The 32-year-old writer Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Burma, now Myanmar. She lived briefly in Bangkok before emigrating to San Jose, California with her family before she turned eight. Myint has no solid memories of Burma other than what has been dutifully told to her by older sisters and parents. Her family fled the country shortly after pro-democracy protestors were crushed in 1988 by the military junta that still wields absolute power. Myint’s father, an educator, managed to secure a teaching job in Thailand which became their escape route to America. During the past decade, Myanmar has drawn the world’s ire for the government’s ferociously vile ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority, who have been fleeing in massive numbers to Bangladesh.
Myint is struck by the violent history and current upheavals in Myanmar. But this knowledge does not preclude her rising irritation with Americans who, after finding out where she is from, annoy her with intimidating questions about her homeland, and wait for her to express gratitude for being in America (which she intentionally withholds). She is thankful for her new opportunities that have taken her to a teaching career at Amherst College. But she doesn’t identify as American. The concept of “place” remains opaque for her. She is inextricably caught up in the turbulent stories of her family’s past and has grown weary of answering questions about her ethnicity and skin color. She writes, “Whiteness is not a color or a race or an ethnicity but a construct of power, the power to speak, to tell stories, not only about oneself, but about other people.” Yet questions linger over her narrative. Whom is she writing for? Is she trying to reveal or conceal? Is she deceiving herself or trying to deceive others? Is this an attempt to reconnect with a family that obsesses her, but from whom she seems estranged? The mystical beauty of her prose, which seems to speak to us in intermittent revelations, transports us elsewhere, but it is an unnamable place, a territory of lostness.
In Names for Light, she anoints herself as the family chronicler, and speaks of the elaborate preparation ritual she has undertaken to begin her task. She writes:
“There are no marks on my body from a previous life. Unlike my eldest sister, I was born perfectly blank, perfectly bare. For years, I waited for a mark to appear, a sign of who I was or had been or would become. I searched my body, read and reread it carefully. The sharp point of a tooth, the shape of my hands, the places where I could not bear to be touched: my back, my pelvis, under my chin. I was afraid to change my body in any way, to leave my own mark upon it. I got no tattoos, no piercings. I never dyed my hair, and the one time I had it chemically straightened, I shaved it off afterwards. I believed I had to keep my body plain and pristine if I was to receive a sign.”
Myint floats backwards in time and tells us of her paternal great-grandmother who was left widowed with many children. She wonders how her great-grandmother handled the distress. Most of her children got into serious trouble. One became a gangster, another was imprisoned, still another died in a street fight. Only her paternal grandfather seemed sturdy enough to withstand the turbulence and he would become the father of her father. She admires her great-grandfather and father’s centeredness but there is a part of her that fantasizes about her great-uncles and their unrestrained wildness thinking “If I had a thousand lives, I might have been more like my great-uncles: braver, bolder, and wilder. But I have only one life, at least one life at a time, and in this life, I am my father’s daughter and my grandfather’s granddaughter. Like them, I am the observer, I am the outsider, always in the middle of the story but never at the center of it.” But we hear the irony in her proclamation. After all, she is the writer; and thus has supreme power to embellish or omit whatever she chooses to, without asking anyone’s permission. Thus, she becomes the center, and all others rest beneath her.
A few stories recur throughout her narrative. One involves a brother who was born to her parents first, and who died shortly afterwards because he could not hold down his nourishment. She believes that years later, when her sister began putting her finger down her throat to induce vomiting, she was perhaps mourning the death of the brother she never knew. The brother that still haunts their mother’s dreams. Myint writes “Vomiting was the activities of ghosts … ghosts could not speak or touch or bleed, but they could vomit. Vomit or ghosts, the ultimate others, the abject, that which can be rejected from the body, in death or in times of distress when reality is rejected …” Myint frequently refers to her mother’s thwarted ambitions and an uncomfortable competitiveness between them. Yet in another way, Myint’s family remain muffled by her separation from them. She never mentions any demonstrations of love or tenderness between any of them. Nor are there any remembrances of her mother or father comforting her when she was sick or distressed.
Myint occasionally disrupts her rhythm and speaks to us in a plainer, more brittle voice. She admits to an inclination to keep her suffering from others. She tells of her gratefulness in having found an affectionate white man whom she plans to marry. She marvels at his ability to grasp the freely associational nature of her writing. She talks about her student’s difficulties when writing about love. She writes about her mother’s depression when they first came to California. When she was young and would misbehave, her mother would say “Do you want something bad to happen? Do you want your mother or father to die?”
At its simmering core, Names For Light is itself the “place” where the family’s past – and Myint’s dynamically evolving present — approach each other. The tug and pull of these forces, and the broader awareness of tyranny in the world, comprise an environment for the reader that is both demanding in its multiple vectors and gratifying in its patterning and acute intelligence.
[Published by Graywolf Press on August 17, 2021, 176 pages, $16.00 paperback]