Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties is a book of failures. Not a failed book: Its nine short stories dazzle and move. The failures are of the economic, social, and historical kind. While the book engages with the Khmer Rouge genocide that between 1975 and 1979 killed an estimated 1.7 million people (21–25 percent of Cambodia’s population), So is not interested in replay, repair, or redress. Instead, his mostly dark humor, witty treatment of the mundane, and motley crew of characters invite readers to ask: What do a donut seller’s daughter, a monk, and a tech developer have in common?
Afterparties diverges markedly from its best known Cambodian American antecedents. Both Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father and Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats openly confront the genocide in Cambodia. Rather than latching on to that atrocious past and demanding justice from the responsible parties—the Khmer Rouge and the US for contributing to the former’s ascendance in the late 1960s and early ’70s—Afterparties explores the variegated experiences of the generation born and raised in the US after the Killing Fields era.
As members of what Eva Hoffman has called the “the hinge generation” born after the genocide, So’s characters find themselves embodying the crux “in which the meanings of awful events can remain arrested and fixed at the point of trauma; or in which they can be transformed into new sets of relations with the world, and new understanding.” Like a lens filter that tints every outlook, or a durable bitterness in the mouth, the genocide’s aftermath hovers over every character: a father desperate to save his failing auto repair shop so he can support his feckless son; a young woman yearning to stop being identified by her entire family as her dead aunt’s reincarnated soul; a mother stunned by the enormous task of explaining both the Cambodian genocide and an American school shooting to her nine-year-old son.
Like Maxine Hong Kingston, a trailblazer of Asian American literature, So was from Stockton, California. One gets a whiff of that working-class city’s nervous sweat in the author’s hardboiled depictions of lives spent behind the counter in a donut shop or a corner store. Kingston has made her mark over five decades. So, however, died unexpectedly in 2020, before Afterparties had even been published. The breakout debut sadly doubles as a swan song.
Historical trauma governs daily life in Afterparties, and the various halting attempts across the collection to sort through and transcend the genocide’s legacy broadly engage with three modes of futurity: recursive, assimilative, and digitalized. In “Maly, Maly, Maly,” family and friends welcome a dead relative’s soul believed to have been reincarnated in a newborn child’s body. This Buddhist belief signifies the ethnic content of this community, but So makes clear that religion and tradition alone cannot explain the ritual, which largely responds to transnational events straddling the political and the personal: The dead relative has committed suicide in the US after surviving the Khmer Rouge death camp. The sharp irony of this death—escaping one of the worst mass atrocities in the world only to take one’s own life in American refuge—drives the need of the deceased’s loved ones to find closure in reincarnation. Though it cannot literally bring back the dead, the recursive loop of the ritual symbolically replaces that insensible death with an alternative, communal ending. “Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly” returns to this storyline and reveals the psychic devastation this communal solution inflicts on the child: She grows up broken by guilt for failing to uphold two identities at once, her own and that of someone she has never known.
Then there is assimilation, a hallmark of US immigrant literature. Looking beyond their community, several characters seize on the hackneyed yet irresistible American dream, with its promise of a profitable, progressive futurity. In “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts,” Tevy, a high schooler making her postgraduate plans, considers writing in her college application essay about the experience of mistaken identity with an ethnically ambiguous customer at her mother’s donut shop. “Maybe it would even win her a fancy scholarship, allow her to escape this depressed city,” she muses. The deep questions Tevy asks about her social difference—“What does it mean to be Khmer, anyway? How does one know what is and is not Khmer?”—would become fuel for her social advancement, taking advantage of higher education’s desired goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion—a frequent object of critique in the book.
These two conceivable futurities—recursive/ethnoreligious and progressive/US-affirming—both come to a head in “The Monks,” the middle story nestled at the heart of the collection. Rithy, a directionless college dropout, spends a ceremonious week at a Buddhist temple to help his late father’s soul transition into the next world. He will then join a bootcamp for basic combat training as a new US Army recruit. So delicately draws out the seeming opposite values between the austere temple and the rigorous army—peace versus war, fragile soul versus weaponized body. At the same time, he makes the point that young Cambodian American men desire the form and discipline offered by these competing regimes. The army attracts Rithy because “they could detail every second of a guy’s future,” and he realizes in the end that the temple offers something similar to a monk: “Something with a clear outline.” In one of his signature queer twists, So entwines and subverts the two formal regimes by having his protagonist and a monk face each other “like we were reflections” as they share in transcendent onanism.
We get a feel for true freedom by experiencing what it is not, and we cannot help but keep experimenting.
Finally, there is the promise of the digitalized future. “Human Development,” arguably the most far-reaching story in the collection, pushes the theme of queer belonging and the pernicious irony of the American dream to an extreme. The story revolves around the narrator, Anthony—young, gay, Cambodian American, and a Stanford grad with an English degree—dallying with Ben Lam, a 40-something Cambodian American “late bloomer” and software developer. A striver-parvenu in adrenaline- and cortisol-filled San Francisco turbocharged by Big Tech, Ben has developed a new app that will revolutionize social life forever.
My app seeks to forge pathways between individuals and safe spaces through a cutting-edge algorithm and a network of thoroughly screened members. Think of it as a digital interface that allows people of color, people with disabilities, people identifying as LGBTQ, to cruise for safe spaces—spaces not specifically for sex, but for the whole of their lives.
Ben’s DEI pipe dream, convincing enough to win a half-million-dollar capital investment, signals a technocratic reversal of what cultural theorist David Eng has identified as the forgetting of race that forms the basis of queer liberalism. Eng defines queer liberalism as the increasing retreat of legal restrictions on queer intimacy, most notably through Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 (which prohibits state persecution of gay sex) and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 (which legalizes gay marriage federally). If, as Eng explains, “queer liberalism relies upon the logic of colorblindness in its assertion that racial difference has given way to an abstract U.S. community of individualism and merit,” Ben’s concept of safe space in “Human Development” heightens racial (self-)segregation under the rubric of individual choice as progress, as if safety from systemic violence could ever be a choice. In this technotopia, race becomes a matter of personal preference, not a structural issue, and thus So’s fiction imagines an end point of American neoliberalism. At once a genius and a fool, Ben places his faith in the power of the algorithm and finance capital to prevent history from repeating itself.
Anthony, the literary scholar in “Human Development,” teaches his students the spirit of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to defend their minds from a full capture by neoliberal capitalism. He specifically mentions the chapter “The Lee Shore,” which warns against the false comforts of the shore for a ship. The ship must fight “’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!” We could read this as a condensed form of the subtle but powerful argument So makes throughout Afterparties: For Cambodian genocide survivors and their descendants, America with all its promises of refuge and wealth may be that one touch of land that sends cracking shudders through the ship.
What might be the alternatives to that ruinous touch? Afterparties asks readers to consider ways to be free without conscription—as Anthony would have it, free “to be indefinite, free to fuck off and be lost.” The fraught attempts at envisioning the future in the book—reincarnation, assimilation, and virtualized safety—show us that So’s provocative question can only be answered in the negative. We get a feel for true freedom by experiencing what it is not, and we cannot help but keep experimenting. Carrying that spirit, Afterparties will inspire its future readers with a quickening restlessness that may be So’s greatest statement on futurity.
This article was commissioned by John Plotz.