You’ve Changed – Pyae Moe Thet War

Description

How to be a Myanmar person—a baker, swimmer, writer and woman—on your own terms rather than those of the colonizer? You’ve Changed traces 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 these irreverent yet vulnerable essays 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.