“Trash”
by Souvankham Thammavongsa
from the June 13, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
Souvankham Thammavongsa made her New Yorker debut last year with “Good-Looking,” after she was already an acclaimed short story write, having won the Giller Prize for her 2020 collection How to Pronounce Knife.
I love the way this one, “Trash,” begins:
I don’t know why I didn’t think of someone like Miss Emily. It never occurred to me to imagine her. I guess you could say I lacked imagination. I married her son after knowing him for only five days. A whirlwind romance.
The first few paragraphs go on to describe the narrator’s first encounter with “Miss Emily’s son” — the one that will lead to their marriage five days later (“He was funny and friendly and polite. That’s all I really need to know about anyone.”) — and I think the sly focus on Miss Emily is going to be a fun way to explore each of these relationships.
A few days after the marriage, she finally meets Miss Emily:
She was so eager to meet me. She made her son drive her to the supermarket, and they waited in the parking lot for two hours until I finished my shift. I had been on my feet for eight hours, so I wasn’t looking too hot or feeling that great about myself. But I didn’t think of things like that, impressions — first impressions — what they mean and how people don’t change their feelings about you even years after.
If you have a chance, please share your thoughts below! I look forward to finishing the story and to seeing what you all think!
I used my last free article this month, and I really liked it! I could have listened to it read by the author, which is pretty cool. I was getting a mild Convenience Store Woman vibe…
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s short story, “Trash” features a confident, unassuming and very smooth narrative arc; it looks as if the plucky heroine has found her Prince Charming and a sympathetic and compassionate mother-in-law, Miss Emily.
Yet our heroine is a hard-working innocent survivor who is not asking for very much out of life. She’s not harshly evaluative of others, is generous and so marries quickly. “He was funny and friendly and polite. That’s all I really need to know about anyone.”
But anyone who genuinely enjoys scanning the groceries of others at a supermarket possibly seems not to understand the tooth and claw nature connected with existing in this universe. Even then, she is a winning sort of character as lauratfrey noted.
Such generosity doesn’t go very far with others who can label such a person completely useless unless they’ve reached a certain high level of visible achievement. Maybe it’s my own bad, but I perceive a slight psychological stain within the character of well-intentioned high achievers like Miss Emily who thinks anyone can do as well as she did.
But there is great turn in the story near the end where we find Miss Emily sprouting socially beastly notions or tendencies on account of her son having fallen short of her stellar record and so she now expects her daughter-in-law to be her son’s slave, who will make amends or compensate for all his inadequacies.
Our protagonist’s happiness scanning customer’s groceries at a well stocked, well-inventoried supermarket is totally ignored by the achievement-obsessed Miss Emily.
Miss Emily seems the evil witch in this dysfunctional family fairy tale that mildly questions Miss Emily’s middle class idea that only high achievement leads to happiness and all the other details will sort themselves out; that anyone can work themselves up from having been born as trash.
Of course it is a little alarming to think we might all be born pieces of trash with no connection to any love, compassion or respect that might have accompanied our conception or that anything like that is totally meaningless. Sort of in Miss Emily’s mind, our caste has been cast on us like a spell from which no redemption is possible except through hard work and sacrifice.
I admire how even handed and none feather ruffling or non polarizing the characterization is here; the story may be all about Miss Emily or it is all about the protagonist, whose antagonist is Miss Emily. Like in the Super Bowl one picks one’s team and each one has it’s good and bad points..
Unfortunately Miss Emily’s trash obsession makes her only too happy to use and manipulate others. As her barometric pressure drops, she develops unseemly negative tendencies that completely overpower her previous kindly disposition.
I don’t like the label “trash” because it seems like evaluative labeling happening either secretly or quite right in front our face no matter who you are, who you’re with or where you are.
That this hidden brutal reality is carefully closeted in the beginning yet wildly bursts free as the final emerging turn in this short story makes it a somewhat friendly yet brutal offbeat short story gem.
Disaster is never too far from occurring out of the random benign details of a somewhat simple but quick whirlwind marriage.