Throughout the 14 stories collected in How to Pronounce Knife, nearly all of which follow Lao immigrants and refugees building new lives in unnamed towns across Canada, not once do we encounter a character homesick with nostalgia. Laos may flow in the bloodstream of these stories, but the ...
He revealed that he once attempted to learn Chinese, but the language proved “so difficult to pronounce that my tongue could not move freely.” The book is largely devoted to introducing Lu Xun (pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881-1936), a great Chinese writer of the early 20th century, and...