How to Pronounce KING

Souvankham Thammavongsatwo-time winner of the Giller Prizedoesn't mind if you're jealous of her career

- BY ARIELLA GARMAISE PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRANDON ALLEN

I HAD NEVER BEEN to a literary event with booing until I attended the launch of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut novel, Pick a Colour, at the Toronto Public Library. She had chosen Steve Paikin, a Canadian media celebrity of sorts, to interview her. “I don’t read fiction,” he said up top. Thammavongsa, of course, won the Giller Prize for How to Pronounce Knife, her acerbic collection of short fiction, and her stories have been published by the likes of The New Yorker, Granta, Noon, and this very magazine. “Is this book really just for female readers?” he asked. Pick a Colour, which the following month won Thammavongsa her second Giller, is told over the course of one day by Ning, a former boxer and the owner of a nail salon. “Men are just, for the most part, completely, well, this man for sure...” Paikin hedged, then trailed off. “If I ever have to go into one of these places, it is just not natural territory for me.” The crowd bristled, but Paikin did not abate. “Why is it only Southeast Asian women who work at nail salons?” “Do you write small books because you’re a small person?”

These are the kinds of questions that Thammavongsa has fielded throughout her thirty-year career. Thammavongsa was born in Nong Khai, Thailand, in a Lao refugee camp. The family moved to Toronto when she was one year old. She grew up in a one-room apartment with her parents and brother; when she was fifteen and her parents decided to open their own business, she, her mother, and brother spent months sleeping in the family van to make the transition work. “I got 100 percent on things so that nobody would question or want to talk to my parents on parents’ night,” she says.