You've Changed
Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other Comedies from Myanmar
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this electric debut essay collection, a Myanmar millennial playfully challenges us to examine the knots and complications of immigration status, eating habits, Western feminism in an Asian home, and more, guiding us toward an expansive idea of what it means to be a Myanmar woman today
What does it mean to be a Myanmar person—a baker, swimmer, writer and woman—on your own terms rather than those of the colonizer? These irreverent yet vulnerable essays ask that question by tracing the journey of a woman who spent her young adulthood in the US and UK before returning to her hometown of Yangon, where she still lives.
In You’ve Changed, Pyae takes on romantic relationships whose futures are determined by different passports, switching accents in American taxis, the patriarchal Myanmar concept of hpone which governs how laundry is done, swimming as refuge from mental illness, pleasure and shame around eating rice, and baking in a kitchen far from white America’s imagination.
Throughout, she wrestles with the question of who she is—a Myanmar woman in the West, a Western-educated person in Yangon, a writer who refuses to be labeled a “race writer.” With intimate and funny prose, Pyae shows how the truth of identity may be found not in stability, but in its gloriously unsettled nature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this arresting debut, War reflects on her dual lives spent in the U.S. and Myanmar to cleverly explore notions of home and identity. Born and raised in Myanmar in the 1990s, War attended an international school and, from a young age, straddled differing cultures and clashing expectations—a reality that only intensified when she moved to the states for college. In sparkling essays suffused with cutting humor, she recounts her experiences as a "young, female Myanmar writer"—which she wryly claims is her "unique selling point" and also her biggest obstacle: "The chances that a publisher would want to publish two ‘Myanmar books'... in one year devastatingly slim." In "A Me by Any Other Name," she offers a historical and cultural explanation of the four names she goes by, while the beguiling "Laundry Load" delves into the Myanmar concept of "hpone"—which refers to "innate" powers men contain that can be "sapped" if their clothes come into contact with a woman's. Elsewhere, a long-distance relationship that ended because War and her boyfriend "couldn't get our paperwork in order" serves as a sharp critique of the absurdities of immigration laws that "hinge entirely on a wider societal belief in... imaginary lines in the earth." This is intoxicating.
