Names for Light: A Family History

by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyrical meditation on family, place, and inheritance

Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family’s stories move into the present, her own story―that of a writer seeking to understand who she is―moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book.

Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family’s legacy.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Asia, Essays, Biography

176 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 2021

Reviews

[may ➹ · Rating 4 out of 5]

“She felt there was no distance left between the holy and herself and so the holy was no longer holy.”

🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠

short rtc

[Leah Rachel von Essen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Names for Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was a lyrical, poetic memoir about memory, about being part of a family narrative most of which you can't remember or know.

Myint was young when her family moved from Myanmar to Bangkok and then the US, and she has few memories of it, yet it influences and informs everything she does. The death of her older brother as a baby—the trauma of the political shifts and violence—the sharp isolation of at once feeling bound to the stories and myths of Myanmar and not remembering her own time there—all come together as an intriguing, poetic story of history and memory.

The language is poetic and streams forward. Sometimes it can be difficult to tug apart the web and figure out who is speaking or being spoken about, but I think this was very intentional, a choice to tangle the histories and narratives for the reader as much as they are tangled in Myint's own head and heart. She writes of racism, microaggressions, pain, grief, the generational emotions passed down, the connections to Myanmar that still tug at her. The paragraphs float on the page surrounded by white space, another way to mirror the strange pulls and pushes of the story.

It is a beautifully written book about memory, ancestry, and immigration, for fans of Ocean Vuong. I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Names for Light is out August 17 from Graywolf Press.

[Shelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A memoir, a family history, unlike any I've read before. Beautifully written, with space to breathe in the stories, history, and myths of Burma, and her own story. But not just a telling of family history, a discovery of self as well, that comes to a beautiful conclusion.

Ethnicity and race rears it's head her whole life as people either ask her where she's from or just assume that she's Asian or Latina. Finally, women in Madrid tell her, "Wherever you're from, you're beautiful."

Absolutely no surprise that this book won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize.

[Jen K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrical history of her family, both in Burma and in the US, interwoven with her own struggle with having lived her life in the US but continuously faced with the question of where she is REALLY from. Her family's history and the history of Burma is one that I wasn't as familiar with and enjoyed the poetic version of ghosts and surviving family choices.

[지훈 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly well-written, and ethereal in composition. Although the style is very fluid, similar to Ocean Vuong without the poetic flourishes, Myint is so talented at weaving together identity, personal history, culture, and the sense of listlessness that infects the book and reader. Also, given that I haven't yet read a lot of Southeast Asian, non-Vietnamese memoirs, so I feel like this is a valuable addition to those in the same lacking context I am in.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

stories patched together from memory or mis-memory or conjecture or family folklore or logical deduction or an empty space where a memory should be

stories fragmented by location / dislocation

the non-linear quality of the book perfectly mirrors how memories come disconnected from a before or after

this incomplete memory, not in any order of time or place, is also how I remember or fail to remember

she writes in first person at times and in 3rd person at other times, reflecting how she sometimes sees herself from a distance

final chapter is very moving and should be read in one sitting

She could not conceive what it must have been like for the conquistadors, to believe that wherever you went, you were a god.

[isra · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75 💫

This book was so gentle to itself and to me. The only word that keeps coming to me is “delicate”. In a way- the elasticity was tested. Excited for the generations that come after the author’s time. Imagine having something this precious be a secondary continuation of your bloodline.

[Htet · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 if I could do half stars

[Lissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5⭐️

[Karen]

A pensive memoir of growing up divided between Myanmar/Burma and the United States, with all that that implies and entails.

[Ohm Mar · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I started reading the book I couldn’t put it down. it made me realize that the question “ Where we are from?” is not a question that can easily be answered. In fact, there may never be an answer to this question. In essence, that’s the real beauty of this book. Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint makes it crystal clear that the journey is more important than the destination. In this one-of -a-kind book she takes us on an unforgettable discovery of self that can be breathtaking at times, shocking, uplifting, and most important of all inspirational.
As I finished the book, tears welled-up in my eyes.
Were they tears of joy or sorrow I wouldn’t know?
I do know however that for whatever reason Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s book - “ Names for Light” filled my heart with joy, sorrow and an undefinable sense of longing.
by Ohmar Winn

[Kayla Boss · Rating 4 out of 5]

“…opposites are not vastly different, but often almost the same. like a shadow, or a reflection.”

a lyrical, poetic, memoir centered on the experience of immigration but at times, more about what cannot be remembered and what cannot be given to the white people who feel as though they deserve the story of the immigrant, of the immigrant parents, or of the trauma of… the author takes us through an uncovering of her own understanding of her identity and the experiences of her family. she explores the violence of colonialism on her own family and how that has shaped her life, in ways that she can grasp even through what is unknown or not remembered, where there is white space.

at times, i was slightly confused about what was happening and there is so much vagueness in the writing, which is beautiful and complex, and also challenging. i do recommend picking this up.

thank you so much to @graywolf and @thirimyokyawmyint for the ARC!

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

"If the English word for river had not been river, but had been something else, root, for example, or depth, I think the British would have sailed up the Irrawaddy all the same. Roots too can be parasitic. There are plants that extract nutrients and water, not from the earth, but from the bodies of other plants. There is a name for roots that do this: haustoria. There is a name for every kind of violence."

(p204)

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

“To me, his name sounded like the word for enter, for inside, win or winn, my mother’s name and my mother’s father’s. A light shining from the inside. A window lit up at twilight, in winter, the snow and the sky the same white-blue and the window a small glimpse of yellow, glowing softly in the quiet cold. Clear and wide vacant space, another translation I found of my brother’s name. The space between the stars, or between the earth and the moon. The light that travels that wide expanse.”

I have worked with refugees from Myanmar for many years now from many of the tribes with different languages, so I was excited to read a literary perspective of their worldview, and it was excellent, challenging, heartbreaking, and alive. Finding her place and way and threading her family’s history and the larger cultural worldview was written about with a unique voice that echoes. The home country is shrouded in war right now, but she had been able to return before, and threads that through also, in a way that makes you feel the homeland and the displacement. An eternal story made new by an amazing writer.

Sometimes I forget what I look like because I see myself every day. I look in the mirror and I see skin the color of skin, hair the color of hair, eyes the color of eyes. I forget to see what they see: difference, otherness.

This place repeated enough times begins to sound like displaced. Displaced is where we moved to, displaced is where I grew up, displaced is where I am from.

She walked and walked, but there was no place in the city where she could be alone. The ceaseless blue sky gave her no privacy, no space or separation from the heavens. She felt there was no distance left between the holy and herself and so the holy was no longer holy. It was obscenely green parks and unrelenting sunlight. Streets that ran in straight lines and met one another at perfect right angles. The highway to the mountains packed with cars every weekend.

Someone once told her all the trees in the city were planted by settlers, and even though she did not believe it, she began to feel a tenderness toward the trees. As she drove to the university through a tunnel of green, the trees on either side evenly spaced, all the same girth and height, it was easy for her to imagine them as saplings growing neatly in a row. The surrounding city not yet a city, but an open plain. The trees had been brought here by forces outside of their control, she thought, but unlike her, they could not leave, but had to continue growing in this strange land where no trees had grown beforej

The word for home in Bamar is the same as the word for house. Aain, a dwelling, a shelter, a residence. A hollow word, whereas home is full. Aain, like the sound of a gong, or a singing bowl struck on its side. A sound that opens, that begins. Home sounds like a mouthful, like the feeling of fullness, of bloating, homeland, expanding to cover the earth. One can fall ill from the idea of home, the idea of its loss, homesickness is felt in the body, though it arises from language. There is no abstract concept of home for the Bamar. There is a people, a land, a country, all words that evoke patriotic feelings, but home, aain, is very private, very intimate, and every house is a home, not only the house that belongs to me.

They claimed that Myanmar was a more inclusive term than Burma, which translated to land of the Bamar, but Bamar and Myanmar were synonyms, so Myanmar also translated to land of the Bamar. There is no word, no name that unites all the people who lived or live in the region now encompassed by the boundaries of the present-day country.

She had always resented having to identify with Burma, Burman, and Burmese, when all of these were anglicized names. Bamar was what I identified with, what united my family with other immigrants and refugees, regardless of race, or ethnicity, or religion. It was only when I returned to Yangon to teach English one summer in college that I heard the word Myanmar used as an identity marker. We are Myanmar, my teenage students said. It was one of the few phrases they had been taught in English. Myanmar, a nationality. Something from which those of us who grew up in the diaspora had been excluded.

She read in a book that her friend wrote about the death of her friend’s mother that memories are precarious. Each time a memory is recalled, it must be pieced together again as if for the first time. Another friend once told her that he knew a man who believed he was an angel before he was born. This man could not remember having been an angel anymore, but he could still remember the feeling of remembering that he was. She treasured that: a memory of a memory.

[Valerie HappiestWhileReading · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In a story about the before-and-after life the awakened one asks a girl four questions:

Where do you come from?
Where are you going?
Do you not know?
Do you know?"

- Names For Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

This intense non-fiction title, winner of the 2018 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, was like learning about the author's family history in a series of dreams. The visual presentation of the text is a clue to the unique reading experience it provides. Most pages consist of one or two paragraphs surrounded by white space.

In a non-linear timeline, the author shares events from four generations of her relatives plus herself, organized by geographical locations around the world. The family’s origin story begins in Berma (now Myanmar), then more recently in Thailand, Spain, and the United States.

Throughout Names For Light, Ms. Myint never uses names but identities individuals based on familial relationship; she also writes about herself in the third person. Both are interesting choices for a book that's deeply personal. Reincarnation and ghosts are important to the family’s beliefs and impact each generation - so different from my own experiences.

Thank you to Graywolf Press for the review copy of this powerful book; all thoughts are my own.

[Gina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s memoir looks back at her family’s history in Myanmar and her own life in multiple countries, including Thailand, Spain, and the United States. The book takes shape, in some ways, as an answer to that ubiquitous question, “Where are you from?” Are we from the places we’ve lived, or the people who’ve given us life? How can we claim our histories when the chain of memories is broken and fragmented?

When it comes to my own life, I tend to diminish my lived experience; I’m so hung up on how an objective observer might would record it. (There’s a lot to say about growing up believing the observer’s perspective is more important than one’s own, but I’ll leave it at that.) The truth is, what I have seen and felt is known only to me, and that’s why it’s so precious. So I found it really refreshing that Myint fully embraced memory’s power and couched her memoir in the stories her family has shared, and the specific words they've used. As a daughter of immigrants, I really connected with this. Prior to researching Chile, my image of my parents’ country was truly built of the stories, myths, and words that my parents used. Where we are from isn’t a place, it’s a story.

[Andrea Irvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This highly unusual book is a work of creative non-fiction, which jumps back and forth across time and place. The structure often circles back upon itself, reiterating themes and motifs, reminding me a musical round or canon. I found her stylistic choices interesting even if I am not sure I understood them. Ditto for her use of space and choices of what to include – she barely mentions Thailand, where she lived for years, or California, where she grew up. It is a book of profound dislocation, which made me reflect on how her life and indeed all our lives are initially dictated by the choices made by others, namely our parents. (It reminded me of a passage in another book I read recently in which a woman suggests to another woman that she should not have a baby because the child would not have any say about being born and being made to live.) In this book, her mother had staked everything on going abroad and I would have been interested to know how she felt about that choice now. Interesting and very different.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a fragile and blurry beauty to this book. As someone looking at ways to look at her own family history and ancestors, I have an interest in the archtecture and the structure of the book, of the pieces and sections of it, of its movement through time, the placement of words on pages and across them. There are bones and flesh here, muscles and tendon, and yet I'm still not sure entirely how it works, or if I like how it's working, yet it works. It is one thing, and many things, alive and ghost.

In parts I lose track of who is who and who is saying what, as people are mostly identified through relationship, not name, which is in keeping with the oral tradition of so much family storytelling. I also felt more distance in the third person sections in spite of them being about the author, while the first person sections reach across generations, yet feel more immediate. There's a discomfort generated by this, but one I could sit within. 3.5 to 3.75 stars rounded up to 4.

[Thomas DeWolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard an interview with the author of Names for Light on NPR and was intrigued. I was not disappointed. What a fascinating look into the lives of the author and her family... both living and dead and/or reincarnated... I learned a lot about Myanmar/Burma as she shared stories of herself, her siblings, her parents, grandparents, and great grandparents and their lives there before immigrating to the U.S. She highlights the long-term damage from colonialism and military power-mongering, and raises ghosts and dreams and hopes with engaging prose. Even the layout of the paragraphs on the pages is different from any other book I've read in a long time. Well worth reading.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and moving. Has a kind of looping, hypnotic structure, just the way our minds probe and revisit memories and ideas again and again.

I found it hard to keep track of which grandparent and great grandparent was which (her mother's? her father's?) as elements of their stories returned though the narrative, but this never diminished the stories' power. I also wondered about the grandparents and great grandparents whose stories are not told here (which got me reflecting on my own great grandparents, and how I have four sets of them, but only ever met one set, so they are the only ones I've reflected on much...)

[Sangita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part poetry, part memoir, part fairy tale - all swirling together until the author ties up the pieces in the end in a movingly personal chapter about light and memory and telling her story.

This book made me think of my own story - and of my grandparents and great-grandparents. It made me reflect on privilege and whiteness and this freaking Asian monolith myth that is getting out of control.

Sections of this book taught me about the violent history of Bamar. Sections of this book reminded me of the micro-aggressions we face every day.

[Idyll · Rating 4 out of 5]

People who believe in superstitions inhabit a different dimension; they have one foot in reality and one that expertly navigates several other planes of existence. They perceive things more deeply and intensely than others. Myint's book is imbued with familial love. It is as if her experiences in the present can only be understood in the context of her family's past, and the past extends across the breadth of time! She has a real gift for reflection!

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up. Like others have mentioned, this is a lyrical, almost dream-like reflection/memoir about the author's personal/familial history. There are themes about memory, language, place/movement/belonging/displacement conveyed through the sparse prose, blank spaces, and deliberately vague narrators. As I read this in multiple sittings, it took me a while to connect the different narrators and characters.

[Megan Stroup Tristao · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeously written family history and memoir from a woman who was born in Myanmar (Burma), spent her childhood in Bangkok and moved to the U.S. when she was 7. The book is mostly focused on her family's history in Burma, then the author's experience in the U.S. I picked this one up because won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and I tend to like Graywolf books. I hope more people read this.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quote from the book about the authors own writing style: “She writes in the same way she got through recess, by creating arbitrary goals, and x uses to move from one place to another, moving in circles, the movement itself an approximation of living, a mimicry of life.”

[Tarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astounding and unique. The empty spaces, ghosts, and memories will stick with me for a long time. I have never read anything like this book, and in particular I love the way Myint writes about her own place in the family history that surrounds her.

[Deviant Bates · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous. Regenerative. A rich narrative cradled in lyrical writing. If you're interested in hybrid works, experimental types, or a very good multigenerational story about memory and location then this is it.

[Xixi Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t believe it took me this long to read this book. The language is brilliant and beautiful. The book is lavished with moments that seem to follow common knowledge, but then the language suddenly turns and creates a new idea within a commonly discussed one.

[Melblue · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book means everything to me

[Jennie Chantal]

DNF at 46%