Afterparties: Stories

by Anthony Veasna So

Real Possibility, I had convinced myself, existed in the big cities on TV, metropolitan areas where Real Life unfolded, where I could be as gay as I needed to be. Wishing my car’s air-conditioning wasn’t faulty, I wiped the sweat off my forehead, before thinking, I can’t believe I am sitting in this beat-up Honda, a college graduate, and entertaining the prospect of marrying a Cambodian princess for money. Even so, it was such a heartfelt idea, to think an arrangement like that, the stuff of farce, could actually bridge worlds.

“Thai food is just bad Khmer food,” she once said, “but it’s better than other kinds of food. What am I gonna do? Learn to cook pasta?”

Don’t want her to think I’m apologizing for my existence, that I’m submitting to her perspective, her conviction that I’ve wrongfully held on to the memory of her mother, that I’m an interloper of her inheritance.

Part of me wonders if the new generation should be allowed some freedom from the dreams of the dead.

Felt.