I HAD BEEN looking forward to this coming out since I read "Superking Son Scores Again" back in 2018, and now it's here, and it's great, and it's his last book as well as his first. Well.
There may be another book--I imagine there are fugitive pieces here and there that could be collected. "Baby Yeah" certainly deserves to be in a book. But this will be the only book of So's fiction that So himself had a hand in preparing.
Quite a few of the stories here are narrated from the point of view of a character resembling So himself, gay son of a Cambodian immigrant family that escaped the genocide, growing up in Stockton, California. But quite a few could be from the point of view of cousins, friends, neighbors. As a fictional portrait of a certain place at a certain time, it bears comparison to Jamel Brinkley's A Lucky Man or Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Refugees, although he's funnier and grittier than either, and his prose pings and flashes like a pinball machine.
I hope it becomes a classic.
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