I'm not normally a fan of short stories. You're just getting into something, and then it's over. And this shortcoming applies even more to audiobooks, when the "getting into something" is the most strenuous part of your listen. But I made an exception for this book of short stories by the late Cambodian-American author Anthony Veasna So, and ended up very glad that I'd done so.

The collection was published in 2021, posthumously, as So tragically died in December 2020, at the age of 28, having accidentally overdosed on drugs.

He was the son of Cambodian refugees, who -- like so many others -- were forced to flee the insanities of the Khmer Rouge regime. Born in 1992, he grew up in Stockton, California, home to one of the largest Cambodian-American communities.

My audio-version was narrated by Jason Sean, also a Cambodian-American. From him, I learnt that the correct pronunciation of Khmer is actually Km-ah-eh...

I found the stories really engaging. The style is vibrant, fresh, and chatty. But they're grounded in careful observation and remarkable insight. It's hard for me to judge, of course, but they feel incredibly authentic (and as I read more about So, I realized that a lot of his own experiences had been recycled into the narratives). He says in an interview with Charlie Lee: "I'd realized that I wanted to tell stories about Cambodian Americans that depicted the full range of experiences I grew up with. That is, I was getting tired of reading extremely melancholic Asian writing, not because that's not good or important, but because it wasn't what my life was." Appropriately, So is a master at striking the funny-but-tragic/tragic-but-funny note that many attempt but few carry off.


Kampot, Cambodia, 2009

A number of themes spin out across all the stories. The first, inevitably, concerns the history of Khmer Rouge rule (1975-79), with its awful litany of mass killings, forced labour, and general dehumanization. So refers to it as "auto-genocide", and although there are problems with that designation, it does capture the Khmer-on-Khmer flavour of the violence.

Hua Hsu explains how this comes across in the book: "The younger generation scoffs at the way their parents seem fatally, comically stuck in the past; the adults rue the fickle softness of their children. And neither side quite understands how to turn the old traumas, and the survival instincts they engendered, into a meaningful American future." Which is true. Very few of the characters seem entirely comfortable in their own skin (although they -- generally -- just get on with things).

Hsu continues: "It feels transgressive that Afterparties is so funny, so irreverent, concerning the previous generation's tragedy. Trauma is on the edges of each story, an acknowledgment of why the adults are so messed up... In the moment, though, the youth are too busy worrying about sex or college to give it much thought... 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 there's 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."

In his fascinating profile of the late author, E. Alex Jung records: "During one of his last public appearances..., Anthony reads pages from Cambotown [the novel he was working on]... At the end of the [Zoom] event, one of the audience members asks, 'Is there a particular emotion or feeling that you want to try and evoke in your readers?' He replies, 'I got really drunk one time and ... I just started screaming to everyone about how all I ever wanted my work to be was to communicate an exuberant grief.'"

Exuberant grief... Yes, that sums up so much of what comes across in the stories. The history they experienced will always mark the previous generation, but So also testified to the "dark laughter" that he inherited from his survivor-parents. In the interview with Lee, he says: "When stories were told in my family about terrible things that have happened to Cambodian people, there were often jokes mixed in somewhere, almost reflexively... One basic theory of humor is Kant’s idea of incongruity -- the idea that we laugh when things appear incongruous without any resolution... When you’re living in the aftermath of trauma, when you’re living in a refugee world, everything often feels incongruous. There’s a sense of things not fitting together. That’s what it meant to me to grow up in a refugee community: a constant grappling with incongruity."

Best at expressing this incongruity is perhaps the narrator in the story called Human Development, which concludes like this: "As I waded through the fog [of a San Francisco August], 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 final story, Generational Differences, is told by a mother, whose son has asked her to share her recollections because he fears that as she ages they will be lost. Many aspects of this story link with So's own family. The mother recalls a shooting at the school where she worked as a teaching aide. Not in Cambodia, though. In America... Perpetrated by some misanthrope who hated migrants. So's mother was a bilingual aide at Cleveland Elementary School where the attack took place (in January 1989). Five children died; 32 were wounded. The narrator in the story tells her son about the shooter; she said he wanted "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". She becomes angry when a colleague tears up at remembering the story: "I wanted her to stop filtering the world through her own tears." She concludes the account she is writing for her son like this: "I don't need you to recall the details of those tragedies that were dropped into my world... 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?"



A second, related, theme considers the question of identity more broadly. In the story entitled Three Women of Chuck's Donuts, the older daughter, Tevy, asks: "What does it mean to be Khmer, anyway?" The mysterious man who in the early hours of the morning buys, but does not eat, apple fritters does nothing to alleviate her confusion: "I am from Cambodia, but I'm not Cambodian," he tells her, continuing: "I'm not Khmer... My family is Chinese... For several generations, we've married Chinese-Cambodians." His family has lived in Cambodia for generations, but he calls himself Chinese. His family survived the Khmer Rouge; he speaks Khmer, celebrates Cambodian New Year, eats prahok, and buys food from the Khmer grocery store. But his father told him that he is Chinese. He adds: "I live in America, and I am Chinese." Tevy feels terribly let down by all this. "His vision of the world disappoints her -- the idea that people are limited always to what their fathers tell them."

(Doughnuts might be considered part of the national identity, incidentally. According to Hsu: "In the nineties, Dunkin' Donuts had trouble cracking the California market because of the dominance of Cambodian Americans, who, at that time, owned and operated eighty per cent of the state's doughnut shops, despite constituting less than one per cent of the state's population.")



A third recurring theme is what Zach Shultz calls "the push and pull of home, as refuge and cage". He elaborates: "Throughout the collection, his characters grapple with guilt over their indebtedness to parents and grandparents, while at the same time recognizing how their families hinder their personal growth and happiness." As one character expresses it: "Who cares about our family? What have they ever done but keep us alive only to make us feel like shit?" And yet, although Rithy's father abandoned him when his mother died, he bears no malice: "I still feel like I owe him. The guy endured genocide to get me here. He deserved a break, even from being my dad."

Alex Torres, So's partner, comments on the limitations he was always trying to transcend: "Driving around Stockton was, aside from movies, one of the few things that could make Anthony cry. He’d choke back his tears, worrying that it’d be impossible to reconcile his Cambodian American identity with queerness in real life. That’s why he created art."

And what was the cage, exactly? Well, it's multi-faceted. But the role of men definitely counts as one of the bars. The apple-fritter man at Chuck's Donuts turns out to be violent towards his wife. Tevy's mother, having bashed him over the head to protect the woman he is hitting, "understands now, more than ever, how lucky she is to have rid her family of her ex-husband's presence". As she and her two daughters haul the apple-fritter man off to the hospital, they all find themselves thinking along the same lines: "Yes, they think, we know this man. We've carried him our whole lives."

The Chuck's Donuts daughters are not the only ones to wonder about violence in their parents' relationship. Ves says his father was never violent in front of him, but he can't vouch for the rest of the time: "especially in those years when my dad was jobless ... and when it became obvious I wasn't, you know, a normal boy."

One of the saddest characters in the collection is the young man who runs the Superking Grocery Store. Superking Son, as he's called, was a badminton legend. He's aging a bit, filling out, balding. And he's stressed by his commitments to his late father's store. Yet he really does have a gloriously talented sporting past, and the kids admire him: "Superking Son was one of the good Cambo dudes. He didn't belong to that long legacy of guys who spent adulthood sleeping on their moms' couches and eating their moms' cooking... By taking over the grocery store, Superking Son had done right by his father's life. He had sustained his father's hard work... and made sure his lifetime of suffering didn't go to waste. We looked up to Superking Son. We wanted to keep it that way."

SS, however, is not only unhappy in his job, but also under financial pressure, and beholden to some shady guys. When Justin, the new kid, doesn't share the neighbourhood boys' admiration for SS, he reacts with petty jealousy. He despises the social position that Justin (as the son of a pharmacist) holds -- "Justin was Cambodian, but he seemed so different" -- and he feels hard done by in comparison with this later generation, who are further away from their parents' trauma. But really it's his own pain that SS can't deal with: "Badminton was the only thing that made me happy... This place is so fucked... This store disgusts me... It always has."

Justin and SS face off in a match, which SS wins, although not that easily. The way he relishes this victory is somehow pathetic: "He shifted into older-Cambo taunt mode, donning the same antagonism our moms did when we try to buy shoes not on sale, our dads when we prioritize our homework over the family business, our Mas and Gongs when they hear our shameful Khmer accents, and our older siblings when we complain about responsibilities they previously shouldered, about enduring what could never match what had already happened to everyone we know."

In the kids, despite the victory, respect has turned to pity and contempt. Meanwhile, the business spirals downwards: "When the store closed and Superking Son couldn't even offer the higher-up Cambos his back storeroom to use as their headquarters, Superking Son's mom saved his skin by selling her house and paying back his debts." Occasionally, he turns up at an open gym, plays a few matches, and then sits down to spectate: "He'll watch a crew of younger Cambos play the game that, according to him, was the only thing that made him worthwhile as a person."



Struggling businesses are also a persistent element of the cage that is part and parcel of home. Chuck's Donuts hasn't thrived since the GFC (Stockton was known as the "foreclosure capital" of America); Ves's dad's restaurant failed.

And The Shop -- possibly my favourite story of the collection -- is all about this complex knot of financial vulnerability and family duty. The narrator, Toby, can't get a job after finishing his degree, and moves back home to California, where his dad runs a car repair business as though it's a charity: "It was a beautiful enterprise, no matter how flawed, the way Dad sustained so many people, a whole ecosystem, both in terms of providing a service to the neighbourhood and also providing twelve Cambo men with jobs." It just about ticks over, until one of the men carelessly allows a car to be stolen, and their reputation plummets.

Toby stays on: "Realizations I should have had as a kid were, I guess, what kept me mopping the floors of the Shop... I knew I was supposed to find a legitimate job, but at this point in my life, dumb epiphanies about home seemed so precious, urgent, fleeting."

The meddlesome Doctor Heng's wife eventually organizes a religious event to help the workshop out. "We need to boost your karma," she says. So everyone brings Buddhas: "We put Buddhas anywhere it made sense -- a crowd of medium Buddhas on top of the mini fridge, an army of miniature Buddhas lining the edge of the desk, a giant Buddha hanging out with the bamboo plants in the corner, even a couple of Buddhas stuffed between the desk and the wall, just to ensure we had our bases covered." Monks come to pray, although Toby's Dad wonders how much profit he will have to turn in order to cover the donation and the food.

Toby feels he wants to commit to helping Dad out -- even though he has no particular skills in the car mechanics business. Seeing his father's struggles, he feels that moving away would be selfish. But Dad responds: "Worry about yourself. Okay? The Shop is only here to help you." Toby is mortified: "The past year suddenly flashed across my eyes -- the days I'd spent at the Shop doing nothing, my inability to apply for legitimate jobs... I began to realize now to what extent I was the one chaining my father down to a failing business, preventing his life from moving forward."

Immigrant children, it seems, are never entirely free to just pick and choose their livelihood. And their sexual orientation can be problematic, too. Toby is gay, but that doesn't stop Doctor Heng's wife concocting complex schemes whereby he is supposed to marry a girl from a rich family in Cambodia, who will pay him to secure her a Green Card... Then, after five years, they can divorce, she says, adding: "You can be as gay as you want after your life is established." Ves, similarly, does not find things easy: "I was a precocious freak who came out before puberty, and I was clearly doomed. It's hard enough for people like us, my mom would say. All very cliche, in that gay sob story kind of way, but I can't explain it any better than that. They are my immigrant parents."



A fourth thread running through multiple stories is that of reincarnation. Actually, the stories are not entirely separate. As Hsu points out: "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 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."

When we meet them first, Ves and his cousin Maly are about to attend a party to celebrate the rebirth of Maly's dead mother's spirit in the body of Serey, their second cousin's baby. The story concludes with Ves picturing Maly herself "in all her reincarnated selves". As the penultimate story makes clear, though, the way this reincarnated being inhabits Serey has made it difficult for her to function. For Jung, "Many of the stories in Afterparties end with a vision of what’s to come, through the lens of what has come before. The present moment is wedged between damned pasts and possible futures."

Interestingly, So's sister, Samantha Lamb, testifies to this ongoing belief within their family: "Their grandmother is claiming So may soon be reincarnated. 'I am pregnant right now,' Lamb said, 'and it is a boy. … And especially my grandma has been like "Oh! Anthony is coming back. He is being reincarnated."'"

There were a couple of things I wasn't so keen on. It's all there for a reason, but sometimes there was a bit too much intimate information for my taste... And I found the chronology a bit bewildering, although I guess it's not reasonable to want to have the stories dated... The story set in the nursing home has clearly moved us on a couple of decades, since the baby (Serey) who was the new vessel for Maly's reincarnated mother (Somaly) is now a nurse, looking after the same Ma Eng who supervised the reincarnation ritual, and whom Maly was so cross with. (Of course, you also want to know what has happened to Maly, a very vibrant character...)

But these are small caveats. Overall, this was a very good listen, offering a rich and sophisticated picture of a world that is unfamiliar, and yet so much deserves to be better understood.