On ‘The Sound of Music’ by Tom Cho

In the 1965 film The Sound of Music, Uncle Max delivers the line ‘surprise, surprise’ twice. The first time, he is earnest, or at least as earnest as camp Uncle Max can be. ‘Surprise, surprise,’ he says when he announces that he intends to enter the von Trapp children in the Salzburg Folk Festival. Captain von Trapp is equally earnest when he firmly forbids it. Max’s second ‘surprise, surprise’, an hour later in the movie, is ironic. Surprise, surprise, scheming Uncle Max has taken advantage of the captain’s absence and entered the children in the competition behind his back. Nobody is surprised. Both within the phrase and in its repetition, there is slippage between the first surprise and the second. Part of the reason this shift in meaning is possible is that surprise has no inherent valence. Surprises can be good or bad, exciting or dismaying or something else entirely.

Tom Cho’s story The Sound of Music begins with the iconic opening sequence of the film: clouds, mountainside, Maria spinning and singing. This is at once one of the most familiar film openings in popular culture and a surprising place for a short story to start. The next surprise is that the narrator of the story appears to be Fräulein Maria herself. The next surprise is that this Maria has an Auntie Ling who was once a riverboat gambler in China. Cho has an astonishing ability to harness the potential for surprise in an unfolding narrative. As the story progresses, he mounts an incisive intervention into popular culture. He subverts the gendered and racialised expectations that surround typical familiar characters to reveal new vistas of self and story. Surprise here is adventurous, expansive, purposeful, and revelatory.

All surprises tell us something. They ‘crystal(ise) what it means to have a vulnerable body and fallible mind in a world of unpredictable and chaotic events,’ in the words of Christopher Miller. Cho’s audacious, dexterous, self-determining surprises remind us that this is the point – everything, from our cultural touchstones to our selves, is endlessly revisable, capable of broader, deeper, truer versions. Surprises are brief, but when done well they can lead to wonder, which lasts long after the story ends.

RE:HEAT is a series in which recent contributors to HEAT reflect on writing from the magazine’s archive. Sign up to our newsletter to receive RE:HEAT in your inbox.