I read Songs on Endless Repeat in January and was enamoured with So’s unfinished novel, so I was so excited to finally read Afterparties to get more of his prose. But I think my expectations were set too high - I was expecting every one of these stories to be a gem, no notes, but a few of them I did have to slog through. 

Some of them, like The Badminton King and Maly Maly Maly, I finished and was just like, okay? That was fine. BUT, others were genius. The first story for example, featuring a mother and her two daughters working alone in their 24-hour doughnut shop was such a perfect portrayal of the way we project our inner thoughts onto absolute strangers, only to feel betrayed when they don’t live up to these impossible, imaginary expectations. It was a perfect short story. 

I also loved The Shop, which features a young queer man who moves back to his hometown after college to work at his father’s struggling garage. The ennui captured here, the stifling feeling of a hometown where nothing ever changes, except perhaps to get worse, is so good.

Of course a common theme in all the stories is that of the Cambodian genocide. So explores how such a tragedy imprints itself indelibly on the psyches of its survivors, which can then also be passed down to their descendants. There’s a lot of themes of immigration, the American dream, parental expectations, and of course queerness.

Now I’ll just go back to mourning the fact we’ll never get a finished version of Straight Through Cambotown - the author left us too soon.