In The Shop, an auto shop squeaks by with help from the owners son, a recent college graduate who has returned from a faraway land (the Midwest), until, one day, an employee accidentally loses a car. The staffs efforts to recover it lack the requisite urgency. What is wrong with you boys? a local busybody asks. Shes less concerned about the missing car than about the generational decline it symbolizes: Not one Cambodian man since my husband, Doctor Heng, has become a doctor here in America, not even those born with citizenship! My generation came here with nothing. We escaped the Communists. So what are boys like you doing?
Immigrant stories often traffic in themes of sacrifice and intergenerational strife, where the past is meaningful only as an obligation, or a set of traumas, to be silently shouldered. But the children of Afterparties seeksomething different. As one young man tells his father, You gotta stop using the genocide to win arguments. It feels transgressive that Afterparties is so funny, so irreverent, concerning the previous generations tragedy. Trauma is on the edges of each story, an acknowledgment of why the adults are so messed up and why, in the wordsof one character, this place is sofucked. In the moment, though, the youth are too busy worrying about sex or college to give it much thought. Teen-agers ignore their parents history lessons and explain why its more important to comprehend the Singularity. They wield terms like the model minority myth to point out the false consciousness driving the adult worlds achievement-oriented dreams. And they look to one another, not their elders, for role models.
In Superking Son Scores Again!, the members of a high-school badminton team worship their coach, Superking Son, a nineties legend of their Cambo hood. Its rumored that he was so good in his prime that he could vanquish any challenger while eating a Big Mac with his free hand. His unorthodox, aphoristic coaching style results in their winning the local championship: The first time we called ourselves number one at anything.
To the rest of the world, though, Son is just the goddamn grocery-store boy. One day, a college-bound city kid named Justin, who seems too good for our team, our school, our community of Cambos, arrives. He doesnt understand why the teammates look up to their coach, and he delights in challenging his authority, leading practices in Sons absence and taking everyone out for fast food afterward. But Son seems more deeply affronted by the effortlessness of Justins existence than by the impertinence of his manner. Man, that dumbass kid doesnt know shit about working hard, Son explains. Which means he doesnt know shit about badminton, because badminton takes workreal work! His outburst confuses the students. Werent we supposed to aspire to the status of Justins family? Werent we supposed to attend college and become pharmacists? Wasnt that what our parents had been working for? Why our ancestors had freaking died?
So once remarked that he was raised on stories of genocide that would often, somehow, end on a joke. In his stories, the structure is inverted. His sentences are brusque and punchy, and theres an outrageous, slapstick quality to his scenes. But the stories often end on a haunting note, resonating with the broader consequences of leaving or staying. Son and Justin eventually settle their differences with an epic badminton session, and the teammates begin to recognize the tragically static contours of Sons life. What they fear, just as much as violence or poverty, is that they will inherit the passive, fatalistic relationship to the past that so many around them possess.
In Maly, Maly, Maly, two teen-age cousins, Ves and Maly, hang out and get stoned in the hours leading up to a party of sortsthe celebration of Malys deceased mothers spiritual rebirth in the body of their second cousins baby. Reincarnation might be a pillar of Cambodian Buddhist belief, Ves reflects, yet its all a bit ridiculous. He contemplates driving off to college right now, leaving behind my worthless possessions, my secondhand clothesall of it. I could finally start my life, with a blank slate. But hefeels responsible for Maly, whosemother took her own life after looking to the next day, and the day after that, only to see more suffering. Its not quite survivors guilt, like that experienced by their parents and grandparents. Still, Ves and Maly are outsiders who can see through the bullshit, and the thought of leaving her behind saddens him. As they sit together, blowing off her moms reincarnation with weed and porn, he tenderly imagines Malys future, wondering whether she will ever leave home and be reborn somewhere else.
Ted Ngoy, the real-life Donut King, burned through his fortune. A lavish home and jet-setting vacations werent enough for him. He became an avid gambler, imperilling both his family and his leaseholders. If the American Dream couldnt satisfy Ngoy, how could the steady, dutiful ethos of immigrant life be sufficient for the youth of Afterparties?
In Three Women of Chucks Donut, Tevy and Kayley wonder if their parents failed relationship offers any clues about what makes life meaningful. They discuss their estranged fathers explanation that Cambodians, upon leaving the Khmer Rouge concentration camps, sought to marry for skills, pairing up out of pragmatism, not love: He said marriage is like the show Survivor, where you make alliances in order to live longer. He thought Survivor was actually the most Khmer thing possible, and he would definitely win it, because the genocide was the best training he couldve got.
For other characters, the vision of a workable future involves a frictionless, tech-assisted grafting of old and new. In the story Human Development, a romantic Stanford graduate named Anthony teaches high school, a choice that differentiates him from his college buddies, all of whom dream about angel investors and seed capital. He meets Ben, a fellow Cambodian American, on a hookup app, and they begin dating. Ben is an entrepreneur who wants to create an almost utopian app that will let users find the safe space of like-minded people that they seek. On the side, Ben has perfected healthy versions of the fatty dishes from their homeland: One of my aspirations is to disrupt the Khmer food industry with organic modifications. Anthony begrudgingly loves Bens cooking, complimenting him in the only terms legible to the entrepreneur: Id pay twenty bucks for this.
Anthony is cool and guarded,whereas Ben seems a bit of a Silicon Valleybuffoon, propelled by a dream that technology might offer people a sense of fulfillment, even rush them to shore, secure everyone to land. Their unlikely relationship unfolds into something steady and comfortable. But never too comfortable: along with a sense of unease, Anthony totes around a copy of Moby-Dick, which hes thinking about assigning to his students the following year. He realizes that what ultimately turns him off about Ben is his fixation on efficiency and his obsession with solutions. Anthony wants a future that is as stupid and vast as the novel, maybe even as futile as Ahabs quest.
Earlier this year, the journal n+1 published Baby Yeah, a moving essay So wrote as a tribute to a friend who took his own life. When they were in graduate school together, So and his friend, who is described as a half Iraqi Chaldean poet, loved discussing Jos Muozs notion of queer futurity and listening to the indie-rock band Pavement, which also escaped Stockton. They wondered if they would do something meaningful and great, despite coming from ethnic backgrounds where that seemed impossible and, more important, impractical. Its one of the most discerning essays Ive ever read about friendship, and it contains a clue for understanding all of Sos work, as he swoons over Pavements ability to make music that was simultaneously jaded yet big-hearted, doubtful yet sentimental, qualities he couldnt find in literature.
Yet even his fascination with this band, with which he has little in common, is tinged with reminders of his own alterity. He realizes that one of Pavements best songs, Box Elder, was recorded in Stockton on January17, 1989. That very day, probably no more than a few miles away, a deranged white man, aggrieved by the growing numbers of Cambodian and Vietnamese people in the city, entered Cleveland Elementary School and began firing. He killed five schoolchildren, all of them Southeast Asian, and wounded thirty-two others. It was the most fatal school shooting of the eighties and remains among the nations most horrific incidents of targeted anti-Asian violence. Sos mother was a bilingual aide at the school that year.
Afterparties is a collection of short stories, yet names and settings recur, offering a sense of how intimate the characters world can feel. Nearly all the protagonists of Afterparties resemble one another, the jaded yet big-hearted young men and women who yearn for history to take them beyond the Central Valley. The references to reincarnation give the book a cyclical feel, as though new bodies are always returning to old scars, hoping to figure out where they came from.
The swaggering idealism and bitter humor found throughout Afterparties are what make the more sombre final story, Generational Differences, utterly devastating. It is told from the perspective of a Cambodian woman who, like Sos mother, worked at Cleveland Elementary. She is setting down an account of her life for her son, and has reached the last section, about the day of the mass shooting, which she witnessed from inside a classroom. Its a strange conceit for a story, and she is impossibly composed and lyrical as she tells him about the shooter, who had acted to defend his home, his dreams, against the threat of us, a horde of refugees, who had come here because we had no other dreams left.
Writing literature is one way that immigrants humanize themselves to their uncomprehending hosts, but in Generational Differences So refuses to appeal to a readers liberal sympathies. The mother recounts the day she told her then nine-year-old son about the shooting, and how he asked her to show him the classroom where shed hidden, so he could make sure it would be safe if another attacker came. She took him to the school, where they ran into a white colleague of his mothers, whose Blond hair appeared combative, as if forcing me to register its abundance. The white woman, seeing the boy, began crying over the memories of dead children and the senselessness of it all. His mother was incensed. I wanted her to stop filtering the world through her own tears, she later writes to her son. I almost slapped her.
As the mother completes her narrative, she urges her son to resist the temptation, when he grows older, to gather the raw materials of their American lives and twine them into a coherent story. When you think about my history, I dont need you to see everything at once, she writes. I dont need you to recall the details of those tragedies that were dropped into my world. Shes not saying that the stories are insignificant, or that they paint the community in a harsh light. Her point is that its an impossible task, and she wants to free him from the obligation of pursuing it: Honestly, you dont even have to try. What is nuance in the face of all that weve experienced? But for me, your mother, just remember that, for better or worse, we can be described as survivors. Okay? Know that weve always kept on living. What else could we have done?
Read more:
Anthony Veasna So Takes On Trauma, but Doesnt Leave Out the Jokes - The New Yorker
