Novel “Ask for Susan” | All people think

A store where all the employees look the same. That's how capitalism likes it best: everyone is replaceable. Photo: mwewering!/pixabay »If you see us like that, she in the chair above me and me deep down, you might not get the impression that I'm in charge here. But that's deceptive." Ning knows how to get people to want what she thinks is right. And what brings money into the tills of her nail salon. Without many words.

“Ask for Susan” is the debut novel by Laotian-Canadian writer Souvankham Thammavongsa. He plays exclusively in Ning's nail salon "Susan" on a single day. It starts at seven in the morning with a ringing phone that starts Ning's work day and shows her that she is "needed." It ends at around 8 p.m. when she closes the shop and goes back to her small apartment above the shop. In between, the customers come and go, and Ning, a former boxer, talks, fragmentarily and only in an inner monologue, about earlier times, about the boxing ring, about Rachel's nail salon, where she learned her craft. A novel like a chamber play.

There are hardly any novels that are told from the perspective of people with a low level of education.

Thammavongsa, who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1978 and moved to Canada with her parents at an early age, has already published several volumes of poetry. How she came to write a novel that takes place in a nail salon and is told from Ning's point of view, she explains to the Represent Asian Project with a blank space in literature: "If someone thinks in a book, it is usually an educated person like a professor, writer or artist." There are hardly any novels that are told from the perspective of people with a low level of education. »But I know that other people think too. My parents never went to school, but they are the most intelligent people you can imagine. How they read people and situations, what they perceive and how they react to them. I wanted to write about a person like that.«

And so Thammavongsa takes readers into the everyday life and thoughts of a beautician. Laconic, dry and in short sentences, the protagonist talks about classism, racism and sexism without explicitly naming any of them.

In the original English, the novel is called “Pick a color,” which in German means somewhat clumsily “Pick a color.” “Ask for Susan” is shorter, catchier and conveys several of the topics that the book covers. Because: Ning is pragmatic. Her shop is called “Susan”, she calls herself Susan, and all of her employees also get a small sign with this name. In addition, everyone has to wear the same hairstyle: black, shoulder-length. This means that anyone can book an appointment with Susan and receive what feels like superior treatment, no matter which of the three Susans is assigned to him or her. Ning takes advantage of the fact that to many white people she and her colleagues all look the same anyway - she just helps a little.

Ning once hired a woman who had to dye her hair black to look like the other Susans. But the customers noticed that she was the only one who only spoke English. “Everyone thought the store was hers,” says Mai, one of Ning’s employees. "The stupid cow didn't even explain who the boss really was." From then on, Ning only hired women who spoke her language - that was easier in every way.

Also because it allows her to better communicate with her colleagues about the people in the store - often in a pointed tone. She doesn't like talking to customers. When she paints her nails or washes her feet and removes calluses, she lowers her head and hopes there won't be any questions. About family, friends, her life outside of the nail salon. Maybe because she doesn't have a life outside of the nail salon. Ning doesn't want to hear about her customers' lives either; she prefers to read it from their bodies. One of them forgot to shave a strip of hair on her leg: she was probably in a hurry. The other has strong hands, tension in her fingers, office job, Ning is massaging her.

Ning treats women better than men. Recently someone wasn't happy with the service, went on a rampage, gave a bad online review. Since then, Ning has repeatedly looked at the door, only opening it when the first employee comes and then immediately closing it as soon as she is alone again. Some men ask for a "happy ending" because they seem to assume that one service automatically leads to another, "that we are at his service in every way, drooling, with our faces hanging out."

Seven years after the success of Katja Oskamp's "Marzahn mon Amour," another novel is set in a beauty salon. It is not a redundancy, but an addition: While Oskamp focused on the customers and at the same time wrote a portrait of the Berlin district, Thammavongsa focuses on the women who work in the salon. That's rare. Even in films you always see beauty salons or hairdressers, places where a wide variety of people come together, places where a kind of fleeting intimacy arises, where interpersonal dramas come to light. But they only serve as a short interlude, usually for upper-class women who are getting dressed up for a celebration. The employees themselves are rarely the focus, which is why they are rarely the focus of the features section. Souvankham Thammavongsa draws attention to the employees, people from the working class, makes them visible, dedicates not a chapter to them, but an entire book. That is a great achievement.

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