Home Books You've Changed: Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other…

You've Changed: Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other Comedies from Myanmar

You've Changed: Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other Comedies from Myanmar

by Pyae Moe Thet War

Catapult ·2022 ·224 pages
Maybe Someday
Maybe Someday
I Index
32/99
Near the Top

60/99

Critics' Rating Index

Bottom of the Pile

3/99

Readers' Rating Index

n/a

Scholars' Citation Index

51/99

Volume of Reviews

29/99

Volume of Reader Ratings

Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.


About This Book

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.


Reviews

"Across two essays [the author] lucidly examines her fraught relationship with her own name ..."

Nadia Owusu· The New York Times Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Probably the readers who benefit the most will have comparable trajectories, or at least some knowledge of societies that share some comparable characteristics to those of Myanmar, which is not for example alone in its naming patterns, difficult scripts, or ideals of femininity."

Jane Haile· The New York Journal of Books Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Particularly brilliant is her candid discussion of her conflicted feelings about writing about her heritage, which, at times, feels like a trap ..."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"sparkling essays suffused with cutting humor ..."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Near the Top

"She deftly skewers gender inequity ..."

Terry Hong· Booklist Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

Preview


Reader Reviews

0 reviews

Sign in to write a review.

No reader reviews yet. Be the first!