I found Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife, a collection of 14 short stories, and told myself I would enjoy one a night for two weeks.
But the stories were too good. I binged.
The stories are the kind I like. I can read one in 10 to 20 minutes. Each is so tight, so well made, it takes me to another world. To say they’re more rewarding than a 20-minute doomscroll doesn’t cover it.
Critics say Thammavongsa’s fiction is largely about Laotian refugees. She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. Her parents crossed the Mekong River on a bamboo raft and made it to Canada.
The culture of the immigrant community is interesting, but the stories worked on me although I know little about Laos and its people. In the past few years, I’ve developed a sharper sense of what it’s like to live in a culture I don’t understand. I can understand how people who are having to adapt to a place they don’t understand can be uncertain, tentative, fearful.
I can see how, under pressure like that, adults sometimes act like children, and children have to act like adults.
Like the critics, I could see refugees in Thammavongsa’s stories. But I also could see myself.
• Source: Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife: New York: Back Bay Books, 2021. “Slingshot,” one of the stories in the collection, was picked up by Literary Hub after winning an O. Henry Award. It’s here:
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