Afterparties
By Anthony Veasna So
How do you heal generational trauma that you can’t begin to understand? Trauma coming from the slaughter of your parent’s or grandparent’s families. No one wants to talk about it, other than say how awful it was and how lucky you were to be born here where you were welcomed by a government who doesn’t currently recognize your personhood.
Anthony Veasna So’s posthumous, debut novel Afterparties examines what it was like for the generations following the survivors of the Cambodian Genocide. Sometimes he does so through a queer lens, sometimes through the eyes of characters who have long since left their hometown, but there is always a connection to family and a question of where a person sits within a culture they couldn’t understand without experiencing. It’s heartfelt in one moment, cynical in the next, each short story unraveling some new way in which the surviving families are stronger as a unit than they are as diasporic strangers floating farther from their home.
While reading Afterparties, a friend recommended I watch the PBS documentary The Donut King, about Cambodian refugee and multi-million dollar entrepreneur Ted Ngoy. It was interesting watching it alongside the novel because they pursued telling the same story through different means. Afterparties begins set in a Cambodian donut shop and asks questions about what makes a person Khmer. The Donut King follows a man trying to provide for his family, finding success, trying to provide for his community, and finding more success than he knew what to do with, eventually ruining his life through the American Dream.
What makes The Donut King interesting is not Ted’s rise and fall, but what his brief impact did for the refugee community immigrating to California through his empire of donut shops. How to this day, those shops are kept alive by generations of Cambodians providing security to their families through dedicated work. This undercurrent of the documentary runs through Afterparties, each story building in a different way off the importance that generational connection holds for these characters.
I approach any queer book like this with a certain amount of dread. I expect it to consume its queer characters in some story of trauma, that someone will be beat beyond recognition and an older relative will come in to stand up for them. If you share this fear of mine, Afterparties will get you to the end without triggering that tender sensitivity so many of us share. Plenty of characters were closeted, or small in their queer identity, while others were extremely gay and happy to share that news with you. I felt more than once that parents were simply happy to have family safe from harm, that they didn’t care what they did in their personal lives. As long as their gay children were able to make enough money to provide for their family when infirm in their old age, who cared what they did behind closed doors? One chaotically nosy wife told one of the characters he should get married to a nice, rich Cambodian girl, just long enough to give her a green card and him a nest egg of money, before divorcing and returning to his homosexual lifestyle.
Gay or straight, all the characters at some point or another, were made to grapple with their placement in the world, and how that would impact their families when it was their turn to be depended upon. Familial debt, for kids trying to escape their parent’s experience, felt more than ever like a positive relationship. There was always a sense of “I’m doing everything I can to make your life easier than mine, just please take care of me when I can no longer take care of you” and rather than the usual bitterness associated with forced expectations, there was a recognization for the dedication they were payed through childhood. It’s not always a perfect relationship, but at the heart of every story you’ll find love and family, nestled together despite their mismatching parts.