins at Mandalay University, where he studies his first love, English literature, and meets his second, a feisty student called Moe. Instinctively, they keep their affair secret. She is a Burman, the nation's dominant ethnic group, some of whose members believe the government- propagated myth that "backward" tribes like the Padaung are cannibals. His family would have been equally shocked at his interest in a woman from "the land of green ghosts"—the Padaung name for the spirit-haunted Burmese lowlands.

Khoo Thwe's education is abruptly terminated in 1987, when Burma's superstition-obsessed dictator, General Ne Win, orders the nation's bank-notes to be replaced with new denominations divisible by nine, his lucky number. The savings of millions of Burmese (Khoo Thwe's included) are wiped out overnight. To make ends meet, the author abandons his studies to wait tables at a grotty Chinese restaurant, the improbable setting for a chance encounter with a Cambridge literature don, Dr. John Casey, who will later change his life.

But first comes 1988, when student protests in Rangoon grow into a nationwide pro-democracy uprising in which Khoo Thwe, a natural orator, plays an impassioned role. "It is hard to describe the thrill people felt in finding their voices for the first time," he writes, then describes brilliantly the sheer, heart-pounding euphoria of defying the authorities under a regime where "even to think about the possibility felt like committing a crime."

The euphoria is short-lived. After a savage military crackdown in which thousands of unarmed protesters are murdered, a dazed Khoo Thwe stands on the banks of the Irrawaddy River watching corpses spin past on the milk-chocolate currents. As the regime starts liquidating all remaining dissenters—his beloved Moe among them—what began as a lyrical coming-of-age tale becomes a dark and gripping story of survival. Pursued by government soldiers, Khoo Thwe and fellow students flee into the jungle to join ethnic insurgents on the Thai-Burma border, enduring both disease and terrifying assaults by the Burmese army. Yet, even as enemy mortars explode nearby, Khoo Thwe pores over his treasured copy of The New Oxford Book of English Verse, an anomalous scene he compares to "reading the New Testament in a brothel."

In the end, it is literature—quite literally—that saves him. In an astonishing climax, a desperate letter dispatched from Khoo Thwe's rebel camp somehow reaches Dr. Casey, who, with the help of an ex-SAS officer, smuggles the young Padaung out of his jungle nightmare and into the hushed cloisters of Caius College, Cambridge. A happy ending, then? Not entirely. As Khoo Thwe sadly (and guiltily) acknowledges, for each miraculous success story like his own there are thousands of bright young Burmese whose futures remain blighted by a repressive regime. Khoo Thwe is clearly still haunted by the "green ghosts," and not even this remarkable book—part confession, part thriller—can fully exorcise them.

Andrew Marshall is the author of The Trouser People: A Story of Burma in the Shadow of the Empire (Counterpoint, 2002)

• Books: Sentimental Education