Thammavongsa herself is a child of Laotian immigrants. In that moment, she takes a stand for her father, her family and, by extension, her culture and identity.
“It’s in the front! The first one! It should have a sound!” she argues. Her classmates ridicule her, but Joy is insistent that her father is right: k in “knife” has to be pronounced. In that opening story, Joy, a Lao child who is learning to read, is told by her father that the word “knife” is pronounced kahneyff. So, I couldn’t help smiling when I read the title story in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s prize-winning collection of short stories, How to Pronounce Knife. “How to Pronounce Knife” is about “not wanting to fit in,” says author Souvankham Thammavongsa.
My dad and I always cracked up when he pronounced it daata instead of the North American day-ta because daata also happens to be the Bangla word for “drumstick,” a necessary ingredient in some of the most delicious curries known to humankind. “Almond,” “asthma,” “data” - growing up in a Bengali family in Mumbai, India, I was aware that some family members always pronounced those words exactly as they looked, articulating the “l” in “almond” and the “sth” in “asthma.” “Data” was the funniest.
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