Songs on Endless Repeat

Starred review from October 16, 2023
This magnificent posthumous collection by So (Afterparties), who died in 2020, brings together the short story writer’s essays and excerpts from his unfinished novel. In “Journey to a Land Free of White People,” So discusses his ambivalence about the film Crazy Rich Asians, recounting the “tenderness I felt watching” a set of “wildly different” Asian characters represented on screen while criticizing the film’s ending as a facile reconciliation of the “cultural contradictions” between the female protagonist’s Asian American upbringing and her boyfriend’s Singaporean family. “Baby Yeah,” the compendium’s most intimate essay, is a visceral meditation on So’s struggle to cope with the suicide of a close friend from his creative writing program: “What is remembering other than revitalizing a corpse that will return to its grave?” Chapters from Straight Thru Cambotown, the novel So was working on at the time of his death, focus on a Cambodian neighborhood in Los Angeles County shaken by the sudden death of Ming Peou, a pillar of the community and organizer of its unofficial bank. So’s distinctive voice blends mordant cultural criticism with a striking combination of humor, compassion, and insight. This is a bittersweet testament to an astounding talent.

May 31, 2024

The late Cambodian American writer So (Afterparties) deeply probes the tension between trauma and comedy in this second posthumous collection of "essays and outtakes," drawn from his experiences as a gay man and second-generation immigrant in Southern California. This work deftly combines So's previously published nonfiction pieces on topics such as Crazy Rich Asians and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy with excerpts from his unpublished novel Straight Thru Cambotown, which was left unfinished upon his death in 2020 at age 28. His prose brilliantly rages--with humor, frustration, youthfulness, embarrassment, loathing, and sorrow--at the invisible traps and tragedies that define the human condition. For So, these emotional cycles are the heart of both grief and laughter, a contradiction that leans comic in "Manchester Street," with scenes from his immigrant upbringing, and collapses into devastation with the concluding essay "Baby Yeah," in which a friend's death by suicide results in a song played over and over to evoke his absence. With the foreword written by So's adviser, Jonathan Dee, and well-paced, thoughtful narration performed by Keong Sim. VERDICT A moving collection of posthumous writings, both finished and unfinished, from a unique and impassioned young author whose life ended tragically early.--Robin Chin Roemer

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