Little Daughter, By Zoya Phan

Jungle girl who speaks for Burma's liberty

She was a jungle girl, and Zoya Phan's childhood was a long immersion in the elemental realities of country life on Burma's eastern border: the bamboo home on stilts, the ducks and chickens clucking underneath, the garden of aubergines and chillies, the perilous playground of forest and river, the elephants tame and wild, the feasts of pork curry and water spinach. Untold generations of Karen villagers have grown up as she did, learning which tree provides the giant leaves to roof the house, what is the meal that must be cooked (pumpkin and chicken curry) to reward villagers who help with the annual re-roofing, which plants to run to when a cut needs binding. How no Karen meal is complete without fish paste.

But this was bucolic, traditional country life on the hoof. For the whole of Zoya Phan's short life (she is 28) and for the previous 30-plus years, ever since Burmese independence from Britain, the Karen have been at war with the Burmese state, fighting to realise what the departing British promised but failed to provide: a Karen homeland. Children have a self-protective ability to conjure comforting normality out of unpromising circumstances, but true stability was elusive.

Both Zoya's parents became fighters in the Karen struggle for independence. Her father was a Rangoon student when General Ne Win seized power in 1962 and was caught up in the protests against the coup; her mother became a soldier with the Karen resistance movement, and only escaped to safety after a trek lasting five years.

The couple raised a family near Manerplaw, the overgrown village near the Moei river which for years was the centre of Karen resistance, and which after the brutal army crackdown of 1988 became a refuge for opponents and victims of the regime. Zoya loved her tireless, enterprising mother and her soft-hearted, romantic father whose passion was growing flowers, but the Karen struggle for survival was never far away. Playing in the river she discovered a putrid body, a Karen victim of the army.

Finally, as Zoya entered puberty, she learned what it means to find yourself under attack from the air. Manerplaw was destroyed, the family fled across the Thai border, and have been on the move ever since. Last year her father, by then general secretary of the Karen National Union, was assassinated.

One incidental hero of Little Daughter is George Soros: if it wasn't for the philanthropist, whose Open Society Initiative provided Zoya with a scholarship to study in Bangkok, she might have been trapped in the half-life of the refugee camp. As it was she learned the arts of blending in (she had no right of residence in Thailand) and then, outside the Myanmar Embassy in London, discovered that she had the gift of public speaking. Zoya's story is one of fulfilment in the teeth of terrifying odds. But the endless war grinds on.