This week’s story, “Wall Cano,” opens: “Mom left. Dad didn’t tell us anything.” The narrator of the story is a ten-year-old girl who has been living with her parents and her younger brother in a small basement apartment until one morning, before school, her mother’s not there. Why did you want to start the story in such a direct way?
I was thinking of writing a poem—just a list of my father’s smiles. But then I began to build in things around the list of smiles I had. A window. Cardboard. I really played around with the arrangement of the story. I felt like I could begin the story anywhere, put it out of order, and no matter how I arranged the details the story remained the same. Mom left. So I began with that.
The narrator’s father is a stylish man. He’s short, she says, but he has suits made up by a tailor that fit him perfectly. It’s clear that her mother is attractive, too. Other women are always trying to get the father’s attention and other men the mother’s. Does the narrator feel as though it was her job to keep them together?
I think she just thinks of it as normal. This keeping them together. It isn’t any different to her than being told to tie her shoe or eat breakfast.
At one point, the narrator’s father tells her that he never got to go to school. In Laos, where he grew up, “the war came, and that was it.” The narrator is left to figure things out by herself, and she often gets it wrong. The concept of homework, for example, is something she can’t understand. If school is the equivalent of work, then surely time at home is for relaxing after work. How hard is it for her to puzzle her way through a life her parents never experienced?
When I write, I know that the room reads me—or the voice on the page reads me—as someone who will tell a sad story. It’s a real surprise for people to discover that the way they have read my sentences in their head is not the same as experiencing my sentences live—in my own voice. I think of my stories as being built around humor. Maybe not laugh-out-loud humor, though that’s there, but other forms of humor like wit, deadpan, understatement, exaggeration, recognition, irony. We know what homework is, but the way the story asks us to suspend our understanding of homework for a bit to live in hers is funny. Doing it this way doesn’t diminish or judge or humiliate her lived experience. I love who I come from and where I come from. When I tell a story, I make sure a reader does that, too.
She does know that she’s supposed to make something for a science project, but she’s forgotten about it in the weeks after her mother left. Her father helps her make something, pulling down some of the cardboard that they use on the windows in place of curtains. What he makes—a model of a house on stilts, like one he’d lived in in Laos—is beautiful, but when she gets to school, she realizes that it’s completely wrong. Does she feel worse for herself or for her father?
I think she thinks everyone else is wrong. It’s a lot like that song Dolly Parton wrote, “Coat of Many Colors”: everyone else at school might think it’s a coat made of rags, but to her it is still a coat and it was made by her mother with what they had around the house. To build a house and make it stand is a science project, too. It might not win anything, but you don’t have to win anything to know that what you made deserves to live in this world.
The project that wins—and that gives the story its title—is a model of a volcano, a word she hears as “wall cano.” It’s ugly, like “a pile of shit,” she thinks, but impressive when smoke comes out of a hole. As in other of your stories, such as “How to Pronounce Knife,” the title story of your 2020 collection, English is the language your characters must use to navigate the world outside the home, but any mistakes, like pronouncing “knife” with an audible “k,” convey a kind of glorious defiance, too. Would the narrator ever think of the “wall cano” as a volcano?
I write about language. I ask us to pretend the English language right in front of us is not there. This is very easy to understand when we read a work and are told it is a translation. We are made to understand our distance from the English language. I write that distance into the English language in front of us with the English language. We all know we don’t pronounce the “k” in “knife.” It’s something we have learned—to see a letter there and agree that even though it is right there in front of us we will not give it a sound. And yet, in the telling, we are made to wonder, When did we agree to this and why did we agree to this? We understand why someone new to the language would question this. Instead of focussing on the “mistake” someone new to the language makes, we don’t see it as a mistake at all, but see that it makes absolute sense. I do a similar thing here, but with a different word. This time, though, I never give the correct word. We remain isolated with the word “wall cano,” and remain in her perspective and point of view and understanding of the language. We live and move through the story the way her father knows the English language. He says, “I just poo-poo paa-paa my way around until something makes sense to them. That’s how English works.” We do what he says of the English language—we, the readers, are given the responsibility of carrying the meaning and understanding of these words.
At the end of the story, the time frame shifts, and the narrator is now a thirty-seven-year-old woman, visiting a friend and watching as she checks her son’s homework. Why did you want to explicitly switch into this adult perspective?
My stories come across as really simple and tiny. Breathe and the story is over already. Blink and it’s done. There are all these gears turning underneath the story that make it tick. I can’t draw attention to all that in the telling, because it would betray the telling of it. I could have certainly done this a different way. I could have had the child go over to another child’s house and discover that their parents helped with their homework, too. Take a reader into a scene where she discovers she doesn’t have what other people have. I could have had this moment come out in a discussion between her and her brother. But I don’t think she could really know how significant the story she just told is. It also feels too easy and cheap and sentimental to keep her that age and have her realize hers is a different experience. I needed a lot of life to happen for her. And there’s a lot of life between that science project and her friend’s house. And I need that life to happen in order to give significant weight to the story that has just been told. The refusal, even as an adult, to say the word “volcano.” That restraint, that absence there in the last scene, is so important to the story.
Do you think of this as a story about education? What’s more valuable to your narrator? What she learns from watching her father, her mother, and her brother, or what she learns in school?
I think of this as a story about love. People leave or they change, and no one is coming to make things better. You will have to learn to love yourself even when there is no one there to tell you that you’re worth loving. In a way, that is what an education is. You learn how to teach people how to love something until they can do that on their own without you. ♦