Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife is a masterful collection of short stories that bite. The book is a meditation on the feelings of displacement, discomfort, and alienation that often comes with the immigrant experience, particularly the refugee experience, in Canada. Most stories end on a melancholic note, but it isn’t all doom and gloom. The strength and love within family is a common theme and there is often a humourous bent to Thammavongsa’s characters. They crack jokes (sometimes very dirty ones), find joy in the smallest of places, and live as whole characters instead of two-dimensional sob stories.
The women characters are especially strong. All of Thammavongsa’s characters are resilient, but she gives a lot of room to her women to be boisterous, whip-smart, and sexually free. In many cases, it is the women who chooses to leave their partner or family behind—for better or for worse. In “Slingshot”, a seventy-year-old woman takes up with a thirty-two-year-old man but leaves him for not seeing her as a real partner. In “Ewwrrrkk”, an elderly woman shows her breasts to her eight-year-old great-granddaughter and gruffly explains why she doesn’t look like the naked bodies in magazines. The accountant in “The Gas Station” finds herself inexplicably drawn to a gas station attendant and leaves town only after she makes him fall in love with her.
While many of these characters have real agency, they often remain nameless or their names are more or less forgotten, instead being remembered for their job title or role in society. Immigrants often fill service jobs and are overlooked by the very clientele they service, as is the case in “Mani Pedi” which tells the story of Raymond and his sister who run a nail salon. While his sister remains nameless, her voice stands out and she is the quintessential “boss lady”, smoking, ordering Raymond around, but also trying to protect him by reminding him that the women they service will not date him.
I found Thammsongva’s writing style to be crisp. As is often the case with short stories, language has to be utilitarian, doing the most amount of work it can in a short time. This to-the-point language also reflects well the voices of the blue-collar workers featured throughout the work. For most of them, English is their second language, and they are looked down upon for their limited range, but it is interspersed with playful prose that interrogates what “good English” really is. This is explored particularly in the title story “How to Pronounce Knife,” which points out the incredulous spelling of the word knife and how language is policed when the child protagonist, Joy, is sent to the principal’s office for insisting that the letter k should not be silent. Joy’s argument is based on logic and reason but also a defense of her father who between working late nights and limited chances to learn English himself taught her to say, “kah-nnn-eye-fff.” She is right despite being wrong, which is the case with many of the rules of the English language.
I really appreciated the character of Joy because like in many tales of the immigrant experience children can become embarrassed by their parents’ lack of assimilation, especially as they age. Thammsongva also does not shy away from this, telling the story from the heartbreaking perspective of a mother in “You Are So Embarrassing.” However, like in Joy’s case, the children in “Chick-A-Chee!” also defend their parents’ language (and now their own) against an interjecting lunch lady. The daughter in “Picking Worms” stands up her date for the school dance, James, a fourteen-year-old boy who gets promoted over mother and judges her, even though her mother taught him the best way to pick worms at the farm they work at. In this way, the children of these stories also become guardians for their parents in a world that looks down on them. Joy really captures this sentiment:
She never gave up on what her father said, on that first sound there. And none of them, with all of their lifetimes of reading and good education could explain it. As she watches her father eat his dinner, she thinks of what else he doesn’t know. What else she would have to find out for herself. She wants to tell her father that some letters, even though they are there, we do not say them, but she decides now is not the time to say such a thing. Instead she tells her father only that she had won something.
“How to Pronounce Knife,” by Souvankham Thammavongsa
As a lover of short stories I cannot recommend this collection enough! These sweet and sour stories are the perfect summer read.