Anthony Veasna So: “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts”

16 thoughts on “Anthony Veasna So: “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts””

1. What a knockout of a short story. What an incredible distillation of how becoming American will solve everything and yet one’s own origins and original culture will undermine one’s attempts to realize one’s dreams. And how the necessity to survive will undermine love and trust when one’s individual desires will cause one to betray the original love they might have had. And why second generation children totally detach themselves from their parents original culture. This story could apply to California immigrants from Burma, Singapore, India, Pakistan or Nepal but is realistic in anchoring the experience in California Cambodian immigrants. It also conveniently conveys how the American dream of foreign immigrants is evaporating as America declines into the dysfunction of homelessness, low paying jobs, rampant crime and drug addiction and the cultural chaos Cambodian immigrants originally attempted to escape. Not easy to read because of its sadness, yet brilliantly observed in a multitude of ways.

2. a great read indeed but i’m confused by the final words: “Yes, they think, we know this man. We’ve carried him our whole lives.” what does that supposed to mean? didn’t touch it on Q&A with the writer.so anybody here can shed some light?

3. Diantiesan,
   It’s unclear but maybe the mother and daughters are attempting to control their lives but are continually being thwarted by the father. And then the man who comes to the donut shop that reminds them of their father. “We know this mam” is ironic in that they didn’t know he would start a second family at their expense. “We’ve carried him our whole lives” is also ironic in that the money they have earned (the three women) goes to what he wants rather than what he said he would do for them. The inequity of men and women is made worse by survival instincts.

4. I immediately found the prose awkward and clunky, and was surprised the New Yorker’s editors didn’t winnow it down. Why “three in the morning” instead of “3 am”? Why is there just a single street lamp? Why is the fog “nightly”? (I’ve lived in notoriously foggy regions and even there it was not actually foggy on a “nightly” basis) Why is the fluorescent glow “cool”? You can stare at a small city’s downtown? Not really. You can stare at the street or the fog or a trash can, but are you really starting at downtown itself? You sure as hell aren’t staring at “busted potential.”

   The handling of POV is also loose and clumsy, vacillating between third-person-omniscient and close-third-person. And the close-third can’t even make up its mind which character it wants to be close to.

   In Sothy’s first paragraph, the word “needlessly” is unnecessary. And then take this section, for example. “Sothy’s perception of the world becomes distorted when she stays in the kitchen too long, kneading dough until time itself seems measured in the number of doughnuts produced.” That’s overwrought, man. Her “perception of the world”? “Time itself”? Blech! Wretched writing.

   The coyness of a phrase like “normal time” or the evasiveness regarding “what he pulled” in reference to the father (a second family in the next town over, how convenient), it all had me running from the story and ready to chalk it up as sophomoric, even worthless, and wishing to abandon ship. In some ways I wish I had, but I’m a finisher, so I soldiered on.

   A person who buys an apple fritter every night only to never eat it is the best thing in the story and even that’s more of a conceit than anything. Same for the girls “interview” of him and then the “we need some drama here” appearance of the woman.

   The Cambodian backstory, the camps and the Khmer/non-Khmer/Chinese stuff, and the Wittgenstein, these are ideas, not story elements. Nothing coheres. The squabbling siblings are sketches, not 3-D characters. It’s just a mess all around.

   Oh, and then misandrist vengeance-violence (all men are evil and all women are victims, a bleat of deep anti-feminist sentiment there, one a straight male writer would never get away with) explodes for no reason like some sort of bad, inverse Bukowski story.

   “Can the act of enduring result in psychic wounds that bleed into a person’s thoughts and actions, Tevy wonders, affecting how that person experiences the world?” One of the worst sentences ever published in New Yorker fiction? Perhaps, very much so perhaps. Although the ending couplet is maybe even more laughable.

5. There are small California towns next to the ocean where thick fog rolls in from the ocean and doesn’t disperse until late morning or early afternoon. In very small beach towns, the downtown area is between 750 and 1,000 yards of where the Pacific Coast Highway runs through. Sometimes the content of a short story just does not resonate or a rich drunk flawlessly rendered, is more interesting than the plight of 3 Cambodian women, whose story might seem too maudlin and melodramatic. The New Yorker probably publishes a lot of factory fiction with dull uninteresting characters where nothing happens but there are no faults in the writing or voice. Still it is good to note shortcomings that if fixed would have made it a better story.

6. I don’t think I’ve ever read any fiction about the Cambodian diaspora. This is also the third piece of fiction by an LGBT writer published in TNY this year, following Douglas Stuart and Bryan Washington. Stuart and So are appearing for the first time, so credit to the magazine for fostering new, diverse voices.

   That said, I wasn’t crazy about this. It has a decent flow and maintains interest, but it’s haphazardly shaped and ultimately somewhat unconvincing. I appreciate Sean H’s close reading; this definitely could have been improved with a few judicial edits. The author had a story published in Granta last month that I actually liked better:

   https://granta.com/the-shop/

7. Talented writer but such a pandering, over-didactic story. If you find yourself putting a character into a philosophy class as an excuse for all the over-theorized reflection your characters are doing, that’s a sign that exegesis has slain mimesis and salted it’s fields.

8. I found myself reading it all the way through, and enjoying the different voice and mystery. The apple fritter a bit precious- why not order a cup of coffee or tea? And at 3am would the owner really not come out and say hello and exchange a few words? And agreed that the final “we carried him” overkill… that’s the point of the story, no need to “tell” the reader… some good editing could have helped to sharpen the nuance in the epiphanies of the two daughters, as the experience pushes them to “grow”, though at their ages they can hardly articulate the emerging understandings, so metaphor and indirection needed. But overall a decent story. Riffing off Updike’s A&P, in a different direction?

9. I was surprised people were as kind of this very clumsy story as they were above. Sean explains many of the problematic sentences and the awkward mix of modes of 3rd person narration. Also–this is loaded with “telling” not “showing” such as: “now that she’s old enough to disavow her lying cheater of a father, Tevy feels completely detached from what she was apparently born as.” followed a few sentences later by “Tevy carries little guilt about her detachment from her culture.” This sounds like the sort of narration acceptable in removed 3rd person literature from the 18th and 19th centuries but it smacks of “here we are in Spain” screenwriting. So much of what is told here could be shown to us and, as noted, the last sentence of the story is a particularly glaring example.

10. I enjoyed the story but am only replying here to Sean H’s complaint about the veracity of “nightly” fog. The author comes from my hometown Stockton which was built on the San Joaquin Delta. While that area has mild winters and hot, dry summers, it certainly does get a regular fog that clears up with the sunrise. This special fog even has a name, “Tule fog,” that you’re free to google!

11. Thanks, Stockton kid. Maybe I’m just a stickler. I much prefer your word choice, “regular fog,” because “nightly” implies every single night, 365 days a year, and even the definition of tule fog that you encouraged me to google comes with the definition that tule fog forms “from late fall through early spring,” not year round.
    And Stockton always makes me think of the fine Leonard Gardner novel Fat City (and its film adaptation by John Huston), so hopefully you’ve read that one, it’s a classic of the region.

12. “Three in the morning” is SO much more interesting than “3AM”

13. I admittedly haven’t gotten around to reading this story more than a year later, but I did see the author sadly passed away unexpectedly in December. It appears his story collection will be published this summer.

14. It’s bittersweet in that Anthony Veasna So hurtled through so many barriers, was so successful in getting a good agent, who got him a great publishing deal. He attended Stanford, got or obtained a graduate degree in writing and taught writing. Everything to enjoy after all the hard work. But his story collection will be published this summer. Even with some structural quibbles pointed out, 3 Women of Chuck’s Donuts had the struggle part of Asian refugees surviving in America delineated in a memorable way. Hope the other short stories give glimpses into Asian survival.

15. I just read his memoir in the July 12-19, 2021 issue. Looking forward to hearing what you all think, although, particularly knowing he died of a drug overdose, I can’t help thinking how representative he is of a spoiled entitled generation. Still, I enjoyed the memoir, enough to waste half an hour on google!!

16. It is extremely tragic that Anthony Veasna So died of a drug overdose just as he was gaining increasing literary success. Sometimes writers or actors ironically get noticed and read and then don’t take care of themselves in order to gain even larger success. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison pop up in the mind.

    At least we get to enjoy their art. His book of short stories will live on. If there’d been a novel but sometimes we just have to be grateful for what he was able to write. We sometimes have habits that could kill us but the individual person is the only one that can save herself or himself.

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