Thought provoking great little listen with sexual

My grandparents were immigrants. These stories pointed out to me how difficult simple, everyday things which we take for granted, must have been for them. Like work, school, family & relationships. But these are modern day stories. This is a great collection of short stories. I’m so glad I bought this Todays Deal! Well worth the 99 cents & my time. I feel like I understand what everyday life must have been like for my grandparents a little better. The stories are thought provoking & speak to the heart. WARNING: SEXUAL CONTENT! These are not stories fit to share with your kids. They give you a fresh, modern perspective on the lives, school & work hardships still being suffered & endured today. I think all immigrants must long for their homelands & traditions. You can feel their sense of isolation & being outcasts or rejected. The author has great insight. The narrators are very good. It’s a really interesting book. Not my usual genre so I was really surprised by how much I liked this book. Buy it! It’s worth a buck.

52 people found this helpful

Two thumbs up!

Fourteen vignettes reflecting the lives of some Laotians displaced to a new country with a difficult language, new lifestyles, the things that they expected of themselves and the different ways which others expected of them that were new and different in every way to their pasts. It's kind of a reminder to any one of us who had family who were in similar circumstances years ago and how the social isolation and longing for the way things were in their particular homeland before whatever war drove them to this new land. Well written and sometimes raw. It comes across as reality, and who's to say that some of it isn't. Dr. Siri Paiboun would have been very proud of her.
I requested and received a free ebook copy from Hachette Book Group and Little, Brown and Company via NetGalley. Thank you!*****
That was in July, now I have the audio and it is even better! James Tang and Kulap Vilaysack alternate in the audio interpretation with very slightly accented speech and an obviously sympathetic understanding of the characters.

21 people found this helpful

When Hope Is Survival

“How to Pronounce Knife” is a collection of snippets of life for Laotian immigrants to the US. Once you know that much, the title makes sense. We all can remember times when we were learning to read when we asked ourselves or our teacher, “Why is it spelled like that? Why are there so many letters in ‘thought’ when you only need ‘thot’ and why is ‘though’ pronounced like ‘tho’ when it is only missing one letter?”

I came away from this book with mixed feelings. On the one hand, with my experience of having lived most of my life as a foreigner (American) living in an Asian country, and also my work with Vietnamese refugees trying to adapt to life in America while trying to overcome the personal traumas they had experienced in Vietnam and as boat people escaping from there, I feel I better understood some of their feelings. I identified with so many  things about the characters in the book, from their struggle with the language, of looking so different and out of place, the giggles when you make cultural faux pas and you don’t even know what you said or did wrong, and the dependence on others sometimes to help with the most basic and simplest of tasks. Of course, I didn’t experience most of this to the same extent as they did, partly because the people where I lived were so gracious and wanting to help, and also because I didn’t have to struggle with low-paying jobs and others looking down on me for my position. Still, there was a great deal that struck home. 

But, I was looking for more coherence to the stories. I kept expecting to find some characters that appeared in more than one story. And, I found each story cut off too soon, just at the point where you might think that something was about to happen, for better or worse. The author could have told me more. I wanted some conclusions, some endings to the stories. 

Yet, it still kept pushing my thinking. Maybe the lack of endings was on purpose. Real lives don’t have conclusions until death, and even then the endings are not complete. In fact, maybe the point was that, for immigrants from a culture so very different from ours and especially for those who come from the bottom rung of the ladder, the best that most can hope for is continuation, not conclusion. The focus of most Americans is on immigrants taking jobs from Americans, but in this book, we see more of immigrants being exploited and held back. It exposes racism and our own assumptions that we are an equal society where anyone can get ahead. 

The adults are just trying to survive, sometimes by holding everything inside and plodding on, sometimes by focusing on a narrow area and trying to make that their own, from becoming a rabid fan or Randy Travis to working so hard to be the best at your job that you provoke the resentment of others. 

The children are torn between wanting to fit in and yet trying to still be Lao. Others go to the extreme of one or the other. And even among the immigrants there are sometimes similar divisions that can divide them. 

These are brief snippets built around one short turning point in a life, but in the end they do come together to show the struggles with the dreams. And maybe this book will help others see the real people who clean their offices, do their nails, and work on farms. By the end, I found that I liked the book better than I had thought.

5 people found this helpful

Great insight

This book is So very interesting, so many different viewpoints. I enjoyed each story.

2 people found this helpful

Interesting premise

I thought there would be more culturally specific stories about how it's difficult to understand the vagaries of a new place. A few of the short stories did that but many were more universal. I caught myself tuning out since the short stories tended to meander and not be very interesting. The reader had a pleasant voice.

1 person found this helpful

Well written and interesting

I wanted to give this 5 stars, but I didn't feel like any of the stories left me wanting more. The writing itself was excellent, but the characters could have done with slightly longer stories. I would be willing to try more of this author's work - I feel like there's a lot of promise here.

I'm interested in the experience of immigrants and refugees. Their experiences really can tell us a lot about ourselves as a society. Maybe I was spoiled by some other books which had more of an impact on me. She is also a poet so I plan to read some of her poetry.

For anyone who likes short stories I would recommend this. Some of the stores were more to my liking than others.

I spent the fall listening to random books from my Audible library. It's good to get through some books I've had for a while

I just don't like short stories

Please stories were well written and eye opening. I did not realise I had purchased a book of short stories. They are not my favourite material to read. this i reflected the in rhe review stars.

Good collection

I enjoyed these short stories overall. There were one or two that didn’t resonate with me, but the others were interesting. I liked learning a bit about the Laos culture as well.

Not really as advertised

I bought this thinking it was about the first story, it would have been interesting enough. But when that story line dropped out for others. I found decidedly less entertaining and wished I could return it.

There was nothing I can fault in the performance, I just didn't like the jumping of short unconnected stories .

Short. Sweet. Different. Real.

I stumbled on this little collection of Laoan short stories while browsing on Audible. Each story is full of heart. Some stories are sprinkled with a bit of sadness and others get a hefty dose of "this is just the way life goes." The main characters of these vignettes are resolute yet unsure, confident yet vulnerable. The title story left me feeling like that brief period in early childhood when my parents were infallible, and I fiercely defended them against any kid who dared speak ill. Oh, how that view of my mom and dad did change with each birthday that passed into my rear-view, but I digress. The story featuring a lonely, frustrated middle-aged woman hit too close to home, although she was ultimately braver than I ever could dream of being once her attention turned towards a youthful neighbor. The cultural differences were present throughout, but they didn't detract from the enjoyability of these brief glimpses into what it is to simply be human, no matter your country of origin or current locale.

I listened to the audiobook version and the narrators generally performed well. I felt the female narrator expressed more emotion in her performance as opposed to the male narrator who more or less reads words from a page and rarely sounds as if he's truly invested in making the stories sound unique and separate in their own right. At the same turn, I highly respect all narrators who work hard to record my much-loved audio entertainment, as I would sound like an uncultured Southerner with a frequently incomprehensible backwoods drawl by comparison.