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“Pick a colour.” It’s how every nail appointment in any salon starts. The phrase is also the inspiration for Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut novel Pick a Colour.
In Pick a Colour, which has already been longlisted for the Giller prize, Thammavongsa uses the familiar setting of a busy nail salon as the backdrop for observations on class, gender and race. The novel follows Ning, a retired boxer working at a salon. The entire novel takes place over a single day and is solely in Ning’s first-person perspective.
Thammavongsa says she wanted to set the novel in Ning’s mind because it’s rare to have representation inside of non-educated characters’ brains. “Whenever we see someone think on the page, it is often coming from an educated person like a professor, a writer, an artist. I know other people think, too. And wanted to show that on the page,” she says. “My parents never went to school, but they are the most intelligent people you will ever meet. The way they read people, situations, what they notice, and what they do with that. I wanted to write about such a person.”
All of Thammavongsa’s works—Pick a Colour as well as her collection of short stories, How to Pronounce Knife and her works of poetry—are deeply impacted by the author’s lived experiences. Thammavongsa is a Laotian refugee who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. When she was one, her family moved to Toronto, where she’s lived since.
For Thammavongsa, her choice to centre the experiences of working-class immigrants is about writing what she knows. But it’s also “a wonderful chance for me to refuse how working-class immigrants are written about,” she explains. “No one is pitiful or sad or helpless. No one speaks in an accent. We are not a bit, a side-show, a glance, a side-eye, or just a prop in a story. The way I write about us, we are the main characters.”
It’s not just representation that Thammavongsa is interested in—she’s also fascinated by languages and the way that silence can both erase experiences and bring them to the forefront. In “Mani Pedi,” a short story in How to Pronounce Knife that this novel is spun-out from, it’s a single letter that’s silenced. Pick a Colour, meanwhile, silences the English language. “We don’t hear directly the English-language the clients speak, and when we do we only hear from them twice and they are heard saying ‘yoo-hoo’ and ‘whoa, whoa,’” she explains. “The book is written in the English language but it asks you to pretend the English language is not there.”
Thammavongsa also uses Ning and her inquisitive narration to explore the inner lives of working-class women like her and the way they’re made to be invisible by the privileged guests they serve. Ning’s sharp observations about the guests—the ones who disgustingly joke about “happy endings,” the ones who are fabulously wealthy and yet don’t tip, the ones who demand better treatment—are all at the expense of the guests.
For example, one of the salon’s regulars is a professional baseball player who comes in regularly to have his nails filed down. The workers—who are interchangeably named “Susan,” a cheeky nod to the fact that non-Asians say that it’s “difficult” to tell people who look like Ning apart from one another—use the language gap between client and worker to their advantage. The women talk openly about the baseball player and add on a number of extra treatments to jack up the cost, a small bit of defiance in exchange for the chauvinism that the baseball player treats the women with.
And by setting the novel in Ning’s mind, her perspective is given more weight than the empty words that the patrons say. The readers are invited to see the guests, who in another book might be the protagonist, through characters that would otherwise be rendered background. For Thammavongsa, her background as a Laotian refugee means elevating the perspectives of people like her through stories like Ning’s.
“I don’t sound or look like other writers. And that makes what I do all the more important.”
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