![]() ![]() In “Chick-A-Chee!”, two young siblings stay alone at home after school because their parents work long hours that don’t allow for a 9 to 5 workday. How to Pronounce Knife, Souvankham Thammavongsa (Little, Brown, April 2020 Bloomsbury, April 2020) When my parents read the newspaper or watched the evening news, they never heard anything about what was happening in their country. In the story, “Edge of the World”, the narrator states, Yet it’s these stories of Southeast Asian immigrants and their struggles to be seen-the country of Laos is all but erased in the immigrants’ new homes in Canada and the US-that make this book special. While not all of Thammavongsa’s stories are about Lao immigrants, they all address this feeling of invisibility. She’s also made to hold the class sign to cover more of herself. Her classmates are all dressed up Joy is strategically placed in the class photo where the tattered parts of her clothes are not visible. Joy, a young girl in a Lao immigrant family, goes to school on the day of the class photo in her standard sweat suit her father hasn’t paid attention to the notes she brings back. Now an award-winning poet and short story writer, her first collection of stories, How to Pronounce Knife, begins with a story of the same name. Her family, originally from Laos, were able to settle in Canada when she was a year old. Souvankham Thammavongsa has come a long way from Nong Khai refugee camp in Thailand in which she was born in 1978. ![]()
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