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This article examines the literary representation of the complexities of the refugee experience in five short stories from Souvankham Thammavongsa’s collection How to pronounce knife. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s (2010) notion of happiness, it investigates how the stories expose the harmful effects of neoliberal scripts on refugees’ wellbeing and interpersonal relations. Moreover, it highlights the characters’ refusal to comply with normative expectations that cast refugees primarily through discourses of trauma, pain, or suffering. Instead, Thammavongsa portrays a community of Lao refugees who, by resisting these prescriptive narratives, cultivate affective bonds of care and solidarity. I argue that such practices emerge as forms of relational resilience that challenge erasure and invisibility, offering alternative ways of imagining refugee life beyond dominant representational frameworks.

In loud, crass, indiscriminate mainstream culture, where the modified quick byte, the gross dollar, is all, a writer like Souvankham could have been swept out to sea early on, except for the scale of resistance that lives in the woman herself and in those who have witnessed and supported the luminosity of her life work. (20-21) From that moment at The Green Room in 2001, cut to the 2020 release of Souvankham's first book of fiction, How to Pronounce Knife (McClelland & Stewart; Little, Brown and Company, US; Bloomsbury, UK), and her subsequent winning of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Toronto Star, 4 July 2020, thestar.com/entertainment/books/2020/07/04/dionne-brand-onnarrative-reckoning-and-the-calculus-of-living-and-dying.html.

In the opening poem of her first collection, Small Arguments (2003), Souvankham Thammavongsa writes about the \"only reading material\" in her childhood home, the \"old newspapers laid out / on the floor / to dry / our winter boots\" (14). In the absence of conventional texts like books, the rest of the volume's poems take up the challenge of reading salt, water, fruit, weather, insects, and animals in meditations about memory, suffering, beauty, and loss. [...]there is a fearless plunge into the unknowable depths of cruelty that permeate the world, where even snow is abandoned, \"left / or thrown aside; / the path / of every gutter\" (40), where heaven turns away the grasshopper, there is no light to lead an ant's way, and the butterfly \"knows / this is its last\" (47).

A FIREFLY casts its body into the night arguing against darkness and its taking It is a small argument lending itself to silence, a small argument the sun will never come to hear Darkness, unable to hold against such tiny elegant speeches, opens its palm to set free a fire its body could not put down (41) The poem utters light, over and over, not as noun but as imperative. In Thammavongsa's third book, Light, a colossal squid stares into the lightless abyss, its eyes, the size of dinner plates, waiting for the rarest photon. (In his lonely little mental cell, Descartes thinks that his inability to imagine the difference between a chiliagon and the shape of a dragonfly's eye is evidence of the body's existence.) Meanwhile, growing up in the house without books, the poet never doubted it.

Historians will quibble about whether the war began after the 1954 defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu that ended the colonization of French Indochina, and whether the conflict is distinct from the Vietnam War, or if the whole of the fighting should be called the \"Secret War\" or the \"Second Indochina War,\" or the \"American War,\" but what most readers will need to understand is that in the end, to avoid death, torture, and imprisonment, especially for assisting the US, a great exodus across the Mekong was necessary for thousands of families, and where they were resettled and how well they thrived in the decades after was anything but certain. Among Lao writers specifically she has almost no peers in the Americas, with the only other major collection of Lao short prose in English being the late Outhine Bounyavong's Mother's Beloved published by the University of Washington Press twentyone years ago. Since the end of the war, in the Western Hemisphere there have been fewer than forty-five books by the Lao diasporic community in our own words. Whether it's the Halloween misadventures in her tale \"Chick-A-Chee!\" or reflections on what the music of Randy Travis meant to a Lao mother, or discovering the fallibility of a father in the titular \"How to Pronounce Knife,\" we are given a chance to see a community journey from an intimate and refreshing perspective.

Thammavongsa once described her interest in this tension: \"[I'm] interested in what a person can do when given the fewest possible resources . . . what a mind can do with what people call 'little'\" (\"The Trillium Conversations\"). In Thammavongsa's poetry, attention to small details is pivotal because these details reveal what might be lost amid accounts of transnational and transpacific migration that stress urgency through enormity (the number of people, for example, affected by a global refugee crisis, or the lasting historical repercussions of transpacific violence and its aftereffects). (102) Recalling the content, imagery, and sonic and visual dynamics of those opening sentences in \"How to Pronounce Knife,\" here Thammavongsa again highlights erasures, absences, gaps, and distance, redefining the meaning of \"nothing\" and what her characters-and we as readers- do and do not know.

There is a tenderness to Thammavongsa's descriptions of the smelly, sore, sexualized, labouring, at once excessive and lacking racialized migrant body that could be in productive dialogue with Adele Wiseman's highly embodied immigrant Jewish Winnipeg characters in Crackpot (1974), Dionne Brand's precarious Caribbean migrant women navigating Toronto in Sans Souci and Other Stories (1988), or the diverse labouring migrant characters in Mariam Pirbhai's Outside People and Other Stories (2017). [...]Raymond could never win this round, and the story ends with a heartbreaking image of him and his sister sitting in her car, windows open, listening to the sounds of a family barbeque and children giggling, the soundtrack of middle-class innocence \"like a far distant thing, a thing that happened only to other people\" (71). The Laotian women working in a chicken processing plant think that nose jobs, hairdos, and glamorous clothing might get them promoted to the front office by their sexual predator of a boss.

[...]as such stories construe refugee success \"as the nation's own success at multicultural, collective-building projects\" (Vinh Nguyen,\"Refugee Gratitude\" 18), they also downplay the fact that the refugee resettlement process is typically characterized by what Jana Lipman calls \"a stark absence of choice\" (qtd. in Espíritu 2), and by an enduring sense of ambivalence and loss.[...]Yen Le Espiritu notes, \"[t]he messiness, contingency, and precarious nature of refugee life means that refugees, like all people, are beset by contradiction: neither damaged victims nor model minorities, they-their stories, actions, and inactions-simultaneously trouble and affirm regimes of power\" (2).With transitions like this, Thammavongsa underscores the difficulties, limits, and, crucially, the excesses of her translation.[...]she reminds readers, as Kumar does, that \"to forge\" has \"among its meanings the sense of forming, making, shaping\" through the application of careful effort and in extreme circumstances, including \"the heat of history\" (Kumar xii).[...]his \"forged passport\" mimics the presentation of information on an official document closely enough to draw attention to the ways in which its \"rich ambiguities\" can \"resist a plain reply\" or \"demand a more complex though unequivocal response\" (xi).Like nearsighted voyeurs, readers of Found study the poem's small print and engage its details while longing for the big picture-be that the missing portrait with its promise of plenitude and intimacy, or a more thorough understanding of the often traumatic history to which the poems allude and in which the scrapbook was produced.[...]as Goellnicht argues with reference to Le's collection, we are asked to reckon with the extent to which our own gaze \"assumes the right of the dominant culture, the viewing subject, to know the viewed as an ethnographic object of study\" (216).