Afterparties: Stories

by Anthony Veasna So

Two people who knew how to cook wouldn’t marry, because that would be, like, a waste. If one person in the marriage cooked, then the other person should know how to sell food. He said marriage is like the show Survivor, where you make alliances in order to live longer.

Tevy wonders if her mother has ever loved someone romantically, if her mother is even capable of reaching beyond the realm of survival, if her mother has ever been granted any freedom from worry, and if her mother’s present carries the ability to dilate, for even a brief moment, into its own plane of suspended existence, separate from past or future.

Kayley, on the other hand, wonders if her mother misses her father, and, if not, whether this means that Kayley’s own feelings of gloom, of isolation, of longing, are less valid than she believes. She wonders if the violent chasm between her parents also exists within her own body, because isn’t she just a mix of all those antithetical genes?

What concerns Tevy more is the validity of the idea that every Khmer woman—or just every woman—has to deal with someone like their father, and what the outcome is of this patient, or desperate, dealing. Can the very act of enduring result in wounds that bleed into a person’s thoughts, Tevy wonders, distorting how that person experiences the world?

This man, they realize, didn’t mean much at all to them, lent no greater significance to their pain. They can hardly believe they’ve wasted so much time wondering about him. Yes, they think, we know this man. We’ve carried him our whole lives.

Their playing fed off their opponent with the intensity of two Mas trash-talking their grandchildren.

He shifted into the Cambo taunt mode of our elders, donning the same antagonism our moms did whenever we tried to buy new shoes not on sale, our dads whenever we prioritized our homework over the family business, our Mas and Gongs whenever they heard our shameful Khmer accents, and our siblings and cousins whenever we dared to complain about the responsibilities they had previously shouldered, about enduring what could never match what had already happened to everyone we know.

you’ll swear, on the graves of all those murdered Cambos, on every cupping bruise your mom self-inflicts to rid her flesh of trauma, we promise you’ll swear that the stench of raw fish, and raw everything else, never got the memo to quit and relax. Seriously, you can trust us.

Hard to say if it’s intentional, the way her clothes fit, all these hand-me-downs, which is the effect she uses, I guess, to chew up guys too dumb to realize she will spit them right out.

and when it became obvious I wasn’t, you know, a normal boy, that I was a girly wimp who despised sports and watched weird movies. 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 cliché, in that gay sob story kind of way, but I can’t explain it any better than that. They are my immigrant parents.

This summer Rithy and Maly started fucking, which makes sense, as both of them have dead moms and shitty dads,

Cause every Ma has been a psycho since the genocide. It’s like, as long as they don’t overthrow a government and, you know, install a communist regime, they aren’t being total dicks.”

Here’s the part that seems like a revelation until it’s forgotten as life is lived, because nothing’s special about an adulthood spent in the asshole of California, which some government official deemed worthy of a bunch of PTSD’d-out refugees, farting out dreams like it’s success intolerant.

I am entranced by the cum covering the woman’s bottom half, though not the vagina itself, and, despite my own preferences, this reminds me of failure, somehow. Failure in its most legit form.

with her Lexus and Omega watches and Louis Vuitton bags smelling of fresh leather, all of them so giant I swore they had gained consciousness and could swallow me whole, were I to transgress their master.

I was content with myself as a gay man, and I knew gay men could have kids, of course, but it didn’t seem worth jumping through all the hoops—the surrogates, or the adoption, all the paperwork. The only time I took the idea of kids seriously was when I thought about everyone who had died, two million points of connection reincarnated into the abyss, how young Cambos like me should repopulate the world with more Cambos, especially those with fancy college degrees, whose kids could be legacy admits.

We joined them and prayed, for good karma and luck and blessings, for the upcoming year and our future reincarnated lives, and I slipped into a total hopelessness. What had we done to deserve such violence? How terrible it must have been, our country and culture’s past karma.

And I can see that in becoming a monk, he could shed these expectations, replace them with something else. Something with a clear outline. But if I tell Monk D this, I bet he’d blow smoke in my face and laugh, pass me his cig and urge me to chill. Somethings can’t be explained to death, he’d say. Guess they don’t need to be, I’d say. That’s how shit goes, we’d say.

he felt the sensation he often experienced when visiting home, that his parents had conceived him to work on a conveyor belt of nonsensical family issues. How else could he explain the tasks that continued to jam up the flow of his free time?

They imagined a future severed from their past mistakes, the history they inherited, a world in which—with no questions asked, no hesitation felt—they completed the simple actions they thought, discussed, and dreamed.

He tried to get me involved, but I told him I was too tired, that I was bored by all the talk of the future. I could see he was disappointed and I expected him to get mad, to snap on me for belittling his passion. The fact that he didn’t felt like an intrinsic flaw in our relationship.

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.

I wonder how it’ll feel to be rid of Somaly, to have complete ownership of my life, to move through the world without half my energy drained by memories not even mine,

Maybe the younger you are, the more dying seems unexceptional. What’s the difference between birth and death, anyway? Aren’t they just the opening and closing of worlds?

Part of me wonders if the new generation should be allowed some freedom from the dreams of the dead. But I’m also tired and don’t see any other path.

I guess that’s another part of our generational difference: you believe we deserve answers, that there is always some truth to be uncovered.

When you think about my history, I don’t need you to see everything at once. I don’t need you to recall the details of those tragedies that were dropped into my world. Honestly, you don’t even have to try. 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?