My friend blogger blogging about me, sort of--

As she uses "Kanlaon" handle, I don't feel I should give her real name, https://anthropologist.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/kyi-may-kaung-berlin-2005/ But she wrote an amazing story called Mayor of the Roses, which describes a mass rape inflicted on a Philippine Beauty Queen, which was pinned on her boyfriend. "The autopsy collected 42 different semen samples." I met "Kanlaon" in Berlin where 5 or 6 of us from SE Asia were invited as "Writers who dare to confront." They found us on the Internet. One was Gunawan Mohammed, founder of Tempo, the Indonesian Time Magazine. Also the group included Linh Dinh, Vietnamese-born poet and his friend Chan or Chang, who did not speak English. Loved that part, meeting other writers, hotel on River Spree, though did not like the ominous Burmese men who came looking for me, whom I managed to avoid. They spotted me as I was about to go back to hotel, and I recognized them speaking to each other in probably very broken German, I didn't like the female Philippine ambassador either, who came with K's mother, a concert pianist, and denied no such thing as mass rape took place, Poor K had to go with them to dinner, though we urged her not to. She has since given me permission to write about it, but I have not written a short story about it yet. In another unrelated book talk I hosted on Orhan Pamuk in Silver Spring, MD, Turkish embassy folk came and denied an Armenian genocide had ever taken place, but a woman who came who had read all of Pamuk's books and the rest of us talked back, and the 3 people left in a huff-- but now I see what happened in the summer when Ergodan's goons beat up Turkish US Citizens in DC demonstrating, I feel a bit scared. FYI, the Burmese embassy was always very ugly, filmed demonstrations from inside, once greeted a dissident with a baseball bat and smashed windscreen of a car that dissident parked in their driveway. I post these things because there are some Burmese who are sort of wishy washy as regards the junta. To them I would just say, like Ygritte in Game of Thrones: You know nothing Jon Snow. Attachment is Ishtar Gate, at Berlin Pergamon Museum. This is the real thing. What Saddam Hussein re-built is a replica. km 12-10-2017

Ishtar Gate at Pergamon Museum, Berlin, photo copyright Kyi May Kaung Kyi May Kaung Words Sounds and Images