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And on his father’s side, the author is descended from a long line of courtiers who served at Burma’s Court of Ava for nearly two centuries. His maternal grandfather, U Thant, rose from being the schoolmaster of a small town in the Irrawaddy Delta to become the UN secretary-general in the 1960s. In The River of Lost Footsteps, Thant Myint-U tells the story of modern Burma, in part through a telling of his own family’s history, in an interwoven narrative that is by turns lyrical, dramatic, and appalling. Drawing both on his own family’s stories and his years of hands-on political experience working with the United Nations, Thant Myint-U has written an illuminating account of how Burma’s rich past informs its violent present, and of how the world might transform the country’s future. It is also the sight of the longest-running conflict in the world. Burma is currently ruled by a harsh dictatorship unmoved by Western activists and sanctions. In 1967, two years into the cultural revolution, he had to leave school and did whatever work he could in the village brigade. Mo Yan (莫言) was born Guan Moye (管谟业) in Dalan township, Gaomi, Shandong, China, in February 1955. Her nephew’s wife dies in such a procedure. She started her career delivering babies in the prosperous first decades under the reign of Chairman Mao and as a loyal Party Member she eventually hunted women pregnant for a repeated time to implement the one-child policy and abort the foetus however late. The letters forming the epistolary novel Frog by Mo Yan, the controversial Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012, evoke the life of a woman born in 1937 who was an obstetrician in Northeast Gaomi Township for over fifty years. Above all the daily lives of the average people under the strict guidance of the Communist Party lie widely in the dark. The history of twentieth-century China is one of many violent changes that made the masses suffer a lot, but because of the geographical, cultural and political distance Westerners like me know very little about it. |