The rest of the evening brings even more success. The owners of that house are so taken by the kids’ cuteness that they give each of them two bags of crisps. Reluctant and worried, the kids stall until their father convinces them to try it. He drives them to the wealthy neighborhood they pass each weekend and ushers his kids up to a fancy house, imploring them to ring the bell and say, “Chick-A-Chee”. It happens to be Halloween and he instructs his kids to change into their costumes and rush into their car. I wanted to cry, but I saw how my brother was looking at me-like he needed me to be brave for the both of us. I was certain then that he really had lost his job and what we were doing was part of his plan to send us away, something our parents often threatened when we were misbehaving or we wanted something they didn’t have the money for. Their father returns home early and his kids worry he was fired. One time, I noticed that every house on that street had raw pumpkins on their front steps-either a giant one or a cluster of little ones. The narrator recounts how the nice neighborhood starts to change once the days shorten into autumn. For fun, the family points out their favorite homes in the wealthy neighborhood they pass on their way to buy groceries in Chinatown on the weekend. The children are taught to never answer the door under any circumstances and to hide in places that murderers won’t be able to find. 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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