Each day, women compare their bodies to one another and look to the white women in the front office as the pinnacle of beauty. While the narrator Red and other women scrape the feathers off of chickens in a chicken plant, they all dream of saving enough money for nose jobs that would land them a position in the front office. In the short story “Paris,” Thammavongsa interrogates women’s success not through the productivity of their work, but by the shapes and sizes of their noses. Thammavongsa’s repetition simultaneously builds and dismantles tension behind reflection and observation while the stripped-down details draw attention to Joy’s home life and family, “what else doesn’t know,” and what else she “would have to find out for herself.” Each repeated “how” statement further distances Joy from her father and both suppresses and exposes Joy’s conflict with informing him that his mispronunciation of “knife” cost her the “red yoyo” reward, leaving her the only student in the class to never obtain a prize. Using repetition, Thammavongsa stacks Joy’s observations to illustrate the divisive world she’s been thrown into.
It is in these moments that Thammavongsa balances the act of placing the narrator outside of their own body while magnifying the details of their surroundings. …………grain of rice with his chopsticks, not dropping a single one. …………Later that night, the child looks over at her father during dinner. Towards the end of the story, Thammavongsa writes: After asking her father how to pronounce the word “knife” at home one night, Joy is ridiculed for her mispronunciation the next day by “a yellow-haired girl in the class.” Unlike what her father taught her, Joy learns that the letter “k” in “knife” is actually silent. Centering the piece around a daughter of Laotian immigrants, Joy recounts her experience of navigating a classroom where questioning the standard pronunciation of English is not tolerated. Opening the collection with the short story “How to Pronounce Knife,” Thammavongsa juxtaposes standard English pronunciations with family loyalty. At 192 pages, the fourteen stories in How to Pronounce Knife are sharp, quick, and anchored in necessity.
Using repetition to magnify and shrink her characters’ personal complexities and intimate hopes, Thammavongsa both invites readers in and shuts them out of the vulnerable worlds found within each piece. Unrelenting in her mastery of zoomed-in detail, Thammavongsa propels readers into the raw depths of what it means to love, desire, dream, ache, and grieve through stories that challenge and push against the problematic American standard of beauty, the dangers of assimilation, and the damaging effects of racism. How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa is not only a collection of stories, but a culmination of lives stripped bare for the naked eye.
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