{"id":260565,"date":"2024-01-11T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-11T12:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=260565"},"modified":"2024-01-11T16:53:06","modified_gmt":"2024-01-11T21:53:06","slug":"anthony-veasna-so-straight-thru-cambotown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/anthony-veasna-so-straight-thru-cambotown\/","title":{"rendered":"How Anthony Veasna So\u2019s Unfinished Novel \u201cStraight Thru Cambotown\u201d Became a Collection"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the six years since I began writing the Unfinished Business column<\/a> here at Electric Literature, I\u2019ve explored the incomplete works of fifteen authors, but these have, until now, always been novels lost decades ago\u2014some over a century gone. That gulf of time tends to soften the loss of the author themselves. While I might find it sad that F. Scott Fitzgerald died at the age of 44, the fact that his fatal heart attack occurred well before I was born tends to take some of the sting out of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this is not the case with writer Anthony Veasna So, who died in December of 2020, from an accidental drug overdose when he was only 28 years old. Here, the sting is never far off. <\/p>\n\n\n

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So passed nine months before his first book, Afterparties<\/a>, <\/em>would be published. That book would go on to win the NBCC John Leonard Prize for a debut novel and the Ferro Grumley Award for LGBTQ fiction and receive wide acclaim from critics and readers around the world. While some of the stories inside Afterparties <\/em>had been published previously, such as \u201cThree Women of Chuck\u2019s <\/a>D<\/a>onuts<\/a>\u201d and \u201cSuperking Son Scores Again<\/a>,\u201d most readers were already encountering So\u2019s incredible voice for the first time after he was already gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is especially jarring because So\u2019s writing is so particularly alive, so boisterously funny, so sparklingly real, and so sharply contemporaneous\u2014there\u2019s nothing that feels posthumous about his work. It insists that So is very much here, and very much alive. Only when you come to the end of the last story in Afterparties <\/em>is it crushing to realize there will be no more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Except, there is<\/em> more\u2014at least a little. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This month, Ecco Books is publishing a second book of So\u2019s, Songs on Endless Repeat<\/a><\/em>, a collection of his essays and \u201couttakes.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d be remiss if I didn\u2019t begin by saying that the essays are their own delight: So\u2019s pop cultural criticism of Crazy Rich Asians<\/em> and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy<\/em> come together with deeper, personal memoir pieces about his father\u2019s life as a landlord and the loss of a dear friend to suicide. According to editor Helen Atsma at Ecco books, it had always been So\u2019s goal to publish a book of essays, and his eye had been on doing so after he finished his novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His novel, you say?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the \u201couttakes\u201d mentioned earlier are not fragments or drafts of other short stories, but actually eight linked pieces of So\u2019s unfinished novel, Straight Thru Cambotown<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So\u2019s writing is so particularly alive, so boisterously funny, so sparklingly real.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the foreword, author Jonathan Dee, who served as So\u2019s advisor at Syracuse University\u2019s MFA program, writes beautifully about what it was like to work with So on some of these pieces of Cambotown<\/em>, which formed the writer\u2019s graduate thesis, submitted only about nine months before his death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In emails to Dee, So described the book he envisioned as being stylistically and structurally inspired by \u201cHelen Dewitt\u2019s The Last Samurai<\/em>, Gabriel Garcia M\u00e1rquez\u2019s One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/em>, and John Kennedy Toole\u2019s A Confederacy of Dunces<\/em>.\u201d He wrote that these three were the books he kept coming back to for inspiration as he wrote. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Dee explains, this high bar that he \u201ccheerfully set for himself\u201d was typical of So. He wonders if, at the time So emailed with this ambitious plan, a single word of the novel had even been written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then So wrote\u2014with all the \u201cdeceptively casual, humor-cloaked command\u201d that Dee and others at Syracuse had come to admire. As Dee notes, the pieces of the novel that we have are incomplete but never rough. So was a \u201cperfectionist about his writing\u2014not in the self-paralyzing way some writers can be, but just made restless by the idea that something good could almost always be made better.\u201d Knowing that the pieces in Songs on Endless Repeat <\/em>would have likely undergone extensive revisions still, it is only more remarkable how strong they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dee mentioned that it contains parts of the novel there that he\u2019d never seen before, seemingly newly penned since their work on his thesis had concluded.<\/p>\n\n\n

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In the eight pieces of Straight Thru Cambotown<\/em> that are included in the collection, readers will get some sense of how So intended to triangulate between DeWitt, M\u00e1rquez, and Toole, and how the novel would continue the project he began in his short stories, to as one reviewer put it in the LA Times<\/em>, \u201cimmortalize Cambodian California.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a worthy goal, a \u201chole\u201d that So intended to fill, according to Dee. But So\u2019s work, and Cambotown<\/em> in particular, <\/em>doesn\u2019t feel like an act of preservation so much as an invitation (at times a demand<\/em>) to immerse yourself in the world he loved. If that immortalizes it, in the process, then so much the better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an opening section, \u201cWe Are All the Same Here, Us Cambos\u201d So writes in a lush first-person plural, present tense. \u201cJust look around and listen to the talk. Him, her, them. Those fools over there blasting Tupac like they actually get it, because in a way, beneath the yellow-brown-light-dark surface of their skin, they do.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So\u2019s work, and Cambotown<\/em> in particular, <\/em>doesn\u2019t feel like an act of preservation so much as an invitation.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Verbally, So soars around Cambotown, hovering over the Mings and Bas and Mais and Pous and Gongs, \u201cHeineken for the humble; Hennesey for the ballers.\u201d He wants to distinguish them from other Asian cultures \u201ctwo thousand miles away from Cambodia\u201d (look at a map<\/em>, he urges) even as he outlines what lumps all \u201cCambos\u201d together: \u201cIn Cambotown, we are all the same\u2014same stories, same history. Or lack thereof.\u201d The awful bonds of displacement, and of having descended from the survivors of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, are for his generation, badly tangled up with the false promises of the American Dream. He concludes, \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019ll never leave this place\u2014not truly. [\u2026] We\u2019re with you, have always been so. Let\u2019s be messed up Cambos together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So addresses the audience in other places in the other fragments of Cambotown<\/em>, but more rarely, making way for highly specific third-person portraiture of his characters. We settle into the year 2014, a decade after a financial crisis that lingers on in this corner of the world. So introduces a central cast of characters, described in So\u2019s obituary as \u201cthree Khmer-American cousins\u2014a pansexual rapper, a comedian philosopher and a hotheaded illustrator.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These cousins are bound together in their grief over the death of their aunt, Peou. In a fragment named \u201cPeou and her Kmouys,\u201d <\/em>So describes the legendary Peou, a mathematical prodigy whose skills, others imagined, would have made her a great businesswoman, or possibly a winning contestant on The Price is Right<\/em>. Her sudden death in a fatal car crash rocks the community and brings her \u201ckmouys\u201d together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201ccomedian-philosopher\u201d is a nephew named Darren, who picks up the next section, set three days after Peou\u2019s crash. At Peou\u2019s funeral he shrewdly observes the art on the walls, the silly minutiae of the ceremony. \u201cThere\u2019s a joke in this,\u201d he thinks to himself, as he takes it all in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Darren\u2019s brother Vinny is \u201cthe first Cambo rapper to break into the hip-hop scene.\u201d (One of Vinny\u2019s songs, \u201cSachkrok Thom\u201d is a rap ballad to Asian dicks, capable of curing all the world\u2019s ills\u2014if only the world would stop marginalizing them.) He is irreverent and headstrong, a fine contrast to the cerebral Danny, and the two read like twin sides of the same coin, perhaps of So himself, whose work never stops ricocheting between those qualities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third kmouy <\/em>is niece Molly, who writes Peou\u2019s eulogy while lamenting her own ongoing forced sabbatical back in Cambotown. After having once escaped to NYU and a Gallatin School bachelor\u2019s degree in \u201cIllustrating the Political Self\u201d that \u201ctotally kicked her ass,\u201d she got laid off from the non-profit where she\u2019d worked and sent home saddled with $200k in student loans. Molly is wearier, angrier (justifiably) and sees things a bit more clearly than Darren or Vinny do\u2014a third side of So\u2019s personality that readers will find underlying the essays in the same collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two read like twin sides of the same coin, perhaps of So himself, whose work never stops ricocheting between those qualities.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Later sections, like \u201cThe Roses\u201d take us back into Peou\u2019s life, and others go forward to Peou\u2019s funeral and the weeks beyond. Between the eight sections we only get about 130 pages of Cambotown<\/em>, but it feels like much more. (When I compare it to something like Fitzgerald\u2019s The Love of the Last Tycoon, <\/em>which was cut off around a similar length, Cambotown<\/em> feels both technically stronger and far fuller.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So\u2019s characters crackle with life, humor, pathos, fury, and desperate dreams. Their struggles are generational, historical, local\u2014epic and personal. What we get in 130 pages is so much more than simply track being laid for what never was written. These chapters are full and satisfying, a whole world unto themselves rather than any kind of mere roadmap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, it cannot be denied that it comes to an end that is painfully premature, with incredible potential energy that is still not yet kineticized. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because So guides our imagination so skillfully towards the future, when the past catches up to us at the end of the final fragment, that loss crashes over us like a tidal wave\u2014maybe not so unlike the way it crashes onto his characters, and onto everyone in Cambotown. It resonates deeply that Peou\u2019s own funeral, and absence, is at the center of this novel, and that the incompleteness it brings cuts through the lives of Daniel, Vincent, and Molly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You want there to be more, because you want to know that they\u2019ll be OK\u2014what else can you say about the experience of reading a truly great novel but that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So\u2019s literary agent, Rob McQuilkin recalled how Mark Krotov described the day he first met Anthony at the offices of n+1<\/em>, where he \u201ccame in off the street\u201d and immediately projected the warmth and irreverence found in his fiction. Krotov placed his story \u201cSuperking Son Scores Again\u201d at the magazine, a bombastic tale of tough Cambo boys who work out their aggressions through harrowing games of badminton. With an intensely sincere absurdity, the story charmed McQuilkin as much as Anthony himself, and they began working together on the collection of stories that would soon become Afterparties<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n