He bought one plane ticket (it was all he could afford at the time), thinking she’d go alone to see her family. She was working long hours these days she deserved a nice vacation. The school bus driver had intended the trip to Laos to be a surprise gift for his wife. He’s such a goofball,” she said, giggling, trying to make light of the whole thing. “Hee keyow,” she would say, shaking her head in disapproval if he ever suggested she wear anything even slightly revealing. This bikini would never be something she’d choose for herself. She would never, on her own, make herself up like this. Her black hair was set in big soft curls and she looked like a child’s doll: blue eyelids, long artificial eyelashes, round rosy cheeks, red lips. She’d never posed this way before, for him. The school bus driver thought his wife looked odd in these vacation pictures. She was sitting on the white sheets of an unmade hotel bed and looking straight at the camera, her knees tucked underneath her. Below that, her bikini bottom was just a patch of cloth in the front, held up by thin strings tied into a small bow. They were tight and perky in the white spandex top she wore. He was looking at his wife’s breasts in a photograph. (Apr.The school bus driver was named Jai. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management. Thammavongsa’s brief stories pack a punch, punctuated by direct prose that’s full of acute observations: in the final story, about a mother and her 14-year-old daughter picking worms at a hog farm, those laboring in the field “looked like some rich woman had lost a diamond ring and everyone had been ordered to find it.” This is a potent collection. In “A Far Distant Thing,” two 12-year-old girls have a short but meaningful friendship before they lose touch and their lives take different paths.

It was like what happened in the ring, but in reverse.”) and pines after a wealthy white client. In “Mani Pedi,” a former boxer begins working at his sister’s nail salon (“It amazed him to see clients transformed. In one of the best stories, “Slingshot,” a 70-year-old woman experiences a sexual reawakening with her 32-year-old neighbor, Richard: “It was the start of summer and I wanted something to happen to me.” In “Randy Travis,” a seven-year-old daughter is made to write hundreds of letters to country singer Randy Travis after her mother-who can’t write in English-becomes obsessed with him, and watches her father wear cowboy boots and flannel in an attempt to draw his wife’s attention.

Poet Thammavongsa ( Cluster) makes her fiction debut with this sharp and elegant collection that focuses on the hopes, desires, and struggles of Lao immigrants and refugees in an unnamed English-speakingĬity.

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