Taipei is humid and gloomy in the winter. I have to make a point to go out, or I might end up wasting entire weekends just staying in bed where it’s warm. So it was a real blessing, to discover that my friend Lily Yang and her business partner had finally opened their Myanmar café.
When I dropped by in the afternoon, we were joined by Koko Thu. Now in his fifties, he’s lived in Taiwan for more than three decades after leaving Myanmar in 1988—a year of great bloodshed and sorrow for the people of his homeland. Lily, Koko Thu and I got to know one another in February 2021, when the Myanmar military seized power in a coup. 2021 isn’t that long ago, but it’s long enough to have undone all of Myanmar’s painstaking democratisation efforts and plunge the country into greater repression and violence.
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- Tags: Issue 30, Liang Liang, Taiwan