02 Aug / Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
Nine electrifying stories comprise Anthony Veasna So’s debut, and while many were previously published, when read together their magnificence is enhanced as they create an interconnected Cambodian American community. Most autobiographical is “Human Development,” in which the narrator is also Anthony, a gay, Stanford-degreed teacher close to his sister; here, his alter ego has an affair with a two-decades-older Cambodian American.
The rest of So’s stories happen in “the sh*ittier valley” (Central Valley’s Stockton, a Cambodian American hub). “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” features a single mother and her two daughters working late into the night; in “Superking Son Scores Again,” a grocer coaches a badminton team. That coach’s nemesis, Justin, is the privileged son of Angkor Pharmacy’s owner, the establishment mentioned in both “The Shop,” about a reluctantly returned-from-college son working in his father’s failing auto repair shop, and “We Could Have Been Princes,” which exposes gossipy intricacies at post-wedding afterparties.
A trio of stories – “Maly, Maly, Maly,” “The Monks,” and “Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly” – follows a motherless teen, her first boyfriend, and her mother’s reincarnation. The presciently chilling finale, “Generational Differences,” portrays a mother remembering the 1989 anti-Asian Stockton school massacre.
So’s death in December 2020 at just 28 is heartbreakingly tragic; this exuberant publication should ensure his bittersweet, posthumous fame.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, July 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2021