Day 4 of The Writing Residency - wrote short story The Goldsmith Cries

Day 4 of The Writing Residency - wrote short story The Goldsmith Cries.  And as Wu Chang Erh wrote (as translated by Arthur Waley) in the Chinese folk novel Monkey, "If you want to know what happened, you must read the next chapter." 

Arthur Waley was one of the close friends of renowned historian Gordon H. Luce, and because of him, and to read about ancient Burma in Chinese sources, Gordon Luce learned Mandarin.

Isn't that Incredible?

Kyi May Kaung

Thank you, Facebook fans and friends -

Thank you Facebook friends and guests - It is only about a month since I started, and I feel so much better with a Community - even if (only) electronic - but some of you I know personally and professionally too, some of you I know through your good & excellent reputation as activists.

Thank you all whose lovely photos I shared. Some are of places I have never been and things I have never seen, especially the friends in USA and Burma.

I am so happy to have such talented and committed friends.

I am going to take the leap and go to Twitter soon, so I hope you will follow me there too.

Kyi May Kaung - sometimes writing as K.M.Kaung.

Memories of Meikhtila - fiction excerpt from K.M. Kaung's upcoming novel Wolf -

Memories of Meikhtila - here is an excerpt from my upcoming novel Wolf -

I just happened to be editing it today -

"My childhood was both ordinary and extraordinary.  When I was five, Father stopped going on operations.  He never rose to a post higher than lieutenant, but he got a nicer position in an army truck depot in Meikhtila.  Ko Ko, Inn Inn and I could visit with one of Father’s cousins named Korea.
Uncle Korea was in a trial marriage with a woman and had a small grape plantation.  It wasn’t the custom to try things out this way, but Uncle Korea was modern and was trying living with a woman to see if he liked her. 
Meikhtila was a big town in central Burma where all the vegetable and fruit trucks came down from the Shan Plateau.  Rice grew in the paddies of Kyauksè nearby, which had been famous since the eleventh century; the time of the first Burmese kings as the great granary of Burma.   We always had enough to eat.  As we lived on the big military base, there was never a problem with things like getting petrol, burglary or security issues.   All of us went to a good school on the base.
One of Mother’s cousins was head of the tank corps.  We were poor compared to the commander, U Ah Par.  But U Ah Par’s wife, a doctor, allowed me and my brother and sister to come and play in their house and garden in the tank corps compound.  Sometimes we were even invited to meals.
I liked it best when Uncle Ah Par was at home, got drunk and told us stories about tanks."

Based on real people, but they are all dead and the names etc. are changed - it is of course not my own story, but the "life" of a fictional 1988 character named Wolf.

copyright Kyi May Kaung - a.k.a. K.M.Kaung

Religious fragment from K.M. Kaung's novel Wolf

Embedded deep in the innermost portion of the stupa was the htapanar taik or jewel chamber, which no one could reach now.  It was said to contain eight strands of the sacred hair of the historic Buddha, Gautama ― who had once been Prince Siddhartha in a city state in northeast India, shielded from the world by his father the King ― before he saw The Four Signs:  A sick man, an old man, a rotting corpse and a religious medicant.  Due to The Four Signs he renounced everything and became a wandering ascetic and then the Buddha after his Enlightenment.  

Copyright Kyi May Kaung

K.M. Kaung's comment on - Dr Sean Turnell appointed Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's economic advisor -

 Photo - sending Chinese money to the dead - photo copyright K.M.Kaung.

This is very good - congratulations Sean. 
His name is spelled "Sean" and pronounced "Shawn" - I am on the board of his Burma Economic Watch at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

Daw Suu could not choose a better adviser. 

I and others first met Sean in 2002 at a Burma Studies conference in Gutenberg, Sweden. Sean had by then already been watching Burma professionally for many years. He knew so much about Burmese money and banking, I thought he had got special permission and gone to Burma and gotten the government's statistics. 

However, he had not gone at that time.
We all should note Daw Suu is not the government, nor the finance minister, and so whatever good advice she and Sean give, for instance, print less money, reduce the military budget, it is doubtful Thein Sein's govt will comply, in fact they have already raised military spending - so --
I am sorry to say this - but don't expect any real change from this excellent move.  The military government should change.
Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) 
Comment left on Ko Nyo's Face Book page. 
PS.  I forgot to mention on Ko Nyo's page that Dr. Sean Turnell was the author of the money and banking portion of the Plan for Democracy and Development for Burma, that I coordinated for the Exile Government in 2010

Rose after rain -

Photo copyright Kyi May Kaung (K.M. Kaung)

Cover design for special issue of International Gallerie, on Burma - hard look.

watch out for my article -/ Aung San Suu Kyi: Strange Collection of Clear Victories, by Dr. Kyi May Kaung/ in this special edition, upcoming./ Editor and founder Bina Sarkar Ellias commissioned this article - the two artistic and literary friends who connected me to Bina - Big thank you, and thanks Bina and International Gallerie.