"The Shop" by Anthony Veasna So

1.5.22

A self-portrait using Southeast Asian stamps

I don’t know why I didn’t think about how hard it was going to be to reread “The Shop” and write about Anthony, but it’s hard. Anthony Veasna So’s book of short stories was released last August, over half a year after his death. The year before, he’d graduated with an MFA from Syracuse University.

I met Anthony in autumn 2017, when he and his cohort began the MFA program, of which I was a part. The program is three years long. I was in my third year, managing drama in my own cohort and beginning to disconnect from the program, but I connected with Anthony and many of the writers in his cohort— so many of them were kind, funny, and warm; something I felt had been lacking in the program as a whole since my admittance. The program at Syracuse is a prestigious one, and while I was there (and in the years before I was admitted, when I was an undergrad at Syracuse) I always sensed an undercurrent of competition and cliquishness, which at times I may have even perpetuated.

I recall the year before my first, when I was still an (older, in my thirties) undergrad. I went to the local bar, where everyone went on Thursday nights, and a couple of the current students, a second and third year, sat at the bar chatting. When I approached them to join the conversation, they completely ignored me, as if I didn’t exist. When I said hello, they glanced at me, and then turned, resuming their conversation.

I think that, as writers, we often feel like outsiders— many of us have lived as outsiders, growing up on the margins of our mainstream cultures, or in the margins of somewhere, always observing, never fully integrated. Maybe that’s just me. That is to say, we are seeking community and friends and belonging, and in seeking that we sometimes buy into the idea that, when we find it, we must protect it from others. That it’s scarce.

While I am typing this I am thinking of Anthony’s cohort— a group of wonderful, beautiful, talented writers, most of whom I only know on a superficial level. But several of them were with me for an autumn class with Mary Karr, and another with Dana Spiotta, and that’s how I got to know Anthony— listening to him speak in class, his hesitancy and urgency both at the same time. His smart interpretations.

Anthony and I ran into each other a lot at the local Crossfit gym. Both of us were obsessive about exercise. I was because I was sick, and overexercising was another way for me to control my body. I’m not sure why he was. We both had memberships to multiple gyms. Whenever I saw him we would chat. He’d invite me to do something, or vice versa, and we’d make plans that never came to fruition. We bonded over the Central Valley— he’d grown up in Stockton and I’d lived in Bakersfield. Every single interaction I had with Anthony solidified my intuitive feelings about him, which was that he was kind, deeply sensitive, observant, and silly. He should still be here, and I wish he were.

“The Shop”

This story came out in Granta while Anthony was still in the MFA program. I remember reading it and feeling like, Wow, what a voice. To be fair, I felt that way whenever I read most of my peers’ work, but clearly Anthony’s voice was hitting right in the moment, totally current and complex and representative of a culture whose often went unheard. I chose this story out of all the stories in his book not because it’s the best one, but because it was one of his first (of many) published. Later, he’d publish in n+1 Magazine and The New Yorker.

“The Shop” is about a young gay Cambodian-American kid who’s just graduated college and come back home to help at his dad’s car repair shop in Central California. He’s languishing. He know he doesn’t belong in his hometown and yet feels drawn there, contemplates staying there, and feels intimidated by the thought of leaving for somewhere else. It’s told in the first person, and one gets the sense that the narrator is living in a liminal space, a kind of pause.

The characters in this story feel deeply real and fully alive. Toby’s father, who employs many Cambodian men despite any deficiencies in work ethic, or even beyond one of them losing an entire truck and causing the shop to lose customers. His brother, a real estate agent. Doctor Heng’s wife, who once wanted to marry Toby’s father and now, according to him, comes around to show off how well she married instead.

It’s Doctor Heng’s wife who tells Toby he should marry a Cambodian woman for the cash. That he considers this conveys to the reader how precarious his position is, and the same sentiment is expressed when he considers staying with his secret hookup, an older kid from his high-school, Paul. Paul’s with a woman, but tells Toby he’s gonna come out so they can be together.

The unspoken character in this story is the genocide from which Toby’s parents escaped. Though the story is funny, this is woven throughout all events; the way Toby worries about his parents, recalls going to Wat as a child and wondering what, karmically, his people had done to deserve such awful violence. The tone shifts about two thirds of the way through the story, from more comedic to serious. Toby is in the kitchen with his mother, helping to make egg rolls with his mother (he’s forgotten how to make the dipping sauce). There are monks coming to the shop because business has gotten so bad. He lies about his hookups, saying he’s not seeing anyone, and then contemplates, as he’s mixing ingredients: “Yet, at that moment, the future appeared so precarious, the way a tradition like this could depend on a flimsy plastic.” He’s referring to takeout containers being used for measurement, but also to the precariousness of Cambodian traditions as a whole. The genocide, the loss.

Not every story has an epiphany, but this one does, and it comes near the end:

“And it hit me— once more that look of grief. But this time no one spared me its full force. The past year flashed across my eyes. The days I’d spent in the shop doing nothing, my inability to apply for legitimate jobs. What had everyone thought of me, I wondered, of Dad? His son jobless, a college degree going to waste. I began to realize the extent I had been a complete child, one that was chaining my father down to a failing business. Dad’s attention returned to the monks all trying to fix the Shop, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t believe myself.”

The last sentence of that powerful paragraph is like a gut punch, and the reader feels it as much as Toby himself. The weight of what he is carrying. How he is not allowed to languish like many others who don’t carry what his family carries. His guilt, which will never cease.

His father signs a check over to the monks, hoping things will improve, and the story ends with this gorgeous sentence:

“But what,” I was ready to ask, for every life Dad and I had lived and lost, “will we do after?”

A deeply powerful question which sends out reverberations beyond the story itself, into the wider culture, into our hearts.