Little Daughter

Little Daughter by Zoya Phan Pocket Books HK$136

Zoya Phan's father had named his daughter after Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the Russian woman who died a martyr in the Soviet resistance against the Nazis. He had seen similarities between Kosmodemyanskaya's struggle and that of the resistance of Myanmar, whose Karen and other ethnic groups are targeted in the junta's extermination efforts, Zoya Phan writes. Her readable, though sometimes cloying, memoir takes her from eastern Myanmar to a Thai refugee camp, then to Bangkok (after she won a scholarship) and in 2004 to Britain, where she was granted asylum. One of Phan's earliest memories of her people's suffering was of villages reduced to famine because of the regime's Four Cuts policy, which called for supplies, information, recruits and food to the Karen to be severed. Phan, whose father was a resistance leader and whose mother a guerilla, tells her story with the help of Damien Lewis although, by the time she reached Britain, her English was good enough for her to study at the University of East Anglia. Ironically, It wasn't until then that she could learn about her country, including the scale of its human rights abuses.