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I first met Pascal in 1995 and was amazed and humbled by him and his positive and hopeful outlook after a damaged life.
This is a wonderful book and is a true story of the spiritual and physical journey of a young man that begins in a small hill town in Burma then crosses borders,
cultures and countries and finally returns to where it all began. His book was published in 2002. Although it is his personal journey,
the story has all the elements of a thriller. It is about dire unbelievable conflict and the amazing strength of the human spirit.
It is spiritual in his overlying beliefs and those of his culture and adventurous in his escape from the violence of the student uprising of 1988 in Mandalay.
His first meeting with an academic, Dr John Casey from Cambridge University, who was briefly visiting Mandalay,
was to change his life and take him from the bloody streets there to the battles of the Kerenni rebels on the Thai border. He was wounded and wrote to Casey,
back in the UK, for help. Casey returned to rescue him. A few years later Pascal gained entry to Cambridge and got his degree. Twenty years later,
he returned to Burma. The writing is an example of the fine balance of light and dark, tragedy and comedy and the agonizing whips of unbelievable pain and resilience.
It also is a study in the scope of storytelling that crosses the boundaries of fiction but is, in fact, fact.
I hope it has made me a more sensitive and observant writer.
