Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 A bronze drum
- 2 Boar Tusk's children
- 3 White collar Flowerland
- 4 True Love at home
- 5 Water child, land child
- 6 A simple man
- 7 Fighting mean, fighting clean
- 8 Great Lake and the Elephant Man
- 9 Bartholomew's boarders
- 10 The three seasons
- Interlude: from the Kok river
- 11 Last of the longhouses
- 12 A delicate bamboo tongue
- 13 True Love in love
- 14 Fermented monkey faeces
- 15 Perfect hosts
- 16 Old guard, young Turks
- 17 True Love and White Rock
- 18 Insurgents in a landscape
- 19 True Love and sudden death
- 20 Portraits
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Great Lake and the Elephant Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 A bronze drum
- 2 Boar Tusk's children
- 3 White collar Flowerland
- 4 True Love at home
- 5 Water child, land child
- 6 A simple man
- 7 Fighting mean, fighting clean
- 8 Great Lake and the Elephant Man
- 9 Bartholomew's boarders
- 10 The three seasons
- Interlude: from the Kok river
- 11 Last of the longhouses
- 12 A delicate bamboo tongue
- 13 True Love in love
- 14 Fermented monkey faeces
- 15 Perfect hosts
- 16 Old guard, young Turks
- 17 True Love and White Rock
- 18 Insurgents in a landscape
- 19 True Love and sudden death
- 20 Portraits
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Heirs of our black and red costume,
honour your own culture, the drums
we inherited from our ancestors.
If we don't preserve it, it will be lost.
Don't desire other people's houses: ours are fine.
Don't eat others' rice, come back to your mother's!
Water from old wells is coolest.
Flowers from afar will leave you in tears.
Song recorded for me by Ku Wah and True LoveYodoyamai Cordial, my introduction to Great Lake's family, is a patent medicine, a rich brown liquid much like soy sauce, made in Burma and widely consumed in Kawthoolei. I bought a bottle because I wanted a copy of the leaflet that went with it, and because Great Lake said that he would give the contents to his wife Lili.
On the leaflet there are four illustrations, unfortunately printed from very old blocks on poor paper, or I'd have had them framed. In the first scene, desperate persons are drowning in the choppy seas of Ill Health, only their heads and thrashing hands still above water. A queenly apparition in the sky, buxom and radiant, is holding up a comforting sight, a glowing bottle of Yodoyamai Cordial, while pointing them towards the good ship Yodoyamai which, with a Red Cross fluttering from its prow, is steaming to the rescue.
In frame two, a wasted figure lies on what threatens very soon to be her deathbed, dimly lit by a table lamp, her anxious husband helpless by her side. In the distance, tombstones may be glimpsed in the penumbra. Useless pills and potions litter the table.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- True Love and BartholomewRebels on the Burmese Border, pp. 118 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991