Secure Undaunted: My Struggle For Freedom And Survival In Burma Authored By Zoya Phan Readable In Edition

book enclasped things about the Karen tribe, evidence of being persistent to get what you want, and how it felt like to be a refugee during the attacks from the Burmese army.
It made me think about adaptation, war, and about the opportunities that I have available to me, I loved it, but i found it pretty challenging because of the slow plot more informative than plot driven, I liked how easy the language was simple and how everything was explained in a way easy for me to understand, I recommend this book to people who wish to learn more about the burmese attacks and what it takes to get recognized so that your voice could be used to help a cause.
. . This is one extraordinary memoir that will captivate everyone's heart, Full of vivid memories from the past that invites others' to enter her world of childhood and the time of suffering, Zoya has successfully raised not just only the awareness for Burma but also challenged us, as the world's citizens, to take action with brave heart for transformation in her homeland.
This is a really interesting life story about an incredible woman she has been through so much and got through it all with grace, positivity and determination, and established herself as a formidable figure in Burma's fight for democracy.
Unfortunately, you can tell it wasn't written by a professional writer I found the language and storytelling techniques quite repetitive and thought it had too much detail on fairly innocuous parts so I found it a bit of a slog to get through except the lastish where the pace picked up so it became more gripping.
. . I'm glad I got to the end though I learnt so much about the Burma civil war and it's made me want to read more on it.
I think it will make a brilliant film one day!! This is really an incredible book, While the Rohingya recently entered the news, the military dictatorship in Burma has been oppressing minority groups for decades, This is a really stark depiction of a refugee Zoya who made it out of Burma, and the steps that she had to take to do so.
I think one of the most valuable parts of the book is how she sets up the peaceful life she lived in Burma prior to being forced to flee her village and her emphasis on the common desire of refugees to be able to return to Burma at the end.
Her description of the gradual slope of further and further loss makes it all the more devastating as you want her to be able to hold onto the security and stability her family labors to create in each new place, only to watch them have to relocate again.
Phan has also led such an interesting life one of the few refugees receiving funds to attend university in Thailand, making the dangerous journey into rural Karen lands, and kind of stumbling into being an advocate for the Karen people.
Phan also benefits from the fact that Burma isn't something that most people know about, and it's a very troubling narrative to hear,
However, I think this book would really benefit from a second edition that updates what has occurred in Burma since then, Phan very much praises the democratic efforts of

Aung San Suu Kyi, who now faces calls for her Nobel Peace Prize to be revoked because of her lack of effort to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.
Since this book was published aboutyears ago, Phan doesn't have the chance to address any of this, and I would love to hear her perspective, Especially because Phan continually discusses the move towards democracy for Burma, and I really wonder what she would think of efforts so far, I will probably end up stalking her social media to figure it out, but I would love to see a second edition of this book that includes more current events and her work as an activist for Burma.

Also, I think they should've kept the title as "Little Daughter" what it was in the UK, It fits so well with the content of the book and her emphasis/relationship with her father, In contrast, "Undaunted" feels less personal, Also, the phrase "Little Daughter" is in the book about a million times, It just fits. I was particularly interested in this book because I visited Burma in, and the area along the border of Thailand and Burma a few years earlier, Even more, we now have a large group of Karen refugees in the school where I teach, This book helped me understand the type of experiences that their families endured, and what they might be thinking about their past, present and future, The book itself was more informative than gripping, but worth the read, Zoya Phans memoir Little Daughter was first published in, a timely period in the modern history of Burma, The year that preceded it,, was the year when the Cyclone Nargis stroke Burma and killed many people, as the State Peace and Development Council SPDC junta at that time failed to warn the people about the coming cyclone and blocked international aid out of fear of owing to the international community.
Two years after that, the top junta chief of the SPDC Senior General Than Shwe decided to step down from his supreme position, allowing Burma to transition into a semidemocratic country, dividing his power into a semicivilian executive power headed by retired general Thein Sein as the President and Senior General Min Aung Hlaing to succeed him as the CommanderinChief of the Defence Forces.
The latter happens to be at the helm of the selfstyled State Administration Council SAC, the junta that has been ruling Burma since the military takeover in February.


More than a decade after its first publication, the memoir stays relevant on its chief intentions, viz, to campaign for a better Burma, a better place for its people to live, and for Burma to be a beacon of freedom and peace, Zoya Phan was born as part of the ethnic Karen, one of the six major ethnic groups in Burma, The Karen people have been struggling to protect their rights ever since Burma gained its independence from the British in, The Karen National Union KNU is the oldest ethnic armed organisation EAO in Burma, first formed inwith an initial goal to create an independent state of Kawthoolei land without darkness for the Karen people, but finally changed its goal to instead establish a federal Karen State within a democratic Burma.
As a Karen, Zoya tells us her journey from a childhood inside a remote Karen village near the Thai border, moving several times to refugee camps in Thailand as her village got attacked by the Burmese army, into finding her way as a campaigner for democracy in the United Kingdom.


A bit of a warning for people who are about to read this book, the first half of it actually feels really dry and very factual as Zoya describes her childhood.
I almost DNFed it, but eventually the second half of it managed to convince me that this memoir is worthy of reading for anyone interested in learning more about Burma, its historical complexities, and specifically the struggles of the Karen people in the past few decades as an ethnic minority who got frequently targeted by Myanmars military campaigns.
Despite the fact that the KNU became a signatory of theNationwide Ceasefire Agreement, the KNU is still actively fighting the regime in its effort to restore democracy in Burma following the coup.
The Karen people now make up the largest internally displaced persons IDPs after the coup, with high influx of crossborder refugees to the Tak Province in Thailand.
Perhaps now there are many Karens reliving the story that Zoya already tells in this memoir with the latest developments,

There are some parts of the story which managed to bring tears to my eyes, I think history needs to be reduced to individuals through individual testimonies rather than solely relying on facts, The sorrows that Zoya experienced seem more alive, compared to reading statistics commonly cited by news reports which quickly become part of “the banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt would term it, as the chain of command in the army sometimes involves those “innocent” people who only carry out their orders, as exemplified by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
.