Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

The train came to my stop, so I stepped off and started walking. A dense fog from the ocean had crawled through the neighborhood, pulled in by the valley heat of my childhood and Ben's prior life. I couldn't see far ahead, but I knew where I was going, and I was reminded of Ishmael "working" on the masthead of the Pequod, Ishmael dozing to the cadence of his dazed reflections, diffused into the clear sky, the total opposite of my current waking moment. As I waded through the fog, I wondered, then, at the impossibility of my existence. Here I was! Living in a district that echoed a dead San Francisco. Gay, Cambodian, and not even twenty-six, carrying in my body the aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism. And yet, my task was to teach kids a decade younger, existing across an oceanic difference, what it meant to be human. How absurd, I admitted. How fucking hilarious. I was actually excited.

The nine stories in Anthony Veasna So's collection Afterparties are all lightly related accounts of first- and second-generation Cambodian immigrants living in California's Central Valley: three women who run a donut shop (this is, I infer, a rather common thing for Cambodian immigrants here to do), a young man whose father's mechanic shop is failing, a group of high school badminton players who pass around legends of their coach, a badminton star now working as the manager of a grocery. Partly, I think, because they are rich portrayals of an American community not before seen in fiction (can you think of any other books about Cambodian immigrants in the Central Valley, or anywhere else?) Afterparties was one of the buzziest books from the last couple years, and that buzz was amplified by the sudden death of author Anthony Veasna So by a drug overdose in 2020.

So's death hangs over these stories, and when his obvious stand-in writes about "carrying in [his] body the aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism," it's hard not to hear tragic echoes of So's future. But of course So's untimely death can also get in the way of the stories themselves, which are fraught with recognizable conflicts about the difficult balancing act demanded of immigrant communities in the United States, but which are also very warm and even quite optimistic ("I was actually excited").

One theme, specific to the Cambodian immigrant experience, that emerges is the way Pol Pot's genocide hangs heavy in the memory of those now living in the United States. It informs the older characters' sense of gratitude, and their dedication to making a new life in a new place, but it also divides them from the younger characters whose division and alienation from their parents seems like a recognizable aspect of immigrant stories of all kinds. I was struck by a pair of stories that depict a Cambodian belief that children can be the reincarnation of family members and the pressure this places on younger generations. When your mother commits suicide, unable to shake the memories of the Killing Fields, how do you move on when your new niece is believed to be her reincarnation? One of these stories, "Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly," about a hospice nurse who must care for her own dying aunt, is one of the strongest stories, and I'm going to use it in my class.

There is a richness to the stories, a kind of complexity that avoids easy plotlines that might underscore the generational conflicts that are their underpinning. In the opener, "Three Women of Chuck's Donuts," a mother and her two daughters watch a Cambodian man come in every night to buy an apple fritter he doesn't eat. The daughters suspect he may be a half-sibling, a child of the father who abandoned them for his second family; the mother fears he may be a cousin come to violently take back the money her absent husband borrowed from his gangster family to establish the donut shop. But the man proves to be someone else entirely; his secret fails to wrap the story up neatly but manages, in a way, to enrich it.

Stylistically, the stories are--well, fine. One of my favorites was "We Would've Been Princes!," about a pair of brothers who are determined to discover how much a successful cousin has given to the bride at a wedding--suspecting him of being stingy. The story is a fast-paced mess, but it has a kind of stylistic energy and verve that the other stories lack. Afterparties is most engaging, I think, when it breaks out of a kind of traditionally realist mode; another example is the story "Superking Son Scores Again," which uses a collective first person narrator (those breathless badminton fiends of the local high school) to great effect.

Finally, I ought to mention that these stories are deeply interested in queer themes also. "Human Development," one of the strongest stories, focuses on a narrator I suspect is the closest we get to So himself (not least because his name is Anthony) who is living in San Francisco and becomes involved with an older gay man who is also Cambodian and from the same town. The relationship is sexually and mentally thrilling for them both, but the narrator can't shake the suspicion that his new lover is interested in him specifically because he is also Cambodian, and that traditionalist expectations about reproduction and the sustaining of their small and embattled community have been transposed even into an ostensibly queer relationship. In "The Shop," a gay narrator endures the harangues of an older Cambodian woman who encourages him to marry a Cambodian woman to provide one of their own with a green card--his sexual orientation being almost irrelevant. In this way the stories often find a rich area of exploration in the overlap between immigrant stories and queer ones; sex and sexuality become, as of course they are, a battleground between more traditional first-generation immigrants and their Americanized children.