Biography
Keharn Yawnghwe was born in Bangkok, Thailand but was unable to become a Muay Thai champion or learn how to make the perfect Pad Thai before his family moved to Discovery Bay, Hong Kong and enrolled him in preschool. After learning to read with Sheilia K McCullagh's Griffin Pirate readers and painting crocodiles in various shades of green, Keharn had a brief flirtation with the 6-day school week while in Maizuru, Japan but ultimately decided it was not for him. Thankfully, his family moved back to Canada when he was 6 and there he lived happily ever after until moving to Belgium.
In Belgium, Keharn learned to have a sense of humour, ate moule frites, and enjoyed Kafkaesque adventures. These included being moved around to different grades in the Belgian educational system, going back to Quebec to write his grade 10 provincial exams so he could salvage the year, and finally returning to Belgium to attend an international school instead. With the right mix of school and teen socializing, as well as regular athletic team trips around Europe, Keharn's attitude towards Belgium began to change and he was forced to wrestle with the question of whether ABBA's Waterloo was true and that he "couldn’t escape if I wanted to." Eventually, however, Keharn found that despite fond memories it was time to return to Canada and say goodbye to that famous battleground.
While identity politics would later become a focus of his Honours research on ethnic nationalism in Burma, questions of identity immediately challenged Keharn upon his arrival in Montreal, Quebec as he experienced reverse culture-shock and explored what it meant to be a Third Culture Kid (TCK). During this time, he took courses at Concordia and McGill, and later worked in a wide variety of jobs from clerical and administrative positions to network consulting. After making a decision to finish his university studies, Keharn enrolled in Trinity Western University and moved to Langley, British Columbia in January 2006.
In December 2009, after cramming his summers with extra coursework, Keharn graduated from Trinity Western University with a BA in Communications and a BA Honours in Political Studies. These degrees were further complimented by two certificates: one obtained in 2008 for developing a computer game for an interdisciplinary capstone project at the university; and a certificate in Applied Leadership and Public Affairs for spending the Fall 2009 semester working on Parliament Hill and studying at the Laurentian Leadership Centre in Ottawa, Ontario as part of the Laurentian Leadership program at Trinity Western University.
In Keharn's spare time he battles friends in SingStar - a competitive version of karaoke, plays his classical and electric guitars (badly), listens to real music (as opposed to his own), reads almost any genre as long as the writing is good, watches esoteric movies that are only comprehensible when the planets are in alignment, and hangs out with his friends and recently acquired industrial-grade light-payload robotic arm.