She is sent to the principal's office, but when she returns home, she does not tell her father that he was wrong.
The child repeats the mispronunciation in school the next day and refuses to believe her classmates when they correct her. She brings a book home and asks her father how to pronounce a word she does not recognize-"knife." Still new to English, he does not recognize the word either and mispronounces it. In the title story, a child of Lao immigrants attends school in an unnamed North American country. It is author Souvankham Thammavongsa's fiction debut. How to Pronounce Knife is a collection of 14 short stories. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2020. Upending the narrative of immigrants sweeping in to take jobs away from Americans, Thammavongsa highlights how it’s often immigrants who get exploited, their contributions ignored.The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Thammavongsa, Souvankham.
He was fourteen and he was boss.” Soon, he brings about changes that reduce the mother’s worm-picking efficiency and endanger her livelihood. He didn’t wonder if he deserved the job or not. And James? He was happy to have a job that paid so well.
“She loved this job and she had been at it for much longer than James, but no one had noticed her work at all. “I knew what James got was something she wished for herself,” the girl thinks, pondering her mother’s situation. Then, a white boy - the girl’s classmate - copies the woman’s process and quickly becomes the manager simply because he speaks good English and agrees to initially work for free. Having mastered an improvised method, the woman’s worm counts are consistently highest among her fellow workers. In the last story of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut collection, “ How to Pronounce Knife,” a 14-year-old girl helps her hard-working mother pick worms at a hog farm.
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