Whenever I read stories about refugees and immigrants, they’re always so sad and tragic—and rightly so—but also that’s a very narrow way of looking at ourselves. There’s a lot more to us than being sad, we are also really fun and hilarious and angry and ungrateful. Whenever we hear stories about immigrants and refugees, we hear about success. It’s always children going to Stanford, or they have a Ph.D. in chemistry. Or we are some brave hero and saving a dangling baby on the side of a building, or we’re crazy rich. I just wanted to write stories about refugees and immigrants that are trying to get to the next minute, hour, day, or next year. Those lives are important and successful too.
Souvankham Thammavongsa: Interview with Angela So at Electric Literature.
It’s a bit ironic that Souvankham Thammavongsa should celebrate the small successes in this book of small stories – about ten pages each – since she would be considered a success story. In her interview with the Paris Review, she tells us she was born of Lao parents in a Thai refugee camp and thus considered stateless. The family settled soon after in Toronto amongst other refugees; she spoke Lao at home and English at school. Some of her characters, the child protagonists, seem to come from her experience. But her adult life differs from most of the adults in her stories: she studied literature at the University of Toronto, has published four books of poetry, and now has become known for her prize-winning fiction.
Maybe it’s her roots in poetry that makes the voice of these stories so interesting to me. I keep thinking of words like brittle or sparse to describe it. She doesn’t start by setting the mood with weather or description, but jumps right into the character who sets the mood. That gives the descriptions that do appear – such as the mould that begins and ends ”A Far Distant Thing,” available online at LitHub – extra emphasis. It’s not a matter of searching for “what is the author trying to convey” but rather a matter of being smacked in the face with the presence of rot, or the glare of bright lights, or the bleakness of drizzle.
At first, I kept thinking thematically along the lines of affiliation, on the strength of the title story that leads off the collection. How do we choose which team to play on, to cling to our heritage or assimilate, in what ways to combine the two? This gets especially complicated for children, who might have no memories of their original homeland or culture, or who were born in their new countries so have only the connection through their parents and families. I remember Jake Weber, my BASS blogging companion, describing this generational progression when discussing “The Art of Losing” by Yoon Choi, ranging from Korean to Korean-American, American-Korean, and finally American. How and when does a child choose between their schoolmates, who are often sources of criticism or ridicule, and their parents?
This conflict is front and center in the title story, available online at Granta, where a girl learning to read English at school must choose sides over how the word knife is pronounced:
Later that night, the child does not tell her father the ‘k’ in knife is silent. She doesn’t tell him about being in the principal’s office, about being told of rules and how things are the way they are. It was just a letter, she was told, but that single letter, out there alone, and in the front, was why she was in the office in the first place. She doesn’t tell how she had insisted the letter ‘k’ was not silent. It couldn’t be and she had argued and argued, ‘It’s in the front! The first one! It should have a sound. Why isn’t there a sound there?’ and then, she screamed as if they had taken some important thing away. She never gave up on what her father said, on that first sound there. And none of them, with all their lifetimes of reading and good education, could explain it.
It’s not by accident that the troublesome word is knife. Nor is it by accident that the child is incorrectly dressed for her class picture because her parents could not read the note that was sent home. Nor is her understanding, at the end, that she knows some things her parents do not – a truly shattering thing for a child to realize, that these people on whom she depends are not omniscient and omnipotent – nor that the story ends with them putting together a puzzle, a second-place prize, instead of the toy she truly coveted. It’s a story that fits pieces together beautifully, yet doesn’t feel contrived.
“Chick-a-Chee!” plays with this similar theme of affiliation via language, but creates a very different story, available online at Postcolonial). We see the home life of six- and seven- year old siblings, told in hindsight by the girl. The scariness of everyday life – possible intruders, possible state interference – plays against the joy of Halloween, which they don’t understand at all but still thoroughly enjoy. Last year I was more acutely aware than ever that I was not in the mood to celebrate fear and violence, but maybe joy is the way to turn it around. These children put on costumes, marveled at pumpkins on front porches, and went from house to house in a nice neighborhood shouting, “Chick-a-Chee!” Their parents dutifully sorted the candy, and when they brought the approved items to school, they tried to explain it all to the lunch lady:
The next morning, at school, my brother and I took out the candies at lunch and displayed them on a table like we were street vendors, telling our friends we went Chick-A-Chee where the houses were gigantic….
The lunch woman on duty leaned into the crowd around us and said, “Don’t you mean, you went ‘Trick-Or-Treating’?”
We shook our heads. The woman did not know what she was talking about. I looked up at her big, round, intrusive face and said, “No, Missus Furman. We went Chick-A-Chee!”
I realized, as I read more stories that departed from this linguistic affiliation, that there was a broader theme here. These are stories of the different ways we can love each other. And, once in a while, the ways we can deflect love that feels too scary. When I read the Electric Lit interview mentioned above, I was delighted that Anita So called them love stories. I was on the right track. How does a child love her father, when she realizes she can spell better than he can? How does a father love his children when he has to work such long hours to provide for them? How does a husband love the wife who abandoned him and their child? How does a man forgive the wife who betrays him? How does a mother deal with a daughter who finds her embarrassing? How do immigrants, relegated to the status of other, keep their dignity in spite of it all? How does a father relieve his daughter’s pain after a devastating humiliation?
That last question is the subject of one of my favorite stories, “The Universe Would Be So Cruel.” Mr. Vong is a printer by trade, but by choice deals in low-volume, low-profit accounts: “The farmers with dirt under their fingernails from working out on the fields all day, the butchers who didn’t have time to change out of clothes stained with blood, the seamstresses who only had twenty minutes before they had to get back to work. They reminded him of himself – all of them doing the grunt work of the world.” But his specialty is Lao wedding invitations:
Of all the things Mr. Vong made and printed at the shop, though, it was Lao wedding invitations that gave him the most joy. Mr. Vong took great care with his invitations. He made his own paper, every fibre dried and flattened in his shop, the process taking several months. He even mixed his own pigment, creating a final shade that was unique. He kept a record of all the colours and shades he had used in a scrapbook, little tiny squares with the names and date of each one. To use the same colour pigment more than once might invite the idea that no marriage was unique. He wore a headpiece with jeweller’s magnifying glasses attached and went over every single letter on the invitations. He was determined to get the smallest of details exactly right-a spelling error could be a sign that the couple was not perfect for each other. He was the guardian of their good fortune. And he was the best.
When it’s time for his own daughter’s wedding, he takes special care with every detail. And when things don’t turn out as expected, he takes responsibility for that, giving his daughter someone other than herself to blame. It might be because of my long-standing interest in manuscripts that this story touches me so deeply, but I think rather it’s the honoring of the self-sacrifice of parenthood, right alongside Mr. Vong’s affiliation with his community.
Some of the stories deal frankly with discrimination. In “Paris,” ethnicity is reduced to the shape of one’s nose: those with noses that stick out from the face work in the front office of the chicken processing plant, while Red and the others pluck feathers – or, worse, like Somboun, slit throats. Some women go so far as to have low-budget nose jobs, which rarely turn out as expected. The story ends in a dramatic scene of Red and the plant manager’s wife consoling each other over very different, but equally painful, slights.
Marriages and other romantic relationships play a big part in several stories. “The School Bus Driver” is either monumentally naïve, or chooses to ignore the affair his wife is having. Their arguments, however, revolve around his name. She chooses to Westernize, calling him Jay, whereas he is proud of his name: “Jai. It rhymes with chai. It means heart. Heart.” Thammavongsa the poet comes through in that last phrase.
Other stories have little or nothing to do with ethnicity or immigration. “The Gas Station” features Mary, a woman with mighty defenses who nonetheless falls under the spell of an unapologetically libertine gas station attendant. Thammavongsa makes the most of the iconic phrase “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear” as Mary watches him fill her tank. I’m still uncertain if she’s projecting in the final scene; I think so, but maybe she knows better than I do.
I chose to read this collection after reading Thammavongsa’s story “Trash” in BASS 2023. It, too, presented an everyday hero, a supermarket worker, and her dealings with her newly acquired mother-in-law. I was impressed with how she stood firm in her self-image, just as the story stood firm in its focus. This collection shows the same resolve: it seems like a small work, the stories consistently short even for short fiction, yet they know what they are about and resolutely present their view to the world.