Afterparties, After Loss
Review of Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties (USA: Ecco, 2021)
By Aileen Liang
Afterparties is the late Cambodian-American writer Anthony Veasna So’s debut, a story collection spotlighting the Cambodian immigrant community in the valleys of California. Drawing from his own experiences growing up in Stockton as a son to immigrant Khmer parents, So brings to life a diverse cast of characters of different generations of Cambodians: a provision shop owner’s son doubling as a badminton coach, a nouveau riche stingy pou (Khmer for ‘uncle’), a young nurse who lives with the ghost of her aunt, twin Stanford graduates on different paths in life, among others. What they each share in common, across all nine stories, are the intergenerational traumas of the Cambodian genocide under the brutal Pol Pot regime, experienced first-hand but also passed on to successive generations in karmic cycles. These are stories that interweave humor with pain and suffering—So takes care to flesh out the richness of family life, Cambodian traditions, and the social spaces inhabited by the community. How these details are rendered in each story, though, take on their own life and character.
Tevy, the teenage daughter of a donut-shop owner in “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts,” asks a question that resonates throughout the book: “What does it mean to be Khmer, anyway?” The different generations presented in Afterparties grapple with this defining question. Tevy, having grown up in America and assimilated into it, feels detached from her Cambodian heritage and even her own parents. Sothy, her mother, on the other hand sees her heritage as a legacy; she notes that “her hands have aged into her mother’s,” the same hands that suffered from “picking rice in order to serve the Communist ideals of a genocidal regime.” Sothy’s hands are not entirely her own, as the spectre of her mother haunts and lives on in her. So’s characters, living with a pain that overwhelms and precedes them, struggle to shape an identity out of and alongside inherited trauma. For the young nurse, Serey, of the story “Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly,” her very psyche is shared with the consciousness of her dead grandaunt, Somaly, and she experiences “her torrent of unresolved emotions, which burrow deeper inside my body with my every restless night.” Believed to be Somaly’s reincarnation, Serey experiences vivid hallucinations and dreams that are not her own, and Somaly’s suffering lives on in Serey as a visceral experience, undiluted by time.
Although the burden of history is heavy, So’s characters respond to their Cambodian legacy by claiming intimacy and pleasure in unexpected people and places. In “The Monks,” Rithy serves for a week at the wat (temple) so that he may atone for his negligent father’s mortal sins and ease him more gently into the afterlife. The gesture is all the more surprising given that Rithy is presented as an Americanized adolescent who cares about appearing cool in front of “[his] crew” of friends. However, he possesses the magnanimity to forgive his father: “I still feel like I owe him. The guy had endured genocide to get me here.” His modern outlook clashes with the age-old cultural shibboleths of the wat, and he is both annoyed by his surroundings (his room smells like a “couple-banged-in-a-pile-of-ash funky”) and is annoying to the overbearing Monk A who takes him in. So reimagines the wat as a regenerative space where tradition and the new generation of Cambodian-Americans collide, and Rithy in the climax of the story shares a moment of sexual intimacy with a new friend, Monk D.
If Rithy finds himself unexpectedly connected to his heritage, Anthony, the disgruntled Stanford graduate who dates another Cambodian for the first time in “Human Development,” feels disaffected by it. Anthony is the only one of his peers not working in tech and is snarkily critical of those who fulfil the roles people expect of them, whereas Ben, the man Anthony is seeing, obnoxiously fulfils the role of the model minority, even making bastardized Khmer dishes that looked like they were “genetically resurrected in a petri dish.” Anthony is repulsed but simultaneously co-dependent with Ben. As bizarre as their relationship is, it is a kinship forged in the process of navigating a shared history. And it is the energetic three-way that occurs late in the story that helps Anthony to actualize himself, claiming the composite identities of his person as “Gay, Cambodian, and not even twenty-six, carrying in my body the aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism.” It is in finding joy and pleasure, in finding moments of intimacy and companionship, that So’s characters craft identities true to themselves.
So is not afraid to bring out the clumsiness of navigating Cambodian culture and history within the boundaries of the American dream. In “We Would’ve Been Princes,” a stressed-out bridesmaid exclaims, “Forty years ago our parents survived Pol Pot, and now, what the holy fuck are we even doing? Obsessing over wedding favors?” Even at a celebratory event, their pleasures seem absurd, if not inappropriate when contextualised within the devastation of the genocide. Marlon and Bond, the narrators of this story, are a pair of siblings who believe themselves to have “[tarnished] their parents’ reputations with drug addictions and frivolous artistic delusions.” They perceive their own sense of failure in relation to the sacrifices made by their parents, having stumbled in the pursuit of the American brand of prosperity. They share chocolate wedding favors and wryly joke that, even if one “[gives] Cambos money, […] they’re still gonna believe a coup d’état’s coming for us.” Their gaudy uncle Visith is a more straightforward caricature—he flaunts his wealth yet snubs the bride by hiding his ang pav (Cambodian red packet). “I was born a prince,” Visith says, while being “red in the face and covered in cognac-infused sweat.” Progress in a new world, though yearned for, is not a reality easily granted to its dreamers. So uses the brevity of the short-story form to articulate these frustrations but also invites snarky self-reflexivity about them.
Humor can be employed in more subtle ways, as a bulwark against accusations of sentimentality. When a family’s car repair shop in “The Shop” experiences a stall in business, the community comes together in a bid to win back good karma, pictured in the incredible image of “an army of tiny Buddhas lining the edge of the desk, a giant Buddha hanging out with the bamboo plant in the corner, with a few Buddhas stuffed between the desk and the wall.” The giddy excessiveness of the Buddha statues in the garage materializes the collective ambition of the community, who pool together their dreams for success and a better future in each one of their peoples. It is at the same time an absurd image, which only “[promises] that our lives, and our reincarnated lives thereafter, would remain, at best, tolerable.” Indeed, it is a difficult reality they continue to contend with, but they’ll laugh about it, if only for relief.
So, in his stories, envisions a future apart from inherited suffering, as the younger generations shift from being Cambodian to being Cambodian-American. He gives voice to the difficulties of assimilation that his characters face, but actively resists generalizations by qualifying the conditions of their experiences. For Ves in “Maly, Maly, Maly,” he feels “sidelined to the bleachers” by the beauty of his cousin, Maly. Maly has found companionship in her boyfriend, and even reconciles with the soul of her dead mother as reincarnated in their cousin’s baby. For Ves, a kteuy (the Cambodian term for ‘third sex’), he is unmoored by the emerging realization of his transgender identity: “I wonder about my kteuy-ness, how it fits into the equation before me, and doesn’t.” He sees his own queerness as being stifled by “how lame and uninspired everything is, [G Block], this neighborhood,” and it is uncensored aversion he feels towards his own heritage. Yet he still feels the ache of his loneliness, and his successful entry to a university in LA is simultaneously a hopeful beginning and poignant displacement from the Cambodian community. A similar frustration plagues the comic figure of the Superking Son in “Superking Son Scores Again,” who takes over his father’s superstore but is also a legendary badminton coach for the Cambodian kids in high school. He is not just a grocery boy, So asserts, because
when the birdie [he launched] zipped by it shattered the force field suffocating us, the one composed of our parents’ unreasonable expectations, their paranoia that our world would crumble at a moment’s notice and send us back to where we started, starving and poor and subject to a genocidal dictator.
So hyperbolizes the situation, where Superking Son’s exceptional badminton skills becomes salvation for the Cambodian kids’ dreary struggle to assimilate into America. Still, he loses this adulation to the cooler and younger pharmacist’s son Justin, the “college-bound […] Mustang-driving badminton player,” against whom he won a match in badminton, yet to whom he lost his dignity when he inflates his victory. So still makes him realistic, though, as he becomes “fed up with his place and inheritance […] made irritated, disgusted, paranoid, by his own being,” having to rely on his mother to save him from his money laundering scheme. So acknowledges the pains his characters undergo as they negotiate their identities, but still finds in it all humor to endear his characters to readers. We find ourselves rooting for both the Superking Son and the snarky, self-pitying Ves.
So has gathered in his stories a vibrant community of Cambodians who are trying to find their place in America. They continue to grapple with the immensity of their lost homeland, all while struggling to assimilate into an America that marginalizes them. So unites his characters and their families in a larger community of kinship, but also disaggregates “Cambodian-American” as an identity marker from the broader Asian-American experience. So’s collection ends with “Generational Differences,” written in the second-person voice of a mother addressing her son, sharing her pain at last while tenderly handing it over to him. She tells him,
When you think about my history, I don’t need you to see everything at once. […] What is nuance in the face of all that we’ve experienced? But for me, your mother, just remember that, for better or worse, we can be described as survivors. Okay? Know that we’ve always kept on living. What else could we have done?
The closing story of Afterparties pays homage to the survivors who experienced the tumult first hand, but also bears testimony to a present that still remains to be defined. Cambodian-Americans have survived and are still striving to in America to negotiate a future that has not been handed to them. The stories So has written show us the breadth and depth of emotions that accompany their journeys, demanding to be read and felt, because such are the mercurial realities of his people. There is more to be said, and listened to, from the hundreds of thousands of Cambodian-Americans themselves.
A lover of words and the worlds spun out of them, Aileen Liang studies English Literature as an undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University, with an inclination towards women’s writing and Southeast Asian literatures. When she is not reading, she is writing frantically in various notebooks and documenting life as best as she can.
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