Three Women Of Chuck’s Donuts by Anthony Veasna So, 2020
The magic trick:
Eloquently tying together the story’s meaning in the final four sentences
Wonderful story here, made tragic by its author’s death.
So presents several ideas throughout the story without ever explicitly connecting them. The family dynamic. The family history. The cheating, lying father. The immigration story. The neighborhood. The girls’ confusion surrounding cultural identity. The seed money from a possibly murderous mobster. And of course the mystery man eating donuts.
It’s not difficult for the reader to draw lines between those ideas, but the story never makes it too obvious.
Until, that is, the very end.
The last four sentences
The narration backs away from showing to tell us what all the things that have happened in this story means to its characters. I’m not sure it’s a technique that would work all that well in a lesser writer’s hands. Here, though, it’s perfection.
The story ties together beautifully.
And that’s quite a trick on So’s part.
The selection:
Throughout her sixteen years of life, her parents’ ability to intuit all aspects of being Khmer, or emphatically not being Khmer, has always amazed and frustrated Tevy. She’d do something as simple as drink a glass of ice water, and her father, from across the room, would bellow, “There were no ice cubes in the genocide!” Then he’d lament, “How did my kids become so not Khmer?,” before bursting into rueful laughter. Other times, she’d eat a piece of dried fish or scratch her scalp or walk with a certain gait, and her father would smile and say, “Now I know you are Khmer.”
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