Sunday, January 31, 2016
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Ai Wei Wei--dissenting artist non pareil
I don't care who Time Magazine chooses, maybe Angela Merkel? of the Nobel Committee chooses,
but I would choose Ai Wei Wei for Person of the Year and and a Nobel Peace Prize.
With nothing but his voice and his art, he has consistently stayed on top of Chinese and now international affairs.
That is impressive.
Click if you agree.
KMK
1-27-2016
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Monday, January 18, 2016
BBC documentary Genghis Khan
BBC documentary Genghis Khan --58 minutes.
I have seen this before, but it took me some time to find it.
Quite good.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x25b850_bbc-genghis-khan_news
kmkaung
1-18-2016
I have seen this before, but it took me some time to find it.
Quite good.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x25b850_bbc-genghis-khan_news
kmkaung
1-18-2016
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Essay about Dr. Kyi May Kaung by John Libid
As I mentioned some time ago, between 1997 and 2003 I went to Boulder, CO about 4 times to read poetry, paint and talk about Burma. Their system is that they invite you and have you participate, almost blind, in a lot of things, like a live session reading poetry with musicians and dancers, or making monoprints with complete strangers, some who did not know much Engish. I found it to be wonderfully challenging. This profile was written about me by a journalism student at the time, who was practicing his reporting skills. It is rather long, but as I like it and want to keep it, I am typing it up all over again. I don't know which old computer the original file was in. kmk 8-25-2015
Dr. Kyi May Kaung's rapid fire Burmese shoots through the speakers in the muffled tone of AM radio. It's possible that none of her 50 million countrymen will hear her broadcast. The RFA program is playing to a country that last saw democracy in 1988 (sic), one year after it was named the (sic) a Least Developed Country by the UN, where the life expectancy for women is 62 years, 58 for men. No reporters are allowed and accessing the Internet with a modem is a crime punishable by 15 years in prison.
Quote of the day from Jon Libid, writing about me at Conference on World Affairs, March 2001.
Still, no topic will be foreign to Kaung at the 53rd Annual Conference on World Affairs. She is a poet, author, artist, professor, playwright and political scientist. She was 13 when her first short story was published and has since added over 400 poems (some of which are collected) in two collections. She more than any other participant, embodies the conference theme, Borders and Beyond.
Jon Libid
"It is important to understand how searing her homeland experiences have been, and to read Kyi May's biography, to become acquainted with the plight of the people of Burma, especially the women," said Leigh Kennicott, who works at the University of Colorado's Theater and Dance Department. Kennicott met Kaung two years ago when she coordinated Kaung's stories and poems with jazz music and dancers.
She (Kyi) lived in Burma’s capital Rangoon, for 32 years from 1950. The city no longer carries that name: The Burmese government had the name changed to Yangon in 1989, to reflect the proper pronunciation. She also spent time in England, from the ages of 3 to 6. Her England-educated father and his circle of friends were a tremendous influence on her subsequent academic journey.
One day, (while varnishing his hard cover books against the Burmese monsoons) her father asked her if she knew how useful books were.
“I was stumped for an answer, so I said, ‘If we run out of money, we can sell them’”Kaung said.
He just looked at her through his glasses.
“’You don’t know how much is in them,’ he said, ‘books aren’t even the same as pamphlets. Somehow we trust books more.’”
After her father died in a car accident in Calcutta, his friends took Kaung and her siblings under their collective wings. The diversity of this group is still reflected in Kaung’s numerous professions.
One was a poet and historian; another founded one of the first orphanages in Burma; another was an economist who originated the idea of plural economies.
She was an associate professor of economics in Burma, but came to the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1982. She also holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Pennsylvania.
“I think the most amazing thing about her is her commitment to her homeland and to publicizing its plight through art and poetry,” Kennicott said, “However, I think her radio work gives her the most visibility.”
Kaung was a senior research analyst at Radio Free Asia up until late February (2001).
Congress approved funding for the organization in March 1996, and in September of that same year, their first broadcast went out to China in Mandarin. Broadcasts are now done in 11 different languages, (with 2 versions each of Mandarin and Cantonese). According to RFA president Richard Richter on the corporation’s website, RFA’s job is quite simply to bring news and information about their own country to populations denied the benefits of freedom of information by their governments.”
She compared broadcasting to the Burmese audience to reading her poetry to an audience in a darkened church in Toronto once. She does not read to the audience as a collective whole; instead she visualizes someone from Burma; a close friend, a relative or a former teacher.
“We knew them to be there and silent and perhaps passive, but we knew them to exist,” she said of the audience. Poems and letters began to “come out of the woodwork” after the first installation (sic) installment of “Poems of Those who Love Their Country” aired , featuring poet Naing Win Swe, who died in the jungle.
“In the early days we got a lot of letters, more than the Chinese section we were told, and you know how much more the Chinese population of one billion is than the Burmese of 48 million,” she said, “So you see how hungry the Burmese people are for independent news and thought.
Kaung said the problems of in Burma are born of the socio-politics of the “Run Down Burmese System” which she discussed (defined) in her dissertation.
“It will get better if Burmese people can work on their livelihoods in peace and the military stays out of political and economic decisions,” she said, “But that’s not likely to happen in the short run. Meanwhile AIDS is spreading like wildfire and it will be too late for many.”
Kaung’s poetry program is entitled “Poems of Those who Love their Country.” This year the CWA will feature more extemporaneous story telling by Kaung, accompanied by Burmese (sic) music interpreted by a dancer.
“Her earlier performance was very well received by the public, and that is why we have invited her back this year, Kennicott said.
Kaung will read from “I Weep for You my Native Land” a 400 page draft of a fictional memoir she has been working on for the last 6 or 7 years.
The great thing about Boulder CWA is that they put you on panels where you are a specialist, as well as where you are a generalist,” she said, “And on the whole they stretch you a bit to take artistic and intellectual risks. That’s why it is so nice to come back. It’s good sometimes to be pushed gently off a cliff and find that you can fly.”
end of essay
Sangre de Christo Mountains from Internet
I tried to find Rocky Mountains, but could not.
Dr. Kyi May Kaung's rapid fire Burmese shoots through the speakers in the muffled tone of AM radio. It's possible that none of her 50 million countrymen will hear her broadcast. The RFA program is playing to a country that last saw democracy in 1988 (sic), one year after it was named the (sic) a Least Developed Country by the UN, where the life expectancy for women is 62 years, 58 for men. No reporters are allowed and accessing the Internet with a modem is a crime punishable by 15 years in prison.
Quote of the day from Jon Libid, writing about me at Conference on World Affairs, March 2001.
Still, no topic will be foreign to Kaung at the 53rd Annual Conference on World Affairs. She is a poet, author, artist, professor, playwright and political scientist. She was 13 when her first short story was published and has since added over 400 poems (some of which are collected) in two collections. She more than any other participant, embodies the conference theme, Borders and Beyond.
Jon Libid
"It is important to understand how searing her homeland experiences have been, and to read Kyi May's biography, to become acquainted with the plight of the people of Burma, especially the women," said Leigh Kennicott, who works at the University of Colorado's Theater and Dance Department. Kennicott met Kaung two years ago when she coordinated Kaung's stories and poems with jazz music and dancers.
She (Kyi) lived in Burma’s capital Rangoon, for 32 years from 1950. The city no longer carries that name: The Burmese government had the name changed to Yangon in 1989, to reflect the proper pronunciation. She also spent time in England, from the ages of 3 to 6. Her England-educated father and his circle of friends were a tremendous influence on her subsequent academic journey.
One day, (while varnishing his hard cover books against the Burmese monsoons) her father asked her if she knew how useful books were.
“I was stumped for an answer, so I said, ‘If we run out of money, we can sell them’”Kaung said.
He just looked at her through his glasses.
“’You don’t know how much is in them,’ he said, ‘books aren’t even the same as pamphlets. Somehow we trust books more.’”
After her father died in a car accident in Calcutta, his friends took Kaung and her siblings under their collective wings. The diversity of this group is still reflected in Kaung’s numerous professions.
One was a poet and historian; another founded one of the first orphanages in Burma; another was an economist who originated the idea of plural economies.
She was an associate professor of economics in Burma, but came to the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1982. She also holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Pennsylvania.
“I think the most amazing thing about her is her commitment to her homeland and to publicizing its plight through art and poetry,” Kennicott said, “However, I think her radio work gives her the most visibility.”
Kaung was a senior research analyst at Radio Free Asia up until late February (2001).
Congress approved funding for the organization in March 1996, and in September of that same year, their first broadcast went out to China in Mandarin. Broadcasts are now done in 11 different languages, (with 2 versions each of Mandarin and Cantonese). According to RFA president Richard Richter on the corporation’s website, RFA’s job is quite simply to bring news and information about their own country to populations denied the benefits of freedom of information by their governments.”
She compared broadcasting to the Burmese audience to reading her poetry to an audience in a darkened church in Toronto once. She does not read to the audience as a collective whole; instead she visualizes someone from Burma; a close friend, a relative or a former teacher.
“We knew them to be there and silent and perhaps passive, but we knew them to exist,” she said of the audience. Poems and letters began to “come out of the woodwork” after the first installation (sic) installment of “Poems of Those who Love Their Country” aired , featuring poet Naing Win Swe, who died in the jungle.
“In the early days we got a lot of letters, more than the Chinese section we were told, and you know how much more the Chinese population of one billion is than the Burmese of 48 million,” she said, “So you see how hungry the Burmese people are for independent news and thought.
Kaung said the problems of in Burma are born of the socio-politics of the “Run Down Burmese System” which she discussed (defined) in her dissertation.
“It will get better if Burmese people can work on their livelihoods in peace and the military stays out of political and economic decisions,” she said, “But that’s not likely to happen in the short run. Meanwhile AIDS is spreading like wildfire and it will be too late for many.”
Kaung’s poetry program is entitled “Poems of Those who Love their Country.” This year the CWA will feature more extemporaneous story telling by Kaung, accompanied by Burmese (sic) music interpreted by a dancer.
“Her earlier performance was very well received by the public, and that is why we have invited her back this year, Kennicott said.
Kaung will read from “I Weep for You my Native Land” a 400 page draft of a fictional memoir she has been working on for the last 6 or 7 years.
The great thing about Boulder CWA is that they put you on panels where you are a specialist, as well as where you are a generalist,” she said, “And on the whole they stretch you a bit to take artistic and intellectual risks. That’s why it is so nice to come back. It’s good sometimes to be pushed gently off a cliff and find that you can fly.”
end of essay
I tried to find Rocky Mountains, but could not.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Stories, Home is Where, Housewarming and My Potsdam by K.M. Kaung
As the holiday season ends and we come to another new year, the Year of the Monkey, it is always a good time to ponder what "home" means.
Here are 3 stories which I wrote, set in different cities.
http://www.amazon.com/Home-Where-Housewarming-My-Potsdam-ebook/dp/B00UC9WQ3I
KMKaung
1-15-2016
My novella about FGM or Female Genital Mutilation as a stand alone publication--
http://www.amazon.com/FGM-Story-Mutilation-Series-Volume/dp/1497497736
It does not exist in Burma, though men in army are said to use penile inserts.
But that does not mean there are no sex crimes, including rape as a weapon of war, in Burma.
It does not exist in Burma, though men in army are said to use penile inserts.
But that does not mean there are no sex crimes, including rape as a weapon of war, in Burma.
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Saw movie The Revenant--
I saw The Revenant, and I think the dead horse may have been an artful fake.
Lots of sculptors, stunt men and prosthesis-makers in the credits.
But it does not matter, novels and movies are about the suspension of disbelief.
I was completely engrossed and stayed till the last credit and the last note of music.
I was so enthralled, I forgot my hat, which the man who came in to sweep the floor picked up for me.
He then greeted me again when I came out of the ladies with my hat and scarf on.
Sure beats going to the movies in Burma, with the piles of sunflower seed shells on the floor and rats running around (nationalized theaters).
Hard then to suspend disbelief.
I was always worried someone would get stabbed in the ticket lines, which had bars at the sides as well as the top.
Once I went to Wizaya Cinema on Boundary Road with my toddler, who got scared of the Jungle Book snake singing, Trust in me, and spent the entire movie looking at the beam of light coming from the camera.
Also, it was extremely hot.
Maybe that's why they all don't like fiction the way I do.
Oh well, as my economics mentor said, "Kyi May, there does not need to be more than one poet in a family."
It's like How many economists does it take to change a light bulb.
I forget what the punch line to that one was.
KMKaung
1-14-2016
Life and Art--
Monday, January 11, 2016
special post--undercover in N Korea
Special post--
what totalitarianism really means.
heartbreaking--would you like to live there?
An exaggerated form of burma--
see also next 2 posts on this my main FB page.
and if you continue to yap at me about change in em, I will tell you go live there, let your children go to univ. there.
There is altogether too much yapping.
For instance in 2010 the advisor's wife told me how happy she was that her child (then one) was an American.
I have not heard that this family surrendered their US citizenship.
kmk
1-11-2016
Saturday, January 09, 2016
Global Witness on Burma jade business--summary in Burmese--
ကိုအား မာန္ေအာင္'s photo.
ကိုအား မာန္ေအာင္ to ႏိုင္ငံေရးသတင္းႏွင့္စကား၀ိုင္း
ဤသတင္းကိုဖတ္ၿပီးလ်ွင္ သင္ ဆံုးျဖတ္နိုင္ပါၿပီ
Global Witness ဆိုတဲ့အဖြဲ႕ကေတာ့ ျမန္မာနိုင္
ငံရဲ႕ေက်ာက္စိမ္းအရႈပ္ေတာ္ပံုႀကီးအေၾကာင္းဖြင့္
ခ်လိုက္ပါၿပီ..
ဆင္းရဲမြဲေတေနတဲ့နိုင္ငံမွာ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြနဲ႔သူ
တို႔အသိုင္းအဝိုင္းေတြနွစ္စဥ္ခြဲေဝယူေနတဲ့ေငြ
ေၾကးပမာဏက တစ္နွစ္ကိုအေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ
၃၀ဘီလ်ွံဝန္းက်င္..
ေၾကာက္ခမန္းလိလိပမာဏ..
ေၾသာ္ လုပ္ရက္ၾကပါေပ့...
အဲ့ဒါေၾကာင့္လဲ အာဏာကိုသားစဥ္ေျမးစက္ယူခ်င္
ေနၾကတာကိုး...
Global Witness ဆိုလို႔ နယ္ခ်ဲ့လက္ပါးေစအဖြဲ႕
မဟုတ္ဘူးေနာ္ ၿဗိတိန္နိုင္ငံမွာအေျခစိုက္တာမွန္
ေပမဲ့ အစိုးရပါဝင္ပတ္သက္မႈမရွိတဲ့အဖြဲ႕..
၁၉၉၃ကတည္းကစဖြဲ႕ခဲ့တာ..
သမာသမတ္က်တယ္လို႔သမၼတႀကီးဦးသိန္းစိန္
ကိုယ္တိုင္ကေလးစားအားကိုးေနတဲ့ေနာ္ေဝနိုင္
ငံကေထာက္ပံ့ေပးထားတဲ့အဖြဲ႕...
အျခားပုဂၢလိကလွဴဒါန္းေငြေတြနဲ႔လြပ္လပ္စြာရပ္
တည္ေနတဲ့အဖြဲ႕ပါ..
သူတို႔အဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ရည္႐ြယ္ခ်က္က တစ္ကမ႓ၻာလံုး မွာ
သဘာဝသယံဇာတေတြေၾကာင့္ျဖစ္ေပၚေနတဲ့
အာဏာသိမ္းမႈေတြ စစ္ပြဲေတြ အက်င့္ပ်က္ျခစား
မႈေတြ လူမဆန္မႈေတြကိုေဖာ္ထုတ္ေပးဖို႔ပါပဲ..
နိုင္ငံတကာအသိအမွတ္ျပဳဆုတံဆိပ္ေတြလည္း
ရထားတ့ဲအဖြဲ႕ပါ..
ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအတြင္းမွာတနွစ္ေက်ာ္ဝင္ေရာက္ေလ့
လာၿပီးေတာ့ ေက်ာက္စိမ္းေလာကကိုအာဏာရွင္
ေတြဘယ္လိုထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ၿပီးႀကီးပြားေနၾကလဲဆိုတာ
ဖြင့္ခ်လိုက္တာပါ..
ပါဝင္ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ေနတဲ့လူေတြက
Global Witness ဆိုတဲ့အဖြဲ႕ကေတာ့ ျမန္မာနိုင္
ငံရဲ႕ေက်ာက္စိမ္းအရႈပ္ေတာ္ပံုႀကီးအေၾကာင္းဖြင့္
ခ်လိုက္ပါၿပီ..
ဆင္းရဲမြဲေတေနတဲ့နိုင္ငံမွာ အာဏာပိုင္ေတြနဲ႔သူ
တို႔အသိုင္းအဝိုင္းေတြနွစ္စဥ္ခြဲေဝယူေနတဲ့ေငြ
ေၾကးပမာဏက တစ္နွစ္ကိုအေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ
၃၀ဘီလ်ွံဝန္းက်င္..
ေၾကာက္ခမန္းလိလိပမာဏ..
ေၾသာ္ လုပ္ရက္ၾကပါေပ့...
အဲ့ဒါေၾကာင့္လဲ အာဏာကိုသားစဥ္ေျမးစက္ယူခ်င္
ေနၾကတာကိုး...
Global Witness ဆိုလို႔ နယ္ခ်ဲ့လက္ပါးေစအဖြဲ႕
မဟုတ္ဘူးေနာ္ ၿဗိတိန္နိုင္ငံမွာအေျခစိုက္တာမွန္
ေပမဲ့ အစိုးရပါဝင္ပတ္သက္မႈမရွိတဲ့အဖြဲ႕..
၁၉၉၃ကတည္းကစဖြဲ႕ခဲ့တာ..
သမာသမတ္က်တယ္လို႔သမၼတႀကီးဦးသိန္းစိန္
ကိုယ္တိုင္ကေလးစားအားကိုးေနတဲ့ေနာ္ေဝနိုင္
ငံကေထာက္ပံ့ေပးထားတဲ့အဖြဲ႕...
အျခားပုဂၢလိကလွဴဒါန္းေငြေတြနဲ႔လြပ္လပ္စြာရပ္
တည္ေနတဲ့အဖြဲ႕ပါ..
သူတို႔အဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ရည္႐ြယ္ခ်က္က တစ္ကမ႓ၻာလံုး မွာ
သဘာဝသယံဇာတေတြေၾကာင့္ျဖစ္ေပၚေနတဲ့
အာဏာသိမ္းမႈေတြ စစ္ပြဲေတြ အက်င့္ပ်က္ျခစား
မႈေတြ လူမဆန္မႈေတြကိုေဖာ္ထုတ္ေပးဖို႔ပါပဲ..
နိုင္ငံတကာအသိအမွတ္ျပဳဆုတံဆိပ္ေတြလည္း
ရထားတ့ဲအဖြဲ႕ပါ..
ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအတြင္းမွာတနွစ္ေက်ာ္ဝင္ေရာက္ေလ့
လာၿပီးေတာ့ ေက်ာက္စိမ္းေလာကကိုအာဏာရွင္
ေတြဘယ္လိုထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ၿပီးႀကီးပြားေနၾကလဲဆိုတာ
ဖြင့္ခ်လိုက္တာပါ..
ပါဝင္ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ေနတဲ့လူေတြက
ဦးသန္းေ႐ႊနဲ႔မိသားစု..
စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္းမ်ား..
အစိုးရအဖြဲ႕ဝန္ႀကီးမ်ား..
ႀကံ့ဖြတ္ပါတီေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား..
တပ္မေတာ္ရဲ႕ဦးပိုင္လုပ္ငန္းနဲ႔
ခရိုနီေတြ မူးယစ္ရာဇာေတြေပါ့...
ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြေနစရာအိမ္မရွိလို႔လမ္းေဘး
တဲထိုးေနရခ်ိန္မွာ..
နိုင္ငံျခားတိုင္းျပည္ေတြမွာ အိမ္ေဖာ္အလုပ္အပါအဝင္ရရာအလုပ္ကိုလုပ္လို႔
ကြၽန္ျဖစ္ခံေနရခ်ိန္မွာ..
သူတို႔ရဲ႕တနွစ္ဝင္ေငြက အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ၃၀ဘီလ်ွံ..
ေဒၚလာတစ္သန္းကိုေတာင္ ျမန္မာေငြသိန္းတစ္
ေသာင္းနွစ္ေထာင္ေလာက္ရွိတယ္ဆိုေတာ့
(၃၀ဘီလ်ွံ)ေဒၚလာသန္းသံုးေသာင္းဆိုေတာ့
တြက္သာၾကည့္လိုက္ေတာ့..
ဒါေတာင္တနွစ္စာပဲရွိေသးတယ္
သူတို႔အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခဲ့တာကနွစ္ေပါင္း ၃၀နီးပါး..
တနွစ္စာဝင္ေငြကိုပဲတြက္ၾကည့္ရင္ေတာင္
ဆင္းရဲႏြမ္းပါးမႈေလ်ာ့ခ်ေနပါတယ္ဆိုတဲ့သမၼတ
ႀကီးက တစ္ကယ္ေစတနာရွိရင္ ေနစရာမရွိတဲ့
ဆင္းရဲသားေတြအတြက္ သိန္း၁၀၀တန္တိုက္ခန္း
ေပါင္း အခန္းသိန္းသံုးဆယ္အလကားေဆာက္
ေပးလို႔ရတဲ့ပမာဏ..
ေခါတ္မွီတပ္မေတာ္တည္ေဆာက္ေနပါတယ္ဆို
တဲ့သူေတြအတြက္ တကယ္ျဖစ္ေစခ်င္ရင္
တနွစ္ကို MIG29တိုက္ေလယာဥ္အစီးတစ္ေထာင္
ေလာက္ဝယ္လို႔ရတဲ့ပမာဏ..
တစ္တိုင္းျပည္လံုးကိုအခမဲ့ေဆးကုေပးရံုတင္မက
ဘူး ထမင္းပါေကြၽးထားလို႔ရတဲ့ပမာဏ..
စစ္သားေတြေျမျပင္ေပၚမွာမိုးကာစခင္းၿပီးထမင္း
အျဖဴသည္စားရစရာအေၾကာင္းမရွိတဲ့ပမာဏ..
အဲ့ဒါေတြကက်ေနာ္တို႔ျပည္သူေတြအားလံုးပိုင္
တဲ့ေျမ..
က်ေနာ္တို႔အားလံုးပိုင္တဲ့သယံဇာတ..
ဆင္းရဲသားျပည္သူေတြအပါအဝင္ အားလံုးရဲ႕ရ
ပိုင္ခြင့္..
အခုေတာ့ေခြးသူခိုးေတြကသူတို႔အိပ္ထဲပဲအပိုင္
ထည့္ေနၾကေလရဲ႕..
ရိုးသားပါတယ္ဆိုတဲ့သမၼတႀကီးက ဒါေတြကိုသိ
ေနျမင္ေနရက္နဲ႔ဘာလို႔မ်ားမွိန္းေနခဲ့တာလဲ..
သမၼတဆက္လုပ္ခ်င္ေနတာကသူတို႔ကိုဆက္ၿပီး
လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္ေပးခ်င္လို႔ အကာအကြယ္ေပးခ်င္လို႔
ထင္ပါရဲ႕..
ဆက္ၿပီးေထာက္ခံေပးလိုက္ၾကပါဦး
စစ္သားေတြလည္းဒန္အိုးဖံုးေပၚမွာထမင္းျဖဴဆက္
စားၿပီး..
ျပည္သူျပည္သားေတြလည္းမေလးကိုသြားလို႔
ကြၽန္ဆက္ခံၾကတာေပါ့..
စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္းမ်ား..
အစိုးရအဖြဲ႕ဝန္ႀကီးမ်ား..
ႀကံ့ဖြတ္ပါတီေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား..
တပ္မေတာ္ရဲ႕ဦးပိုင္လုပ္ငန္းနဲ႔
ခရိုနီေတြ မူးယစ္ရာဇာေတြေပါ့...
ျမန္မာျပည္သူေတြေနစရာအိမ္မရွိလို႔လမ္းေဘး
တဲထိုးေနရခ်ိန္မွာ..
နိုင္ငံျခားတိုင္းျပည္ေတြမွာ အိမ္ေဖာ္အလုပ္အပါအဝင္ရရာအလုပ္ကိုလုပ္လို႔
ကြၽန္ျဖစ္ခံေနရခ်ိန္မွာ..
သူတို႔ရဲ႕တနွစ္ဝင္ေငြက အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ၃၀ဘီလ်ွံ..
ေဒၚလာတစ္သန္းကိုေတာင္ ျမန္မာေငြသိန္းတစ္
ေသာင္းနွစ္ေထာင္ေလာက္ရွိတယ္ဆိုေတာ့
(၃၀ဘီလ်ွံ)ေဒၚလာသန္းသံုးေသာင္းဆိုေတာ့
တြက္သာၾကည့္လိုက္ေတာ့..
ဒါေတာင္တနွစ္စာပဲရွိေသးတယ္
သူတို႔အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခဲ့တာကနွစ္ေပါင္း ၃၀နီးပါး..
တနွစ္စာဝင္ေငြကိုပဲတြက္ၾကည့္ရင္ေတာင္
ဆင္းရဲႏြမ္းပါးမႈေလ်ာ့ခ်ေနပါတယ္ဆိုတဲ့သမၼတ
ႀကီးက တစ္ကယ္ေစတနာရွိရင္ ေနစရာမရွိတဲ့
ဆင္းရဲသားေတြအတြက္ သိန္း၁၀၀တန္တိုက္ခန္း
ေပါင္း အခန္းသိန္းသံုးဆယ္အလကားေဆာက္
ေပးလို႔ရတဲ့ပမာဏ..
ေခါတ္မွီတပ္မေတာ္တည္ေဆာက္ေနပါတယ္ဆို
တဲ့သူေတြအတြက္ တကယ္ျဖစ္ေစခ်င္ရင္
တနွစ္ကို MIG29တိုက္ေလယာဥ္အစီးတစ္ေထာင္
ေလာက္ဝယ္လို႔ရတဲ့ပမာဏ..
တစ္တိုင္းျပည္လံုးကိုအခမဲ့ေဆးကုေပးရံုတင္မက
ဘူး ထမင္းပါေကြၽးထားလို႔ရတဲ့ပမာဏ..
စစ္သားေတြေျမျပင္ေပၚမွာမိုးကာစခင္းၿပီးထမင္း
အျဖဴသည္စားရစရာအေၾကာင္းမရွိတဲ့ပမာဏ..
အဲ့ဒါေတြကက်ေနာ္တို႔ျပည္သူေတြအားလံုးပိုင္
တဲ့ေျမ..
က်ေနာ္တို႔အားလံုးပိုင္တဲ့သယံဇာတ..
ဆင္းရဲသားျပည္သူေတြအပါအဝင္ အားလံုးရဲ႕ရ
ပိုင္ခြင့္..
အခုေတာ့ေခြးသူခိုးေတြကသူတို႔အိပ္ထဲပဲအပိုင္
ထည့္ေနၾကေလရဲ႕..
ရိုးသားပါတယ္ဆိုတဲ့သမၼတႀကီးက ဒါေတြကိုသိ
ေနျမင္ေနရက္နဲ႔ဘာလို႔မ်ားမွိန္းေနခဲ့တာလဲ..
သမၼတဆက္လုပ္ခ်င္ေနတာကသူတို႔ကိုဆက္ၿပီး
လုပ္ပိုင္ခြင့္ေပးခ်င္လို႔ အကာအကြယ္ေပးခ်င္လို႔
ထင္ပါရဲ႕..
ဆက္ၿပီးေထာက္ခံေပးလိုက္ၾကပါဦး
စစ္သားေတြလည္းဒန္အိုးဖံုးေပၚမွာထမင္းျဖဴဆက္
စားၿပီး..
ျပည္သူျပည္သားေတြလည္းမေလးကိုသြားလို႔
ကြၽန္ဆက္ခံၾကတာေပါ့..
from VOA--report on Hpakant jade mines in Burma (in Burmese)
Oo Hla Oo
ကခ်င္ဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ကို ေခၚယူ စံုစမ္းေနခ်ိန္
ေက်ာက္တူးကားမ်ား ဝင္ေရာက္မႈ ရပ္ဆိုင္း
Voice of America / 10 hours ago
ကခ်င္ဝန္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ကို ေခၚယူ စံုစမ္းေနခ်ိန္
ေက်ာက္တူးကားမ်ား ဝင္ေရာက္မႈ ရပ္ဆိုင္း
Voice of America / 10 hours ago
ဖားကန္႔ေဒသ ေက်ာက္စိမ္းတူးေဖာ္မႈနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ ဝန္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္
ကို ေနျပည္ေတာ္ကို ေခၚယူစစ္ေဆးေနခ်ိန္မွာ ဖားကန္႔ေဒသအတြင္းကို
တင္သြင္းေနတဲ့ ေျမသယ္ကားေတြနဲ႔ ေျမတူးစက္ေတြ ၀င္ေရာက္လာတာ
ရပ္ဆိုင္းသြားတယ္လုိ႔ ေဒသခံေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။ ဒီလုိ တူုးေဖာ္ေရးယာဥ္နဲ႔
ယႏၱရားေတြ တင္သြင္းတာရပ္ဆုိင္းေပမဲ့ ေက်ာက္တူးေဖာ္ေနတာေတြကေတာ့ အရင္လုိပဲ
ရိွေနဆဲလုိ႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။ ဒီသတင္းကိုေတာ့ ဗီြအုိေအျမန္မာပိုင္းရဲ့ သတင္းေထာက္
ကိုမုိးေဇာ္က တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။ ဒီႏွစ္ပြင့္လင္းရာသီ ဖားကန္႔ေဒသ
ေက်ာက္စိမ္းတူးေဖာ္ေရးလုပ္ငန္းေတြ စတင္ခ်ိန္မွာ ခါတုိင္းႏွစ္ေတြနဲ႔ မတူဘဲ
တရုတ္ႏိုင္ငံဖက္ကေန ေျမသယ္ကားေတြ၊ တူးေဖာ္ေရး ယႏၱရားေတြ အလံုးအရင္းနဲ႔
တင္သြင္းလာခဲ့တာပါ။ ဒီလုိ တင္သြင္း လာတာ၊ ေက်ာက္စိမ္း အလြန္အကၽြံ
တူးေဖာ္တာနဲ႔ ဖားကန္႔ေဒသမွာ ေျမစာပံုၿပိဳက် တာေၾကာင့္ လူေတြ
ရာနဲ႔ခ်ီေသဆံုးတာေၾကာင့္ ေ၀ဖန္သံေတြ ထြက္ေပၚလာ တဲ့ေနာက္မွာ
ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ဝန္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္နဲ႔ ျပည္နယ္ဝန္ၾကီးတခ်ိဳ႔ကို ေခၚယူ
စစ္ေဆးေနတယ္လို႔လည္း သတင္းေတြ ထြက္ေပၚခဲ့တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေလာေလာဆည္မွာေတာ့
ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သမၼတရံုးညႊန္ၾကားေရးမႈး ဦးေဇာ္ေဌးက ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္၀န္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္
ဦးလဂြ်န္ငန္ဆိုင္းကို စစ္ေဆးေဆာင္ရြက္ေနဆဲျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သတင္းမီဒီယာေတြကို
ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ျပည္နယ္၀န္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ကို စစ္ေဆးေနခ်ိန္မွာေတာ့ ဖားကန္႔ေဒသ
မွာ ေက်ာက္စိမ္း တူးေဖာ္ေရးဆုိင္ရာ ယာဥ္ေတြ၊ ယႏၱရားေတြ တင္သြင္းတာဟာ
သိသိသာသာေလ်ာ့ က် သြားတယ္လုိ႔ ဖားကန္႔ေဒသက အလြတ္ သတင္းေထာက္ တဦးျဖစ္တဲ့
ကိုေဇာ္မုိးထက္က ေျပာပါတယ္။ "ကားဝင္တာကေတာ့ မရွိေတာ့ဘူးခင္ဗ်။ က်ေနာ္တို႔
မေတြ႔ေတာ့ ဘူး ေလာေလာဆယ္။ " တ႐ုတ္နယ္စပ္ကေန တဆင့္ ျမစ္ၾကီးနားဖက္ကေန ယာဥ္၊
ယႏၱရားေတြ တင္သြင္းတာ ရပ္ဆုိင္းေနေပမဲ့ တူးေဖာ္တာေတြကေတာ့ အရင္အတုိင္း
ရိွေနဆဲလုိ႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။ " လက္ရွိကေတာ့ ပံုမွန္ ကုမၸဏီေတြ သြားေနတယ္
လာေနတယ္။ တူးေန တယ္ ေဖာ္ေန တယ္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ အရင္ေတြ႔ျမင္ေနက် ပံုစံ
အတုိင္းပဲ ေတြ႔ေနရ တာပါ။ ေနာက္ၿပီး ျပည္ေထာင္စုဝန္ႀကီး ဒုဝန္ႀကီး
ဦးဝင္းထြန္း လာတဲ့ အခ်ိန္မွာေတာ့ ဒီကုမၸဏီေတြ ခဏ ရပ္နား ထားခိုင္းတာရယ္
ေနာက္ ဒီ တရားမဝင္ လုပ္ငန္းေတြေပါ့ မူးယစ္ေဆးဝါး ေရာင္းဝယ္တာမ်ိဳး
ျပည့္တန္ဆာခန္း အႏွိပ္ခန္းတို႔ လို ဟာမ်ိဴဳးေတြ ေလာင္းကစားလို ဟာမ်ိဳးေတြ
ရပ္ခုိင္းထားတာပဲ ရွိပါတယ္။ က်န္တာကေတာ့ ပံုမွန္အတိုင္း ဒီအတုိင္းပါပဲ။
ျပန္သြားၿပီးတဲ့ေနာက္ပိုင္း ဒီအတိုင္း ပံုမွန္ပဲ တူးၾကတာပါပဲ။ "
ဖားကန္႔ၿမိဳ႔နယ္က ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ဦးတင္စိုးကလည္း ယာဥ္၊
ယႏၱရားေတြ တင္သြင္းတာေတြ မေတြ႔ရေတာ့ေၾကာင္း ေျပာဆုိၿပီး တူးေဖာ္
ထုတ္လုပ္တာေတြကေတာ့ ၂၄နာရီအခ်ိန္ျပည့္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနတယ္ လုိ႔ အခုလို
ေျပာပါတယ္။ "အသည္းအသန္ လုပ္ေနတာေတြကေတာ့ နည္းနည္းမွ မေလ်ွ်ာ့ေသးဘူး။
၂၄နာရီပတ္လံုး ကုမၸဏီတိုင္းလိုလို ၂၄ နာရီ အလုပ္လုပ္တယ္။ ကုမၸဏီတခုကို
အနည္းဆံုး ကားအစီး ရာနဲ႔ခ်ီ သံုးတယ္။ အနည္းဆံုး တစ္ရာေက်ာ္၊ ႏွစ္ရာ၊
သံုးရာ ေျမသယ္ကားေတြ ဘက္ဖိုးေတြကလည္း နည္းတာမဟုတ္ဘူး။ အစီး သံုးေလး ငါးဆယ္
အသည္းအသန္ လုပ္ေနတာ။ ၂၄ နာရီ လုပ္ေနတာေနာ္။ ၂၄နာရီ လုပ္ေနတဲ့ေနရာမွာ
ကားေတြက ဘယ္ေလာက္အထိေအာင္ မ်ားသလဲဆိုရင္ ကားတစ္စီးနဲ႔ တစ္စီးဟာ
စကၠန္႔မလပ္ဘူး ထြက္ေနတာ။ ေျမစာသယ္ကားႀကီးေတြ လည္း ၾကည့္လုိက္မယ္ဆိုရင္
အနည္းဆံုးက တန္ ေျခာက္ဆယ္ေက်ာ္ ကေန တန္တစ္ရာေက်ာ္ အထိ ကားေတြခ်ည္းပဲ။
ႏွစ္ေပါင္းငါးဆယ္ သမား႐ိုးက် လုပ္ခဲ့တာဟာ အခုတစ္လတည္း လုပ္တာနဲ႔ညီမွ်ေအာင္
အဲ့ေလာက္အထိေအာင္ကို လုပ္ေနတာ။ အဲ့ေလာက္ႀကီး ေၾကာက္စရာေကာင္းေအာင္ကို
လုပ္ေနၾကတာ။" ဒီလို တူးေဖာ္ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနခ်ိန္မွာ မေတာ္တဆ ထိခိုက္ေသဆံုး
တာေတြ ဟာ ေန႔စဥ္ရက္ဆက္ျဖစ္ေပၚေနတယ္လုိ႔လည္း ဦးတင္စိုးက ဆက္ေျပာပါတယ္။
"ေသေနတာ ေန႔တိုင္းလို ေသေနတယ္ဗ်ာ။ ဒီေန႔ကိုပဲ ေျမစာ ထပ္ၿပိဳတယ္။
ၿပိဳတာကလည္း လံုးခင္း အုပ္စု၊ လံုးခင္း အုပ္စုထဲမွာ က်ေနာ္ သြားၾကည့္တယ္။
ေဘးက လူ မ်က္ျမင္ေတြရဲ႕ ေျပာၾကားခ်က္အရ လူ ၁၀ေယာက္နဲ႔ ၁၅ေယာက္ၾကားေတာ့
ပါသြားတယ္လို႔ က်ေနာ္တို႔ သိရတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ကယ္ဆယ္ေရးေတြ ျပန္လည္တူးေဖာ္မႈ
ဘာမွ မလုပ္ေသးဘူး က်ေနာ္ ေန႔လည္ ၁၂နာရီမွာ ျပန္လာတယ္။ ေျမစာပံု ၿပိဳလို႔
ေသတယ္။ ေျမစာပံုမွာ ခဲမွန္လို႔ ေသတယ္။ အခုေျပာေနတဲ့ အခ်င္းအရာက က်ေနာ့္
လံုးခင္း တခုတည္းအတြက္ပဲ ေျပာေနတာ။ အျခား အျခားေမွာ္ေတြမွာ ျဖစ္တာမဟုတ္ဘူး။
က်ေနာ့္ လံုးခင္းမွာ ပဲ ေန႔စဥ္ရက္ဆက္ဆိုသလို ေသေနတယ္။ ဒီရက္ပိုင္းမွာကိုပဲ
ဆယ္ေယာက္ေလာက္ ရွိေနၿပီ ေသေနတာ။ တပတ္အေတာအတြင္းမွာကို။"
ဖားကန္႔ေဒသအတြင္းမွာ ေျမစာပံုၿပိဳက်ၿပီး လူရာနဲ႔ခ်ီ ေသဆံုးရတာ၊ စက္
ယႏၱရားၾကီးေတြ သံုးၿပီး အလြန္ အကြ်ံေက်ာက္စိမ္း တူးေဖာ္ေန တာေတြေၾကာင့္
ျပည္ေထာင္စု လႊတ္ေတာ္ဥကၠ႒ သူရဦးေရႊမန္း က ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သမၼတဆီကို
သ၀ဏ္လႊာေပးပို႔ခဲ့ရသလုိ အစိုးရကလည္း ဖားကန္႔ေဒသကို
သြားေရာက္စစ္ေဆးေဆာင္ရြက္တာေတြ ရိွခဲ့ပါတယ္။
Friday, January 08, 2016
No, Hillary. You did not bring democracy to Burma. https://t.co/mSBYfcPlDq via @MotherJones
All the PR machine khoke maung nay tarr--(working full steam)
All the PR machine khoke maung nay tarr--(working full steam)
Quote of the day from Moemakha media
Quote of the day--from Moemakha--media--
on Sr Gen Than Shwe coming out from behind curtain and presenting his grandson as an heir, and DASSK as "joker card"
These opinions are not mine, but of the writer.
ဒီေတာ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ဆုိတဲ့ ဂ်ိဳကာဖဲခ်ပ္ကို သူပုိင္ပုိင္ႏုိင္ႏုိင္ဆက္ကုိင္ထားႏုိင္မယ္ဆုိရင္ သူ႔ေနာင္ေရး ဘက္ေပါင္း စံု စိတ္ေအးရမယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ ယေန႔ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ဟာ ၂၀၁၂ ၾကားျဖတ္ႏုိင္ခဲ့တဲ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ မဟုတ္ ေတာ့ဘူး ၂၀၁၅ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲမွာ အျပတ္အသတ္အႏုိင္ရထားသူျဖစ္တယ္။ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပရဲ႕မ်က္ႏွာသာေပးမႈက ေဒၚ ေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ဘက္မွာ ျဖစ္တယ္။ ဒီေတာ့ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ကုိင္တြယ္ႏုိင္မယ္ဆုိရင္ ေသြးစြန္းညစ္ေပေနတဲ့သူ႔ပံုရိပ္ကို ဖံုးကြယ္ရံုတင္မကဘူး။ နာမည္ ေကာင္းပါရႏုိင္မွာျဖစ္တယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္ သူေသတဲ့အခါ က်န္ရစ္မယ့္ သူ႔သားေျမးမိသားစုေနာင္ေရးနဲ႔ပုိင္ဆုိင္ထားတဲ့ ဥစၥာဓနေတြလံုၿခံဳေဘး ကင္းအတြက္လည္း စိတ္ေအးရမွာျဖစ္တယ္။ ဒီနည္းလမ္းဟာ ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊမိသားစု တကိုယ္ေရတကာယအဖို႔ “သားအိုးေရႊထမ္း” တဲ့ကိန္းေပါ့။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ေျမးကို ဆက္သားအျဖစ္သံုးၿပီး တဲ့ေနာက္ ကုိယ္တိုင္ထြက္ေတြ႔တာလို႔ ယူဆပါ --
Thursday, January 07, 2016
Excerpt from my novel Once--The Dumpster
Excerpt from my novel Once--
Khine Khine lies in bed in the early morning and listens to the garbage truck doing its work.
First she hears the clank of a chain, and realizes that someone is unlocking the dumpster. Even the dumpster is locked in this unsafe neighborhood in West Philadelphia in the Northeast of America , to prevent the homeless from rummaging in it.
Then she hears the dumpster being upended, the truck closing its hatch, driving away. She thinks of the necessity of throwing useless things away, yet her room is full of mementos
and pieces of paper that are there solely to help her remember.
She decides that when she has finished writing up the old stories, she will dedicate them to her cousin or her son, both named Mongoose.
Copyright Kyi May Kaung--
1-7-2016
Wednesday, January 06, 2016
My review of U Win Tin's What's That? A Human Hell in Truthout
From 2012--my review of U Win Tin's What's That? A Human Hell in Truthout.
Tuesday, January 05, 2016
Excerpt from autobiographical novel Once: I Weep for You, my Native Land--by Kyi May Kaung
In England, first they lived in a place called Richmond.
Khine Khine could remember nothing of that place except that the house was big and tall, with a rectangular lawn at the back, in which a red peony, with its heavy head drooping down, bloomed one day.
Khine Khine thought she had never seen anythmg so dark red, the petals were curved inwards and shiny. She turned her head upside down to try to see the center of the flower, if it had yellow stamens, but saw only tight petals, like a red cabbage.
She wanted to cut the flower and put it indoors in a silver jug with a big looped handle.
Glarnis never let Khine Khine do anything that she wanted, but that day she said, "Yes, you may go cut the peony, if you want." She pronounced it pyo ni, which to Khine Khine in the little home Burmese that she knew, sounded like "red maiden."
She ran excitedly into the house to get her mother's pointed scissors, and ran back down the steps to get the peony, but on the way down she stumbled and poked her chest with the point of the scissors, so that was her first scar.
Copyright KMKaung
1-5-2016
All my book reviews to date on Amazon--
All my book reviews on Amazon--note--not all reviews of my books, to date.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/AI19NKJI4NW4X/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_pf
https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/AI19NKJI4NW4X/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_pf
Monday, January 04, 2016
Special request
Special request--everyone who bought and or read my books, thank you.
Pl go on line and write a review of what you read.
If you ever bought anything from Amazon, not necessarily a book, you can write a book review.
I am particularly anxious to see reviews of this--
As I know a lot of you have read this (I hope) :)
I feel it is good practice to regularly read books and write and post book reviews.
If anything, it will refresh your memory and clarify your thoughts.
(Don't worry if this cover looks different. The print edition has a different cover--)
KMKaung
1-4-2016
Sunday, January 03, 2016
Let it Fly with the Flowers--edited by Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.)
Accessed 5-31-2015
Non-fiction:
Print.
Edited by Kyi Kaung:
Co-authors: Daw Khin Khin Thein, Khin Pwint Oo, Ma Myo
Nwe, U Hla Phyu Chit, Daw Sin Theingie, Daw Tin Htar Nu, Daw Yee May Kaung, Dr.
Khin Saw Nyein.
Kindle edition below:
Friday, January 01, 2016
Quote of the day--from Mahmood Darwish
Quote of the day--from Mamood Darwish, Palestinian-born poet--
We love life if we find a way to it.
And we plant, where we settle, some fast growing plants, and harvest the dead.
We play the flute like the color of the faraway, sketch over the first corridor a neigh.
We write our names one stone at a time, O lightning brighten the night.
Excerpt from my autobiographical novel Once--by KM Kaung
Quote of the day--from my autobiographical novel--Once: I Weep for You, My Native Land--
"No," Glamis admonished, holding Anouk by her sleeve, back at the edges of the crowd lining the streets, "You must not move too far to the front. No, that is not good, Anouk. Stand back here behind me."
Anouk now understood that when Elder Sister spoke, it was final.
"You're a young matron now, you must have the proper einteré or demeanor. Besides, soldiers and officers, Burmese or Japanese, can pick up and take away any woman they want. Best to keep a low profile."
"Please Elder Sister," Anouk pleaded, "What harm can it do? I just want to show my support. A bunch of leaves doesn't cost too much. Please."
"No. I told you before," Glamis replied shortly. "No. You're my responsibility when Naing is not at home. Besides, he won't like it."
Anouk hated Glamis most when she used this, "Naing won't like it," argument.
It seemed to her that she should be able to do whatever she, Anouk, wanted. But she prudently kept her mouth shut. It wouldn't do to have a scene in the street, and for two women to call attention to themselves, especially when it was so hard to rell what was going on from day to day, with the Japanese and all.
Copyright Kyi May Kaung, a k a KM Kyi May Kaung
1-1-2016
Chile story The Lovers by KM Kaung
And my all time New Year's glitz story, inspired by the ballet dancer aunt of a Brazilian friend, who struck poses in the living room when she got drunk--
Kauk Site Ma review of KM Kaung's stories, Band of Flesh and 53 Red Roses--
Kauk Site Ma--review of my stories--Band of Flesh and 53 Red Roses--
copied and pasted from Amazon site--
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
which I loved reading. I find many interesting things in this ...
By on April 27, 2015
Format: Kindle Edition
A Review of “Fifty Three Red Roses” by K.M. Kaung.
“Fifty Three Red Roses” is one of the novellas of Dr. Kaung, which I loved reading.
I find many interesting things in this story, such as the way the author portrays the points of view of the man and the woman vividly.
She has described beautifully a married woman's life (Donna is the wife of an American diplomat). Mrs. Woods has to sacrifice her own time for her other half, and to endure her life to fit her husband's career… ”days she ended up cooking what Bob likes…”--”Bob had been incredibly insensitive to give her a fur coat…”
So that is what Donna had to accept, the gift her husband bought for her, though it is not what she enjoys.
…but a year after formal separation Donna can enjoy her life without restraint.
Dr Kaung also touches on a “spirit” if NOT “the evil spirit”...that are known to be homeless, whirling round “the wheel of Samsara”.
Even up to now (in Burma), many people still believe that when a person dies his/her spirit dwells for seven days in and around the house, haunting their familiar haunts, so that monks have to chant a “Kammavacca” or a Buddhist Prayer Script at the death of a human being.
“Kammavacca” is a Buddhist Prayer Manuscript made from various types of materials (but the material made from palm leaves are most common) containing pages of leaves on which words in the Pali Language are inscribed.
Kauk Site Ma-
February 18, 2015.
copied and pasted from Amazon site--
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
which I loved reading. I find many interesting things in this ...
By on April 27, 2015
Format: Kindle Edition
A Review of “Fifty Three Red Roses” by K.M. Kaung.
“Fifty Three Red Roses” is one of the novellas of Dr. Kaung, which I loved reading.
I find many interesting things in this story, such as the way the author portrays the points of view of the man and the woman vividly.
She has described beautifully a married woman's life (Donna is the wife of an American diplomat). Mrs. Woods has to sacrifice her own time for her other half, and to endure her life to fit her husband's career… ”days she ended up cooking what Bob likes…”--”Bob had been incredibly insensitive to give her a fur coat…”
So that is what Donna had to accept, the gift her husband bought for her, though it is not what she enjoys.
…but a year after formal separation Donna can enjoy her life without restraint.
Dr Kaung also touches on a “spirit” if NOT “the evil spirit”...that are known to be homeless, whirling round “the wheel of Samsara”.
Even up to now (in Burma), many people still believe that when a person dies his/her spirit dwells for seven days in and around the house, haunting their familiar haunts, so that monks have to chant a “Kammavacca” or a Buddhist Prayer Script at the death of a human being.
“Kammavacca” is a Buddhist Prayer Manuscript made from various types of materials (but the material made from palm leaves are most common) containing pages of leaves on which words in the Pali Language are inscribed.
Kauk Site Ma-
February 18, 2015.
Dream nightmare of 1-1-2016. Why is Mandalay so big?
A very unusual dream for New Year's Day.
I was 75 inside, but 35 or 55 outside, and as Khine Khine, I was engaged to be married to some rich person in Mandalay.
I went first to the big mansion, which was so vast it had an industrial size elevator.
The elevator had plastic doors, and it kept stopping, during which I saw the illustrious residents.
I stopped or wanted to stop, but my female companion/handler/niece took me upstairs, where I was supposed to get ready for my wedding.
So I did.
I had a white wedding dress that I never had in real life, and high heeled, spike heeled shoes.
I soon had to go for the wedding.
But the guide insisted we walk, and we were soon in a bad neighborhood.
It started to rain, and at one point she dashed across the traffic lights, and I got separated from her.
Instead, I got to the outskirts of Mandalay, and ran into a group of people who were quite friendly, but at one point someone tried to kidnap me by holding me by my shoes.
However, the crowd prevented that.
I had a long conversation with them, including why their language was so bad, for I had known, I said, that Mandalay was noted for its language and culture.
At one point we saw a vendor of water lilies, and when I said I liked the bright pink ones, the vendor gave me one big bunch, which I held against my chest, so it made a big wet stain on my white dress.
They got me to the outside of the big new church, and I walked around on the outside of the exposed brick structure.
The people said it was called Saint Victoria something or the other.
I said it did not worry me what it was called or where I was married, but I was glad they had a great big church.
Finally, I got to the altar.
I must have been asleep, because someone said something to me.
I opened my eyes, and it turned out to be the bridegroom who looked as if he was 24 or 25.
He said, Wake up. Wake up for me.
I said, You don't know how old I am. I don't think I can do this. When the pastor asks, Will up etc. take this man for your lawful wedded husband, I am going to say No.
And that will be the end of it.
I was still holding the big wet bunch of water lilies.
He said, It hardly matters, so long as you keep telling me stories. I heard you have a lot of stories to tell.
I asked who made the wedding arrangements. I said I did not care who made the arrangements, so long as it was his big fat uncle. I said I did not like big fat uncle whose gut had burst as he did not eat enough roughage.
The bridegroom said he made the wedding arrangements himself.
I said, But I don't need anything so elaborate.
I was married on the lawn the first time, and only wore ordinary clothes.
He said, But I wanted you to have everything.
This was after I found out some cronies, cronies of cronies and cronies of cronies of cronies, all had TB and maybe HIV too.
I thought, what is the use of being so rich, if your body is riddled with disease?
Copyright KMKaung
1-1-2016
I was 75 inside, but 35 or 55 outside, and as Khine Khine, I was engaged to be married to some rich person in Mandalay.
I went first to the big mansion, which was so vast it had an industrial size elevator.
The elevator had plastic doors, and it kept stopping, during which I saw the illustrious residents.
I stopped or wanted to stop, but my female companion/handler/niece took me upstairs, where I was supposed to get ready for my wedding.
So I did.
I had a white wedding dress that I never had in real life, and high heeled, spike heeled shoes.
I soon had to go for the wedding.
But the guide insisted we walk, and we were soon in a bad neighborhood.
It started to rain, and at one point she dashed across the traffic lights, and I got separated from her.
Instead, I got to the outskirts of Mandalay, and ran into a group of people who were quite friendly, but at one point someone tried to kidnap me by holding me by my shoes.
However, the crowd prevented that.
I had a long conversation with them, including why their language was so bad, for I had known, I said, that Mandalay was noted for its language and culture.
At one point we saw a vendor of water lilies, and when I said I liked the bright pink ones, the vendor gave me one big bunch, which I held against my chest, so it made a big wet stain on my white dress.
They got me to the outside of the big new church, and I walked around on the outside of the exposed brick structure.
The people said it was called Saint Victoria something or the other.
I said it did not worry me what it was called or where I was married, but I was glad they had a great big church.
Finally, I got to the altar.
I must have been asleep, because someone said something to me.
I opened my eyes, and it turned out to be the bridegroom who looked as if he was 24 or 25.
He said, Wake up. Wake up for me.
I said, You don't know how old I am. I don't think I can do this. When the pastor asks, Will up etc. take this man for your lawful wedded husband, I am going to say No.
And that will be the end of it.
I was still holding the big wet bunch of water lilies.
He said, It hardly matters, so long as you keep telling me stories. I heard you have a lot of stories to tell.
I asked who made the wedding arrangements. I said I did not care who made the arrangements, so long as it was his big fat uncle. I said I did not like big fat uncle whose gut had burst as he did not eat enough roughage.
The bridegroom said he made the wedding arrangements himself.
I said, But I don't need anything so elaborate.
I was married on the lawn the first time, and only wore ordinary clothes.
He said, But I wanted you to have everything.
This was after I found out some cronies, cronies of cronies and cronies of cronies of cronies, all had TB and maybe HIV too.
I thought, what is the use of being so rich, if your body is riddled with disease?
Copyright KMKaung
1-1-2016
On Franz Neumann's Behemoth--
Not light reading in the first few minutes of the new year, but an important and essential one nonetheless--
I was reading Raul Hilberg's memoir, The Politics of Memory, in which he says the size of the Holocaust Museum in DC is very important. I must go back again and go through the whole experience again.
In the past, I only went for one event, as I reasoned I had been to Auschwitz and Majdanek in Poland already, so why go to a museum--but it seems the museum visitor is given a card (an ID card of a victim) and then "goes through life" with this computer card at various points in the Museum, I guess with the Nazis coming to the house, being deported in a cattle car and so on.
In c. 2001 C3 and S. went, but I sat on a bench on the Mall and waited for them. I still find my visits to Majdanek and Auschwitcz memorable, traumatic and unforgettable, though it was in 1968-69.
In any case this book, has a large online sample
Including a complete introduction by Peter Hayes--
a table of contents and the introduction by Neumann--
Just reading this sample, I can't help but think about Burma--
in this book the behemoth can only be removed by military action and Nuremberg-style trials, and Peter Hayes says that in practice, the amount of de-structuralization in (West) Germany was much less than Neumann had thought.
I wonder about de-structuralization in Japan after defeat in WW II and about Cambodia after defeat of Khmer Rouge by Vietnam.
I haven't read the Neumann book yet, but now I have reviewed it, maybe more thoroughly than some reviewers, I might as well post this on Amazon.
Even the online sample, you should read it in small doses, as it is abstract and theoretical, but theoretical does not mean it is untrue--
like all theory it is an attempt to make sense of a situation, and I feel that it is much much better than all the jargon and cliches written about the so-called democratization and reform, both so-called, in Burma, said to be taking place right now.
I did not think at all I would go this route intellectually in 2016, but it seems I will.
On Facebook, if you can follow me please do, if you can't look at the pictures of flowers etc, but I myself will go this route.
Burmese Rohingya supporters should also read the arguments that anti-semitism is ingrained in German culture.
A slow and dark read, but at the end you will understand a whole lot more, I am sure.
KMKaung
1-1-2016
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