SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Ning is the manager of what she calls a brightly lit box in an unnamed city, a place that she calls Susan's.
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA: (Reading) I live in a world of Susans. I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name Susan. So many girls come and go. I don't want to bother getting new name tags each time. Besides, you know, it's never difficult to pronounce a name like Susan. None of our clients notice. They come in, and we are ready and set to work. That's all that matters to them.
SIMON: "Pick A Colour" is a new novel, set over a single day in a nail salon, and it is the first novel of Souvankham Thammavongsa, the highly acclaimed Canadian short story writer and poet. She joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
THAMMAVONGSA: Thanks so much for having me on your show.
SIMON: Ning was a boxer, and that's kind of central to how she sees the world, isn't it?
THAMMAVONGSA: Yes. And before she landed working in a nail salon, she had been a prizefighter. We only get little snippets of it throughout the day, as she works and thinks of that time - things she learned from boxing, like controlling the center line. She brings that idea to the face, that when you remove eyebrow hair, you try to control the center line, and the idea that when you enter the ring, you have to protect yourself at all times. It's sort of the same way in a nail salon. When someone walks onto the floor, you have to read what they want, what their intentions are, and you react in that moment.
SIMON: How do you know this world of the nail salons?
THAMMAVONGSA: I'm a regular client myself, and I just observed. In terms of the boxing, I trained for a year and a half to learn to describe what it might feel like to take a punch, to throw a punch, and to make the language of the boxing world feel natural, but in the nail salon.
SIMON: The staff at the nail salon talk about their clients amongst themselves, don't they?
THAMMAVONGSA: Yes, a nail salon worker, when we do encounter them in literature, they're often seen as an invisible figure, a side glance, a prop, even. But in the novel, you are made to feel like you are a nail salon worker.
SIMON: The clients talk about their lives and often seek the advice in front of the workers. And the workers will talk about them in front of the clients, pretty secure that the clients won't know they're talking about them, right?
THAMMAVONGSA: It is a book about loneliness. The narrator is someone who's alone. And every client who comes in they are alone, too. There's something about the way in which they talk. Ning picks out, within their conversation, points that validate her sense of the world of being alone.
SIMON: Is Ning lonely, or is she solitary?
THAMMAVONGSA: Right. That's a really great question. I think she is lonely, but she's solitary. She loves being alone, and she loves her work. She loves that she has a place to go to every day. Every time the phone rings, her heart beats because she says someone out there wants me today.
SIMON: May I ask you to tell us some of your own story? You were born in a refugee camp in Thailand.
THAMMAVONGSA: Yes. My mom and dad are Lao. They built a raft made of bamboo to get to a refugee camp in Thailand, and that is where I was born. And after I was a year old, we were sponsored to Canada. My mom and dad are not writers. And when I wanted to be a writer, I didn't know how someone becomes that. So I just printed and bound my own books, sold them out of my school knapsack on front lawns, at farmers markets and small press fairs. You know, just yesterday, my book came out, and it was so amazing to see it sitting on a shelf at a real bookstore.
SIMON: Oh, my gosh, that's beautiful. Do you think there's a part of you that became a writer because you wanted to tell the stories of people like your parents and other people you'd known growing up?
THAMMAVONGSA: Absolutely. You know, my parents - because of a war, my parents were not educated. And my novel, "Pick A Colour," makes a real distinction between knowledge and intelligence. Something like knowledge, it's easy. You can get it. You can open up a book. Someone can tell you about something you don't know. You can go to school. Whereas intelligence is a lot more interesting to me. It's about what you do with your knowledge, however grand or little you have.
And my parents, people like my parents, I think they're such intelligent people. My mom worked in a cake factory. It's really grueling work, but she is incredibly intelligent because she can take work that would destroy someone else's soul and see joy in that. I asked her about her work, and she said, you know, every day I get to make a cake. I know that it's going to somebody who is celebrating something really special, and I get to be part of that. And for me, to hear my mom think in that way out loud, I feel like she's so intelligent.
SIMON: Wow. There's a section in your book where Ning sees a pigeon run over in the street.
THAMMAVONGSA: Yeah.
SIMON: What does that call out in her?
THAMMAVONGSA: It's run over by a streetcar, and she is unable to leave this body there, and she brings it to the curb. And then another pigeon walks several circles around this body. And she says to herself, you know, if that happened to me, I would have somebody who walks around me like that, and that would be my coworker. She would recognize and know that I'm gone, and that's how I know that I'm alive.
SIMON: I've got to say, I'm left with the impression that all of the people called Susans, they might be invisible to many people, but they have very rich lives.
THAMMAVONGSA: They do. And I wanted to say in writing this book that even though we may feel invisible, maybe to ourselves and to the people in our lives, we're really not. There's someone out there who's noticing you, who pays attention to you, who saw some detail about you that day, and you are alive for them.
SIMON: "Pick A Colour" is the debut novel from Souvankham Thammavongsa. Thank you so much for being with us.
THAMMAVONGSA: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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