I will go far for a story which makes me laugh. This one, about a family of Lao migrants to Canada, is by a writer who was herself born in a refugee camp and brought up in Toronto. The humour in this story draws the reader into the family relationships, which are written with warmth and compassion. The father who spends his first pay check on a record player, something only rich people in Laos would have, the mother who is obsessed with country music and in particular, Randy Travis:
“The songs always told a story you could follow—ones about heartbreak, or about love, how someone can promise to love you forever and ever and ever, Amen. My mother did not know what Amen meant, but she guessed it was something you said at the end of a sentence to let people know the sentence was finished. ‘Three apples, Amen,’ she would say at the corner grocery store. Because of this, our neighbors thought my mother was religious, and even though our family was Buddhist, she caught a ride to church with them every Sunday.”
The mismatch between Lao and Canadian society is so poignant, particularly the differing views of love. The father thinks it’s fine to give his wife a twenty dollar bill as a birthday present, then buys cowboy boots in a failed attempt to look more like Randy Travis. The mother makes her daughter write hundreds of (unanswered) love letters to Travis, which her daughter sabotages. Vinh Nguyen, who recommended this story on Electric Literature, talks of a refugee’s faith in ‘unimaginable possibility’. It is the hope and faith of both the mother and the father that breaks my heart.
The only flip side to this piece was that it sent me down a terrible rabbit hole on Spotify. I take a secret very uncool pleasure in country music (‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’, anyone?). Obviously it was really research. Many of the songs are like short stories, after all.
First published in How to Pronounce Knife, Bloomsbury, 2020. Available to read on Electric Literature here
A Personal Anthology 