Editorial Content for Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes

On December 8, 2020, Cambodian American writer Anthony Veasna So died of a drug overdose at age 28. His death cut short a promising literary career, evidenced by the critical acclaim for his posthumous debut short story collection, AFTERPARTIES, which won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for best first book.

Fortunately for admirers of So’s writing, that collection wasn’t the only work he left behind. SONGS ON ENDLESS REPEAT contains fragments of his unpublished novel, Straight Thru Cambotown, and collects six essays previously published in places that include The New Yorker and the literary journal n+1. These pieces are the work of a dynamic writer whose promise, if not yet fully realized, shines in the vitality and unique perspective he brings to his work.

Set in a city that bears a strong resemblance to So’s hometown of Stockton, California, where he grew up in an “insular community of Khmer Rouge genocide survivors and their children, none of them particularly empathetic to my queerness,” the novel’s excerpts focus on events surrounding the death of a middle-aged woman named Peou. Like So’s parents, she’s an immigrant from Cambodia in the early 1980s, after the fall of the Pol Pot regime that murdered her husband.

"These pieces are the work of a dynamic writer whose promise, if not yet fully realized, shines in the vitality and unique perspective he brings to his work."

In Peou’s case, she has risen by force of ambition and relentless toil to occupy the position of the “Counter” for nearly a quarter century in an underground financial network in the Cambodian community known as the Circle of Money that’s made her a millionaire. She’s the “calculator of interest and debts,” and under her rule, “nobody was spared her strict, unforgiving demeanor.”

So focuses on Peou’s nephews, Darren and Vinny, and Vinny’s sister, Molly. Darren, a failed standup comic, is a Stanford PhD student writing a thesis on “the philosophical origins of comedy and its epistemological relation to trauma theory.” Vinny, a gangster rapper of some local renown in the Bay Area, has just recorded his first album, while Molly has temporarily abandoned dreams of an art career in New York City.

As the family prepares for Peou’s funeral --- conducted in strict accordance with elaborate Cambodian Buddhist ritual --- the three young people display the alienation of the generation once removed from the genocide that killed more than 1.5 million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the country’s population, while their elders seem mystified by the apparent aimlessness of the lives of the three millennials. So exploits these tensions in ways that are both smart and often bitingly humorous.

In “A Year in Reading,” a piece in which he confesses to starting almost a hundred books and finishing none of them, So imagines that as “not a terrible way to live as a writer with political and aesthetic aims of the lofty, masochistic variety, whose first novel draft will definitely push the limits of digestible length.” Whether he would have achieved those aims in his Cambotown novel can’t be determined by the approximately 130 pages included in SONGS ON ENDLESS REPEAT, but there’s enough here to provide a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been.

In nonfiction pieces that include his mixed assessment of the film Crazy Rich Asians and an analysis of what he calls “deep reality TV” as displayed in the show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” So displays a talent for cultural criticism. The strongest essay is “Duplex,” a deeply personal one in which he describes how his father, who owned an auto repair shop, purchased four duplexes out of foreclosure in the Stockton area following the 2008 real estate crash, and embarked on a second career as a landlord.

So portrays his father laboring tirelessly at renovating and maintaining his properties, contrasting the nobility of his calluses with the puerility of the collages that the writer --- then an art student at Stanford with vague ambitions to follow in the footsteps of photographer Diane Arbus --- fashioned out of layers of print transfers and wallpaper glue added to photos of the duplexes.

The collection concludes with “Baby Yeah,” the emotional story of So’s friendship with a fellow Syracuse creative writing graduate student --- a poet and, like So, the child of an immigrant --- and their mutual admiration for the band Pavement, founded in Stockton.

So describes how he and his friend were “full of giddy potential, love for idiotic jokes, fuzzy notions begging to be clarified into true art, until one of us peered into the foreseeable future, or maybe the next gray day, and decided living wasn’t worth the trouble.” He paints a concise but vivid portrait of his guilt and grief after his friend’s suicide, a sudden death that, of course, foreshadows his own. “What is remembering,” he asks, “other than revitalizing a corpse that will return to its grave?”

Writing in a foreword to So’s book, novelist Jonathan Dee --- along with Dana Spiotta and Mary Karr, one of So’s teachers at Syracuse University, where he earned an MFA in creative writing --- observes that “it is still a mistake to dwell on what’s not here, what he didn’t do.” That’s not an easy admonition to heed, but even so, it’s impossible to ignore the pleasure of even this tragically truncated encounter with So’s work.