In 1996, she and her family managed to cross back into Burma, settling in a Karen village called Ther Waw Thaw (The New Village). When Zoya was 14, the Burmese army attacked Manerplaw and Per He Lu, forcing her and her family to run to Mae Ra Moh, a refugee camp just across the border in Thailand. When she was six, she began to spend more time in Manerplaw, and it was there she had her first exposure to the fighting in Burma, as land mine victims frequently went to the hospital there for treatment. She spent most of her early life in a Karen village called Per He Lu, an hour's walk away from the KNU headquarters in Manerplaw. Zoya got her unusual name from her father, who named her after the Russian World War II hero Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya because he saw several parallels between the Soviet fight against the Nazis and the Karen struggle against the Burmese government. Her father was Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan, General Secretary of the KNU, and her mother was Nant Kyin Shwe, a former soldier for the KNU. Zoya Phan was born in Manerplaw, then the headquarters of the Karen National Union (KNU), on 27 October 1980, the second of her parents' three biological children.
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