Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco, HarperCollins)
They’re California kids, doing their homework and killing time in their parents’ shops, smoking dope, having sex, wearing teeshirts that extend to the knees of their baggy jeans, stealing packs of their dads’ cigarettes, envying the kid who drives a Mustang—but as one of them says, “carrying...the aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism.” They call themselves Cambos, these children of people who came to the U.S. in flight from the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia’s Auto Genocide, of people who have “clawed their way to a livable and beautiful life,” ”always thinking on the past and worrying for the future.”
As the kids memorize 50 Cent lyrics and watch Boyz in the Hood, hang out in a mall “that did so badly Old Navy shut down,” they balance their parents’ ambitions for them with the weight of the word “survivors.” They attend ceremonies for infants who have come into the world carrying the spirits of dead relatives who have chosen these babies for their rebirth. They put on the robes of monks to ensure that their prayers will allow a dead parent to pass easily into the next life. The simple act of drinking a glass of ice water can provoke a father into saying “There were no ice cubes in the genocide.” Even when they go off to college and begin to enter a larger world, they’re still haunted by the “dreams of the dead...the ghosts of all our suffering.”
At home, their mothers watch Thai soap operas since that’s the closest form of entertainment to what they once knew in Cambodia. A family wedding means “300 Cambos in the Dragon Palace Restaurant” with a singer imported from Phnom Penh. The wife of a man who triumphed over his early years by becoming a doctor in his new country clutches her Louis Vuitton purse and offers an easy way to become rich. All a Khmer boy needs to do is marry a wealthy girl from Cambodia and bring her to the U.S. A young teacher in San Francisco finds a man on a dating app who’s Cambodian and comes from his part of California. Before finalizing the connection, he checks to be certain that the man isn’t some unknown second cousin. His new boyfriend serves him a meal that both of their mothers once cooked for them, but it’s been transformed into health food; “ the essential ingredients were there but it looked disfigured, like it’d been extinct and was then genetically resurrected in a petri dish.”
In the final story of this collection, a mother tells her son “I’ve always considered the genocide to be the source of all our problems and none of them. Know that we’ve always kept on living. What else could we have done?”
The trauma of atrocities becomes part of the genetic code and is passed down to following generations, living in the bodies of the children of survivors as much as the stories of genocide live on as retold memories. “If you think that I’m interesting,” Anthony Veasna So told an interviewer, “it’s probably because you’ve never met someone that’s come from my particular context.”
It’s true that “his particular context” had never been revealed in fiction before. It’s also true that he tells his coming-of-age stories with a sardonic humor and a bitter compassion that’s powerful and irresistible. The tragedy is we enter the lives of his characters only after So’s own life came to an end. He was never able to hold Afterparties as a finished book and he will never write the four other books he had planned to bring into being. Dead at 28, a writer who had already been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, and Zyzzyva, So has turned his first book into his epitaph.~Janet Brown