In Little Daughter: A Memoir of Survival in Burma and the West,
Zoya Phan writes of her childhood growing up in the remote jungles of Burma,
the daughter of a guerilla soldier and a freedom activist. The first time I
tried to read the book I was frustrated by the writing style. It felt like she
was going to tell a story, and then would get sidetracked into telling details
about living in the jungles of Burma: how to find mushrooms or how his brother
got his name. Once I took a step back and realized that those details were
actually quite interesting, I started to enjoy the book more. I teach English
to adults who belong to the Karen tribe from Burma and I picked up this book to
learn more about their history and their lives before coming to Nebraska. My expectation
that the book would be more political in nature was thwarting my ability to
read and understand what Zoya Phan was telling me about her childhood. Once I
started to make connections with a couple of other writers who I’ve enjoyed,
such as Laura Ingalls Wilder who shared a lot about how things were done on the
Prairie, and Kirkpatrick Hill, who in various books, including Bo at Ballard Creek, details of the life of a child growing
up in an Alaskan mining town in Alaska at the turn of the century, I enjoyed
learning the details of being a Karen child growing up in the jungles of Burma,
and then her experiences as she became an adult and a spokesperson for the
Karen people.
At first I found this book
difficult to read; it seemed slow going and hard to follow. I felt like with
every chapter, I would expect the story to be headed in one direction but then
the writing would get bogged down in details that didn’t seem to move the story
forward. I was committed to reading it though — this story is very important
because of how unusual and how unlikely it is for this kind of first hand
account to be shared with the world. For people who are caught in the middle of
warring factions, experiencing discrimination and genocide, that are out of
favor with the powers that be, the very act of telling their stories brings
danger on them and their families. Meanwhile, people who have managed to leave
these situations are usually caught in the struggle to survive in a new culture
and learn a new language. Many times their experiences, since they don’t have
the language skills to fluently share them, are lost in the difficulties of
daily existence. Zoya Phan is an unusual character in that she has the language
skills and the experience relatively concurrently. For that reason, if she
wants to dwell a bit in her childhood memories, and share the full story of who
she is, it is worth the extra effort it takes to understand and follow her
story the way *she* wants to tell it.
[If
you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Miss Burma, by Charmaine Craig, and In My Faraway Land, by Lue Mu.]
[
publisher’s official Little Daughter web site ] | [ Wikipedia page for Zoya Phan ]
Have you read this one? What
did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
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