We know them only from black-and-white photographs, taken at the notorious S-21 prison in Phnom Penh at the very end of their lives. Blindfolds removed, they stare, squint, smirk, glance away from the camera’s glare, moments before they were ferried away to the killing fields outside the city. A small boy perched in a chair, mouth gaping in terror. An adolescent girl, prim and composed, eyebrows arched. A young mother clasping her infant, a tear visible along her cheek, eyes glistening with the foreknowledge of her fate, and her son’s.
They are among the ghosts that haunt Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties, his gut-wrenching, beautifully crafted collection of linked stories about survivors of Pol Pot’s Rouge’s four-year genocide, which claimed nearly two million (and likely many more) men, women, and children deemed enemies of the Khmer Rouge. So, who died of an accidental drug overdose last year at the age of 28, chronicles a Khmer community in a city nestled in California’s Central Valley. (So was born and raised in Stockton.) His characters are scorched by the memories of abductions, torture, executions, and concentration camps. Those who escaped to the United States pass along to their children, like a strand of DNA, their anguish.
But Afterparties isn’t just about the aftermath of the Communist party’s Stalinist atrocities; it also charts the steep climb of immigrants and their children into a fragile semblance of security. The book stretches over two decades, teeming with blue-collar families (“Mas” and “Pous” and “Bongs” ), DVD rental stores, fast-food joints, Buddhist wats, stressed-out nursing homes. Mostly, these ex-pats get up into each other’s business, gossiping and boozing and smoking weed. Despite their challenges, they are green shoots amid the drab, cracked pavement of the world’s richest country. So, who was gay, probes same-sex desire as well, often graphically, and the toll of queer resilience from the 1990s until now. There’s gallows humor sprinkled throughout Afterparties, the frisson of love lost and won and lost again, but in the background demons lurk, cobra-like, poised to strike.
These stories are powerful dioramas of historical trauma, but that’s only part of Afterparties’ dark allure. Despite his youth, So was already a master of technique. “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts,” originally published in The New Yorker, is a model of suspense and omniscient storytelling, as an all-night donut-store mirrors the sinister noir mood of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. “Superking Son Scores Again,” narrated in first-person plural, thrums with the slang and testosterone of teenaged badminton players coached by an aging athlete:
“He was a regular Magic Johnson of badminton, if such a thing could exist; a legend, that is, for young men of this Cambo hood (a niche fanbase, admittedly). The arcs of his lobs, the gentle drifts of his drops, and the lines of his smashes could be thought of, if rendered visible, as the very edge of known and unknown. He could smash a birdie so hard, make it fly so fast, we swore that when the birdie zipped by it shattered the force field suffocating us, the one composed of our parents’ unreasonable expectations, their paranoia that our world could crumble at a moment’s notice and send us back to where we started, starving and poor and subject to a genocidal dictator.“
So favors the first-person singular. In “The Shop,” a gay college graduate helps out at his father’s car-repair business, blending in with the other guys as he surreptitiously hooks up with his older brother’s friend. It’s a macho culture; his father calls himself a “smog technician” while fending off the velvet glove of a nouveau-riche Khmer woman. Yet despite the opportunities America dangles (and withdraws), the past festers among the older generation:
“One of Dad’s other guys, Ohm Luo, a smog technician who didn’t do much smog checking, had cracked a joke about always finding himself in oppressive regimes – first under Pol Pot, then under his wife, and now Ohm Young had driven their whole neighborhood mad practicing the electric keyboard during block parties – which made Dad laugh and laugh, and when he stopped laughing, and his eyes caught mine, I saw it, that look of faint, enduring grief.”
Afterparties offers prismatic views of these intertwined lives. There’s Ma Eng, who lost most of her immediate family in Cambodia and has recreated herself as the neighborhood doyenne, manipulating her great-nieces and great-nephews like pawns on a chessboard. In “Maly, Maly, Maly,” we meet cousins Ves and Maly in the late ‘90s, just out of high school, perennially stoned, with one’s prospects on the rise and the other’s sagging into a quagmire of sex and drugs. Maly’s boyfriend, Rithy, narrates “The Monks,” set a couple of years later, as he mourns the death of his father and plans to enlist in the armed services. And in “Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly,” a middle-aged Maly duels with a female relation who now nurses Ma Eng in her final days, a bridge between the killing fields and a disquieting present: “Whenever Ma Eng sees me as dead, a ghost, I plead for her to take her medication without a fight. By the time the afternoon comes, Ma Eng will have reverted to hallucinations of war and genocide. Communists lurk behind the curtain. The plants by the window sprawl into ‘rice fields.’ Ma Eng waters those plants like she’ll get beaten to death if she doesn’t.”
So writes with grace and panache; his characters leap off the page. Walmarts, side jobs, SAT prep: these conventions open the door to better lives, mystically affirming aspirations born out of torture chambers and totalitarian purges. In this regard, Afterparties bears a kinship with an emerging generation of writers grappling with genocides in the former Yugoslavia, among them Sara Nović, Pajtim Statovci, and Saša Stanišić. Death, too, is three-dimensional, lurking in the nooks and crannies of Afterparties; and it’s difficult not to read the collection as So’s confrontation with his own mortality. He teases out the Buddhist theme of reincarnation – the nurse in “Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly” is supposedly a fresh iteration of Maly’s dead mother – playing off the possibility of redemption, if not in this life, then in the next (or the next). That America can offer only meager crumbs reinforces these characters’ belief in an infinite chain of selves, severed from the naïve individualism of their adopted country. As one character observes, “I understand how it feels to live with a past that defies logic.”
Perhaps it’s sentimental to consider these stories as a form of reincarnation. Yet So’s abundant gifts reconstitute us as readers. It’s no surprise, then, that Afterparties soars as one of 2021’s most celebrated collections of short fiction. So may have left us too soon, but with its compassion and fastidious attention to detail, Afterparties rises above the plain of desultory débuts. So sweats the small stuff in pursuit of a grave history: a courageous, wise, and awesome achievement.
[Published by Ecco on August 3, 2021, 260 pages, $$27.99 hardcover]