Cambodia & Diaspora: Anthony Veasna So “He did not live long enough to see his success”

He was finishing revisions on his first book when he died. Twenty-eight years old, a six-figure contract secured during a bidding war among New York publishers, and words of admiration from George Saunders, Mary Karr, Roxane Gay.

On December 8, 2020, in his apartment in San Francisco, Anthony Veasna So died of an accidental overdose. His partner, Alex Torres, was sleeping next to him.

Afterparties, his short story collection, was published eight months later. It became a New York Times bestseller.

Stockton, California. The impossible inheritance

Anthony Veasna So was born on February 20, 1992, in Stockton, a working-class city in California’s Central Valley. His parents fled Battambang province. His father repaired cars. His mother was a civil servant. They were among the approximately 150,000 Cambodian refugees welcomed by the United States after the fall of the Khmer Rouge—people who had seen things they did not readily tell their children.

So grew up in that silence. Yet he listened. He heard the stories of genocide and noticed something strange: they often ended with a joke. That would become the driving force of his entire writing.

A brilliant student, he entered Stanford in computer science before shifting to literature—which dismayed his family. He met Torres at Stanford, earned an MFA at Syracuse, taught at a refugee assistance center in Oakland. He worked in photography, painting, and stand-up comedy. He described himself as “a queer boy, son of Cambodian refugees, failed computer scientist, grotesque parody of the good immigrant myth.” His agent secured a two-book deal with Ecco Press.

Afterparties: a voice from elsewhere

The nine stories in Afterparties take place within the Cambodian American community in California—around donut shops, auto garages, suburban Buddhist temples, and Khmer New Year celebrations that stretch until dawn. The characters are the children of survivors. They carry the weight of genocide while awkwardly trying to live their own lives—queer relationships, artistic ambitions, identity crises in a country that does not fully see them.

Ecco editor Helen Atsma admitted she had never read fiction centered on the Cambodian American community before receiving the manuscript. “His writing is dazzlingly funny, but also deeply empathetic. Those two qualities rarely coexist.”

The New York Times described the stories as “crackling, kinetic, and darkly comic.” NPR spoke of a voice “so alive—smart, irreverent, funny, coarse, explicit, and compassionate.” Critic Maureen Corrigan said she was “in denial” throughout her reading, unable to accept that such a vivid voice belonged to someone who had died.

In one story published in The New Yorker, a Cambodian father interrupts his daughter drinking a glass of iced water: “There was no ice during the genocide!” That is precisely So: historical catastrophe captured in the most ordinary detail, turned by humor without being diminished.

Recognition, after

Afterparties climbed the New York Times bestseller list. It was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. It won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ fiction. In January 2022, a television adaptation was announced. The magazine n+1 created a literary prize in his name.

A second book appeared in 2023: Songs on Endless Repeat, fragments of an unfinished novel and nonfiction texts. A body of work, in the literal sense, unfinished.

For the Cambodian diaspora, the impact is of a different nature. “Reading Afterparties was so resonant, so refreshing—to see the Cambodian diaspora represented beyond survival literature,” said poet Sokunthary Svay, a friend of So. Before him, Cambodian American literature was largely confined to genocide memoirs. So opened another door: ordinary life, with its comedies and quiet griefs, in twenty-first-century California.

Cambodia, in absence

So had never lived in Cambodia. He did not speak the language. He knew it only through his parents’ stories—this lost, traumatic country of the past. Yet it is precisely that distant Cambodia that runs through everything he wrote.

Like Haing S. Ngor carried Cambodia in the body of an improvised actor, So carried it in his sentences—without ever having seen it with his own eyes. This paradox, this impossible yet real transmission, may be the core of his work.

He was twenty-eight. He was finishing revisions on his book.

Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties (Ecco Press, 2021) and Songs on Endless Repeat (Ecco Press, 2023), available in English.