The child started reading and everything went along just fine until she got to that word. It was only five letters, but there might as well have been twenty there. She said it the way her father had told her, but she knew it was wrong because Miss Choi would not turn the page. Instead, she pointed to the word and tapped at the page as if by doing so the correct sound would spill out. But the child didn’t know how to pronounce it. Tap. Tap. Tap. Finally, a yellow-haired girl in the class called out, “It’s knife! The k is silent,” and rolled her eyes as if there was nothing easier in the world to know. ~ How to Pronounce Knife
Right from the start and this title story (in which a little girl from Laos attempts to protect her immigrant parents from the things that they don’t know about their new country that make her life a little harder, “She didn’t want to lie, but there was no point in embarrassing her parents”), I was prepared for Souvankham Thammavongsa — an award winning poet and short story writer who “was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and was raised and educated in Toronto where she now lives” — to teach me something of what it is to be an immigrant or refugee from Laos, now living in North America. And I was excited for that because I don’t remember ever reading or hearing about the Laotian experience before. Most of these stories do have a nugget of that experience in them, and many have universally relatable domestic scenes, but while the writing was clear and the reading was easy, nothing about this collection really felt strong or important enough to explain why How to Pronounce Knife won Canada’s richest literary award, the Giller Prize, this year. There were a handful of four star stories at either end of this collection, a couple I would give two stars, and the vast majority were nice, three star reads; three stars overall (and I will be looking for the novel that Thammavongsa is apparently now working on; I’d love a longer visit with any of these characters.)
She hated that he called her by a nickname. It made things feel intimate between them in a way she didn’t want. The way he said, “Dang,” it was like a light in him had been turned on and now she had to be responsible for what he could see about himself. ~ Paris
An interesting meditation on beauty and otherness, and especially the value (and cost) of the Western ideal of beauty as seen by an outsider (“In that moment, Red felt grateful for what she was to others — ugly. It’s one thing to be ugly and not know it. It’s another to know.”)
That’s the thing about being old. We don’t know we have wrinkles until we see them. Old is a thing that happens on the outside. A thing other people see about us. ~ Slingshot
Aging is just another form of alienation.
She held this little radio up to her ear like a seashell and listened. The host always spoke briefly between songs and there was the occasional laugh. A laugh, in any language, was a laugh. His laugh was gentle and private and welcoming. You got the sense that he, too, was alone somewhere.~ Randy Travis
The things we use to fill the lonely voids can sometimes take us over; perhaps those that feel a cultural void from dislocation are more at risk of losing themselves.
You’ve got to not have dreams. That woman ain’t ever gonna love a man who does nails. That’s not real life. You and me here, we live in the real world. You’re given a place and you just do your best in it. ~ Mani Pedi
The adult children of Laotian refugees, a retired boxer takes a job in his sister's beauty salon and refuses to surrender to his new place in the world.
Dad parked the car and told us we were to walk from house to house dressed like this, then yell, “Chick-A-Chee!” at the person who answered the door and hold out our open pillowcases for them to fill with all kinds of candies. I did not believe him. I was certain that he had really lost his job and what we were doing was part of his plan to send us away, something our parents often threatened when we were misbehaving or we wanted something they didn’t have the money for. I wanted to cry, but I saw how my brother was looking at me — like he needed me to be brave for the both of us. ~ Chick-A-Chee!
A really sweet slice-of-life story about a refugee family trying to fit in with new customs (and the Dad who, for once, gets it absolutely perfect.)
Look, I know these things. You just can’t have a Lao wedding without Lao letters on the invitation. And you have to have your real given name on there. Yeah, it’s a long name — but that’s your name. Why would you want to be Sue when your name is really Savongnavathakad? ~ The Universe Would Be So Cruel
A man who “knows things” about how the universe really works must accept extra responsibility when things don’t work out close to home. Another interesting slice of life with a Dad doing his best in unfamiliar territory.
I thought of what my mother knew then. She knew about war, what it felt like to be shot at in the dark, what death looked like close up in your arms, what a bomb could destroy. Those were things I didn’t know about, and it was all right not to know them, living where we did now, in a country where nothing like that happened. There was a lot I did not know. We were different people, and we understood that then. ~ Edge of the World
A heavier story: you can run from your past but you can’t run from your self.
He wanted to remind his wife that his name was Jai. It means heart in Lao! he wanted to yell. But then she would just remind him how men in this country do not raise their voices at women. Or tell him to practise his English. “No one here knows jai means heart,” she would say. So what if that’s what it means? It doesn’t mean anything in English. And English is the only language that matters here. ~ The School Bus Driver
A story of a refugee husband who becomes lost as his wife finds herself and her happiness.
When you’re a mother, you create a life and then you watch it go on its own way. It’s what you hope for, and want, but when it happens, it happens without you. ~ You Are So Embarrassing
The gulf between a refugee mother and daughter increases exponentially as the one tries to get by and the other tries to fit in.
“The first time a guy says ‘I love you,’ your legs will pry themselves open like this.” She held up two fingers and spread them slowly to form a peace sign, and as she did this, she made the sound of a door opening on rusty hinges: “Ewwrrrkk.” Then she shut her eyes tight, threw her head back, and laughed at her own crudeness. The sound of her laughter came mostly from her throat, like a dry cough. ~ Ewwrrrkk
An eight-year-old girl gets life advice from her great-grandmother (which might have seemed mischievously useful to the old woman but no longer applies in the real world) and this one was by turns kinda funny and just sad.
What was the difference between someone who lied about love and someone who didn’t love you? Nothing. ~ The Gas Station
Not necessarily an immigrant story, this is about the short and dark fairytale-ish relationship between an ogre-like man and the (socially) invisible woman who would be monstrous.
Dad always talked about life as if it spilled out all at once and we couldn’t have time to think or do anything about what was going to happen to us. He talked like he had to tell me everything now because we’d never see each other again. I’d roll my eyes at him, but that only made him go on. It always circled back to how different Katie and I were, and how I wouldn’t get the same things she got in her life. ~ A Far Distant Thing
Maybe the refugee Dad is right this time and the same childhood circumstances don’t guarantee the same adult outcomes for two friends of different races.
Me and my mother were the only women. There were about fifteen men, and they were all Lao like us. We were what people called us — nice. I had seen these men before at the card parties my mother went to. She cooked meals with their wives in the kitchen. When we all sat down to eat on those nights, everyone would talk about their work, their bosses, how hard it was back home, how they all came to the country we live in now — but no one cried or talked sad. They all laughed. The sadder the story, the louder the laughter. Always a competition. You’d try to one-up the person who’d come before you with an even more tragic story and a louder laugh. But no one was laughing here. Every face was serious. ~ Picking Worms
Many of these stories are about the hard, manual labour that the Laotian community is forced to engage in — doctors and lawyers showing up to twelve hour factory shifts in blue overalls as though their former lives counted for nothing — and while “picking worms” is referenced in the first story, this one shows what that job entails: the back-breaking work, the callous managers, the Laotians comporting themselves with industriousness and dignity.
The last story is also the only one with a brief scene showing a family’s escape from Laos, and it was so completely engaging that I recognised it as what feels missing from the collection — this is the first fiction I remember reading from a Laotian writer and I’m left not knowing much more about that culture, in the old country or in the new. Each story does stand on its own as an interesting little nugget, but the collection doesn’t add up to a motherlode. I wanted more from this.
