I loved this story. I had to work to understand the accents; like several other listeners, I switched from listening in the car to listening on my headphones with my eyes closed in a quiet room. In the car, it was just too hard to understand. I still missed bits and pieces, but it was like reading a story in a second language - sometimes you get a better feel for the story by staying in the flow than by trying to look up every word. The accent and word choices felt genuine to me from my limited exposure to people speaking in that style, and it brought the story to life for me. I especially enjoyed the switch between the Malay(?) English used by the POV character and the American English used by the boy. The joke about "nailing me" at the end was maybe juvenile, but I got a giggle out of it.
I'll admit that I plan to read the story with my eyeballs to see if I missed anything important - ah, I see already that the loss of the baby was mentioned in the first few paragraphs; dunno if I misheard that or simply glossed over it when I didn't yet have context - but I honestly think the reading would have been distracting and fake if it had been done with an American accent. Many regions around the world speak their own dialect of English - sure, there's American, British, Australian, NZ, but I've also spent a lot of time talking to people who speak Indian English, for example, and it's definitely its own language.
It might be best to think of this as a story told in Asian English, and the similarities between Asian English and (in my case) American English are great enough that I can understand it and enjoy it, even though it's not my native dialect.
I apologize for my lack of specificity and/or accuracy (using terms like Malay and Asian to describe the language of the story).