Once Pascal was a young man of the Padaung people in the mountains who went to Mandalay to study English and ended up in the UK. 

He saw the horror of the Burmese military, later got a chance to study English literature in the UK and to tell about his people and country!

    There is a similarity to the Thai Isaan writer Pira Sudham who grew up in the poor Northeast Thailand, Isaan, and via Bangkok ended up in the UK to author well known books about life amongst the poor farmers in Isaan. Read Monsoon Country.

   Pascal tells us about his childhood among the Padaung people, familiar for their long neck women wearing brass rings around their necks. He describes his family and village life with buffaloes, ghosts, ball sports and listening to western pop on the radio in the Shan State of Myanmar, where ancestor worship and ghosts blend with Christianity brought by Western missionaries.

   Burma, Myanmar was and still is a country of extreme poverty and a military dominating politics and who exploit the natural resources of the lands of the marginalized mountain peoples.

   The military cracked down on his friends and people. Pascal's girlfriend Moe, was raped by soldiers, disappeared, probably murdered. Pascal determines to work for change in Myanmar but eventually he needs to escape.

   While working in a restaurant in Mandalay, to support his studies he had met an English academic who later sent him a book containing a banknote and that eventually brought him to Cambridge, where he was the first Burmese to gain an honors degree in English literature and to write this book!

   From the Land of the Green Ghosts is a fascinating and personal account of life amongst his mountain family but also of the human rights atrocities in Myanmar in those days and still ongoing, today happening to the Rohingya!

   Pascal Khoo Thwe was born in 1967, is a Burmese author of the Padaung people. His book, 'From the Land of Green Ghosts' was awarded the Kiriyama Prize, an international literary award for books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia.

Read it, you won't regret it!

Recommended also

https://www.volunteernonprofit.org/book-review-monsoon-country-by-pira-sudham/