Pyae Moe Thet War

nonfiction/memoir - essays from Myanmar woman educated in American-accented English. Topics include: Myanmar names (War is not a "last" name--Moe Thet War is all one name, her whole name and Pyae Pyae is the nickname her parents chose carefully for her); feminism vs. sexist parts of Myanmar culture; learning to bake when baking in Myanmar is not a thing due to lack of dairy products; choosing not to have children; dating a British white man; being a token Brown writer and owing one's opportunities to one's ethnicity, but at the same time not wanting to have to be the spokesperson for an entire country of people with different experiences just to satisfy western curiosity, but also acknowledging that being Myanmar is part of one's identity; being fat-shamed for being a chubby kid who likes rice; and more.… (meer)

Pyae Moe Thet War's You've Changed is the kind of book we need more of:essay collections by writing living in regions that usually see little representation in the U.S. publishing world. War was raised and lives in Myanmar after completing college and graduate studies abroad. Because her topic is her own life, we can (unless we're deeply distrustful, which I'm not) take what she says as truth: these are things she's lived, these are how she experienced them, and these are the thoughts those experiences have left her mulling over.

War is an impeccable prose stylist and can lay out a complex, unresolved series of thoughts in a way that makes them engaging for readers. She's smart. She's not indulging in navel-gazing or pseudo-profundities. She has what we might call "modern sensibilities" and a strongly internalized sense of Myanmar culture and values, and she moves between these looking for balance.

My one disappointment is that there's almost no reflection on some of the current tensions in Myanmar, including the genocide (I think that's the appropriate word) against the Rohingya Muslims. I wanted the focus of her writer's lens to expand a bit, to look at how one wrestles with issues like this in a country that one loves.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own.… (meer)