A person at work: on labor, invisibility, and freedom
How Souvankham Thammavongsa makes us see the person behind the uniform in the novel “Choose a Color”
A client walks into a nail salon, sits down, and hears the familiar: “Choose a color.” They pick a polish, and the technician begins to work. It seems there is nothing in this scene from which to build a novel. But Souvankham Thammavongsa makes precisely such a day the foundation of her work. Over the course of a single shift, Ninh, the salon owner, works on other people's hands, observes her employees and clients, and gradually reveals her story to the reader. To visitors, she remains part of the service staff, one of those women who are easy to overlook. To the reader, her gaze becomes the center of the book. Thammavongsa makes work, repetitive procedures, conversations, and silence into major events, and everydayness into a way to talk about labor, social class, language, and the daily lives of migrants. The literary critic of Realnoe Vremya, Ekaterina Petrova, tells how Thammavongsa shows the life of someone who spends most of her day helping others look visible while herself remaining almost invisible.
A writer between “here” and “there”
Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. But she considers this circumstance part of her parents' history, not her own personal experience. She was one year old when her family moved to Canada. Souvankham grew up in Toronto, in a neighborhood where many neighbors were refugees. At home, Thammavongsa spoke Lao; at school, English. Even as a child, she noticed that these languages carried different weights. English swear words meant nothing to her, while Lao words could deeply wound. When her family spoke English, Thammavongsa noticed how their sense of humor and ability to express themselves changed.
She views language as part of the everyday life of a person who exists between several cultures. In her short fiction, the writer often turns to the experience of several generations of Lao refugees in Canada and separately explores the position of immigrant women in the collection “How to Pronounce Knife.”
At the same time, Souvankham does not want to transfer her own childhood entirely into literature. She separates her experience from that of her parents. In her stories, she gives almost no geographical markers and often simply calls the place of action “here.” This technique, she says, “disorients the reader and forces them to become closer to the text and the character.”
Thammavongsa wanted to write from childhood. Her first published work was a school assignment based on memories of starting school. Even in this early text, she saw characteristics that she later preserved in her prose: simplicity, clarity, directness, and a complete absence of romanticization. At the same time, her literary path began with poetry, not prose.
In 2003, Thammavongsa published her first poetry book, “Small Arguments," and released four collections before transitioning to prose. In 2019, her story “Slingshot” received the O. Henry Prize. The following year, the collection “How to Pronounce Knife” was published — the writer's first short story collection. Poetry set the principle of working with details. The writer says her poems turn to the most ordinary things: oranges, pears, tangerines, grasshoppers, snow.
— These small details are the drama,— she explains.
But emptiness is also important in her poetry:
— Empty space has as much power and voice as the words used, — Souvankham said in one interview.
Thammavongsa does not consider major events necessary for plot development. In the novel “Choose a Color," she shifts attention to washing hands and feet, opening and closing doors. She calls such actions a story in themselves and explains:
— Big explosions and loud life events sound impressive, but some people simply don't have them. Even if they don't, life still has value.
The novel “Choose a Color” became Thammavongsa's debut in long-form fiction. Here, the writer again takes a small space and fills it with everyday actions, conversations, details, and daily work bustle.
Inside the salon
The beauty salon in “Choose a Color” is a closed system. It has its own rules and its own language. Ninh owns the salon “Susan," lives in a small apartment directly above it, arrives first, and leaves last. The entire novel takes place during one working day and remains within this space. The heroine narrates everything herself, so the reader does not get separate access to either the clients or the employees.
The client sees Ninh sitting below him, washing his hands and feet, doing a manicure and pedicure. The heroine herself reverses this power dynamic. She opens the novel with the phrase: “Everyone is ugly.” With this, Thammavongsa immediately gives the heroine power. In this space, only Ninh decides who is beautiful because she knows more about a person than they assume. She reads them through their hands, nails, skin, moles, and movements. The client may not know her name, but she manages to learn a lot about them.
The name system reinforces this inversion. All employees of the salon receive identical name tags with the name “Susan," although each has her own real name in her native language. It is easier to say “Susan” than to learn the worker's real name. Ninh herself says she has long lived in this world of endless “Susans.” She has become so accustomed to her work name that her former one seems to belong to someone else.
But identical name tags do not erase the differences between the women. On the contrary, Thammavongsa shows them with extreme precision. Mai constantly argues with Ninh, acting as her opposite. And Mai also helps the reader see the salon's structure. Annie works more slowly than the others, but Ninh still keeps her on the team. Nok disappears after receiving money in advance. A shared language and similar origin do not eliminate competition and betrayal.
Ninh has power over the employees, but she also shares power over the clients with them. The workers speak to each other in their native language and discuss clients who understand nothing. From this, the usual view of migrant labor also changes. Thammavongsa does not make her heroine a helpless woman who needs to be saved.
At the same time, Ninh's power does not erase her own experience of exploitation. In the past, she worked for Rachel and her brother Raymond, who maximally exploited the heroine and spoke to her offensively. Before working at Rachel's salon, Ninh was a boxer. Her coach Murch taught her to defend herself and respond to blows. Thammavongsa transfers this logic into the beauty salon space. The heroine applies the principle of “keeping the center” when plucking clients' eyebrows. By the way, the writer specifically studied boxing and trained with a coach for a year and a half to accurately work with its terminology.
The boxing experience determines the heroine's reaction to those around her. She constantly evaluates faces, hands, legs, and gestures as carefully as she once assessed opponents in the ring. And the writer deliberately leaves understatement in these fragments. She seems to want the reader to notice what is not on the page.
And there are almost no external actions in the novel; everything is built on repetition. Clients come, choose one of the polish shades, talk, complain about life, and leave. Among them are a baseball player, a waitress, a woman after multiple miscarriages, and a client who is cheating on her husband. Ninh and the other workers notice details of their appearance and invent stories for them. They read moles almost like Tarot cards. A mole near the lips means talkativeness; one near the tear duct means the ability to hurt others or to cry because of others.
Repetition becomes a way to show the heroine's inner life. Each new client again hears the opening phrase “Choose a color," and the heroine again performs familiar movements. At the same time, she is interested in how a person thinks through the body and without words. Physiology is an integral part of Ninh's thinking. She sees muscles, skin, nails, and habitual movements, and from them reconstructs a person's characteristics.
In a short novel of less than 200 pages, Thammavongsa manages to reveal almost all the problems that concern contemporary women. She also does not avoid the theme of loneliness. Ninh lives alone, has never been married, does not seek marriage, and does not look for a man. There is no familiar plot model here in which a woman either seeks love or becomes its victim. A woman's loneliness does not appear as a defeat; rather, it is a form of strength. The heroine gradually shows that work and independence are more important to her than conforming to others' ideas of a normal life.
Throughout almost the entire narrative, Ninh maintains distance from clients and employees, and indeed from the whole world. But by the end of the workday, the distance shrinks. Ninh helps a homeless man, gives him a free haircut and pedicure, and then helps a girl with a punctured car tire. Her attitude toward the client who is breastfeeding an infant also changes; her story evokes sympathy in the protagonist. And the lunch left for her by colleagues turns out to be a significant gesture for Ninh, although she does not want to show that she was waiting for this care.
In the finale, after the salon closes, an unexpected visitor arrives. Ninh recognizes the person but now sees their body differently for the first time. She kneels down, takes their feet, washes the skin, and massages the joints. After that, she looks at her own hands and understands:
— I am always on the other side — doing my work so that others look good. And I am quite content with that.
Publisher: Belle Lettre
Translation from English: Lyubov Makarina
Number of pages: 196
Year: 2026
Age rating: 16+
Ekaterina Petrova — literary critic for the online newspaper Realnoe Vremya, host of the Telegram channel «Булочки с маком».