‘Mani Pedi’ by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Thammavongsa came to Toronto as a refugee, and many of the stories in her collection How to Pronounce Knife feel like they could only take place there. “Mani Pedi” is about Raymond, a boxer who quits fighting and goes to work in his sister’s nail salon. He starts off working the phones but eventually becomes a nail technician himself.

Raymond is a dreamer, and his sister is a hilariously vulgar and cynical realist. His dreams of making it as a boxer didn’t work out, and at the nail salon he dreams of falling in love with his clients. At the end of the story, when his sister berates him for his dreams, he explains:

Raymond, not one to speak up to his sister, but this one time said, “Well, you know, maybe Miss Emily ain’t ever gonna be with a man like me but I want to dream it anyway. It’s a nice feeling and I ain’t had one of those things to myself in a long time. I know I don’t got a chance in hell and faced with that I wanna have that thought anyway. It’s to get by. It’s to get to the next hour, the next day. Don’t you go reminding me what dreams a man like me ought to have. That I can dream at all means something to me.”

First published 2013 in Ex-Puritan, and available to read here, collected in How to Pronounce Knife, McClelland & Stewart, 2020

‘Mom Is in Love with Randy Travis’ by Souvankham Thammavongsa

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

‘Picking Worms’ by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in a refugee camp, to Laotian parents, and raised in Toronto. ‘Picking Worms’ is from her debut short story collection, which is infused with stories about loneliness, alienation, the hierarchies that beset an immigrant family trying to find their place in a new society. It brings a contemporary lens to the immigrant story as well as authenticity. I admire the political edge, the social commentary and the humour.

At times, ‘Picking Worms’ was an excruciating read. It must have been the worms, which I generally like. The story typifies the grunt work that immigrants often have to undertake.

First published in How to Pronounce Knife, Bloomsbury 2020