Conflicts
One of the tasks in the exam assignment requires you to focus on the conflicts in the short story “How to Pronounce Knife” by Souvankham Thammavongsa.
The major conflict presented in the story is that Joy finds herself in a conflict of loyalties between her Asian identity and her new, Western identity.
One the one hand, Joy is loyal to her parents, who are immigrants from Laos. She respects the Lao traditions, such as eating together on the floor, and respectfully looks for her father’s opinion. When she realizes that her father does not know how to pronounce the word “knife”, Joy discovers that she can no longer see him as an authority figure: “As she watches her father eat his dinner, she thinks of what else he doesn’t know. What else she would have to find out for herself” (ll. 90-91). In that way, she is all a...