Testament

There is a story about the late Anthony Veasna So that I love to share with those unfamiliar with him. In 2018, on the recommendation of one of his professors, So walked into the New York office of the literary journal n+1 with the intention of jump-starting his career. The gamble paid off: n+1 would go on to feature him. The magazine’s publisher, Mark Krotov, would later recall this meeting in a tribute to So, who died in 2020, just a few months before his debut collection of short fiction, Afterparties, was due to be published. “It was an old-school arrival like something out of Balzac, or Tolstoy,” Krotov wrote.

I mention this story because it strikes me that So moved through the world as though any moment could be memorialized. His approach to pursuing his ambitions, his talents, and his life—slant, comic, bold, unforgettable, poignant—animates the stories in Afterparties and also the writing gathered in the posthumous Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes.

Songs on Endless Repeat brings together critical essays and excerpts from So’s unfinished novel, Straight Thru Cambotown, which takes place in a Cambodian community in California’s Central Valley after the death of a beloved matriarch, Peou. The excerpts are narrated in an unnamed first-person voice that takes on the texture of the fourth person. The central characters, siblings Molly and Vinny and their cousin Darren, were close in childhood but have grown distant, living disparate though somewhat parallel lives. They are making their way not only to the funeral but also to one another, a process that is bittersweet as each confronts monumental losses. There’s Peou, of course, and then there are the challenges of their personal and professional lives, which have whittled down the optimism they once shared.

Straight Thru Cambotown depicts the darkly comic complexities of mourning as well as the difficulty of coming to terms with history. Peou was a formative figure in the lives of Molly, Vinny, and Darren. (Indeed, one of Molly’s challenges involves the task of eulogizing her.) Also looming is the legacy of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, whose genocidal reign included the systematic murder of more than 1.5 million Cambodians and made So’s parents refugees. Even though, as first-generation Cambodian Americans, the three protagonists were not directly affected by the genocide, they are witnesses to its diasporic aftermath. The heart of the novel, then, seeks to address a question So first posed in Afterparties: How does the violence of colonialism, genocide, and capitalism inform the ways one lives?

It is no coincidence that the main characters of Straight Thru Cambotown are all aspiring artists. Molly wants to paint; Vinny, to be a rapper; Darren, formerly a stand-up, is in graduate school researching the philosophy of comedy. In her eulogy, Molly recalls a story told by the late matriarch: “All the good men died.… Back in the genocide, they worked them as slaves in the fields, tortured them, imprisoned them in S-Twenty-one and poured water over their clothed faces until they begged the soldiers to kill them, put them out of their misery. The teachers, the painters, the entrepreneurs…the intellectuals…the fabric weavers…the musicians…the architects…the sculptors—they were all killed, even the men with glasses who were trained to see the world in two different ways.”

So is acutely interested in matters of expression and, more specifically, art-making. How, he wants us to imagine, does art endure? What does it mean to capture a people? Or to construct a narrative?

The six critical essays collected in Songs on Endless Repeat—which are interspersed between the novel excerpts—consider in a different mode the question of art-making, particularly the tensions between reality and representation. So’s objects of inquiry occupy a vast range: from the middlebrow (the film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians) to the lowbrow (reality television) to the highbrow (the art of the Western canon). The author inflects the circumstances and contexts of these aesthetic encounters to take on spectacle, queerness, whiteness, and Asian representation, but he is less interested in neat dichotomies of good/bad or smart/vapid than he is in offering a set of provocations. Each essay frames a series of rhetorical questions, compelling us to consider: What does this art do for us? How does it enrich our souls? Such an enrichment is not necessarily for creative or artistic fulfillment alone but rather carries political potential and power.

Inevitably, perhaps, an air of tragedy and mourning envelops the collection. And yet, laughter also reverberates throughout these pages: melodic, joyous, youthful. Humor seems to be the modality through which So oriented his life, leavening devastation with pockets of lightness and comic absurdity, and Songs on Endless Repeat dazzles with its depth and insight. The material here is marked by his distinctive voice—erudite, light, riotous, funny—interrogating the legacies of art and what it impresses upon us, its productive tensions and generative capacities.

No great book is ever perfect. Perfection should not be the goal for literature, for art. Nevertheless—and true to its title—Songs on Endless Repeat offers us a set of glimpses, glimmers that can be excavated, imparting new insights, new ways of thinking about this world.•