Afterparties: Stories

by Anthony Veasna So

“You don’t need to drag me,” Tevy says, breaking free from her mother’s grip, but it’s too late, and they are in the kitchen, overdosing on the smell of yeast and burning air from the ovens.

He said marriage is like the show Survivor, where you make alliances in order to live longer.

Tevy examines the man’s reflection. His vision of the world disappoints her—the idea that people are limited always to what their fathers tell them.

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.

(Though our Mas would’ve shoved their shopping carts right through our vomit, without blinking an eye, without even noticing their puking grandchildren—they’d seen much worse.)

we swore that when the birdie zipped by it shattered the force field suffocating us, the one composed of our parents’ unreasonable expectations,

That’s what happens when your dad’s a pharmacist, we thought. Whenever you wanted, whenever things stopped benefiting you, or whenever you simply got bored, you could just whip out something else, like a skill set in Model UN.

He yelled “Fuck yes!” over and over, like outplaying and defeating a high schooler was better than all the sex he’d ever had (which was probably true, given his luck with women).

affirming how I feel sometimes, like she’s my responsibility, like I’m a dead broom reincarnated into a human, my sole purpose to sweep away her messes—whatever

“We’re young and beautiful and the concept of time is a fucking buzzkill.”

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.

I’d lived with misunderstanding for so long, I’d stopped even viewing it as bad. It was just there, embedded in everything I loved.

“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?”

“It was fun,” I continued. “I’m not saying it wasn’t. But, you know, when I think back to college, that’s all it really was, you know?”

“Which one’s durian?” Paul asked. Brian stopped stretching, grabbed Paul’s shoulders, and playfully shook him. He yelled: “It’s just the only food that Andrew Zimmern has refused to eat on Bizarre Foods! Think about that for a second! The badass dude eats fried grasshoppers and even he thinks durian is gross. You know the fruit is protected by a giant spiky shell, right? They’re so crazy and lethal they fall from trees and strike elephants on the head and, like, kill ’em! How is that not a sign we shouldn’t mess with that shit?”

“My kids are spoiled!” he said. “Anything you can eat, you should be eating. You think every meal we had during Khmer Rouge was smelling right?”

The rusty old parking signs in Khmer, darkness covers them completely. The way you can tell it’s the temple is by the outline. I wonder if that’s all you can know about someone, their outline. I wonder what will end up as mine.

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.

“We’re named after Marlon Brando and James fucking Bond! Which, in fact—the logic’s so Cambodian it hurts: name your kids after the first movies you saw after immigrating, and bam!” Marlon clapped his hands together, the sound like thunder. “American Dream achieved!”

“Can you really be a drunk Cambo without blasting Mariah Carey?” one of them shouted. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” blared from the speaker, and Visith said, “It’s July, dumbasses.” “So what? It’s the best Mariah song!”

Apparently once you have money, you develop fake problems! You should hear the shit people tell me when I do their taxes.” Monica stopped going through the bag and considered Bond, her eyes lighting up. “Marlon’s a perfect example!” she said. “He was making hella money, and then he got anxiety and depressed or whatever, and then he got addicted to drugs. It’s the money, I swear. Like, do you think our parents had ‘anxieties’ when they lived through the genocide? No, they worried about fucking surviving.”

Of course this party had ended with blood everywhere. He was born in the midst of chaos, so how the hell could he ever prevent it?

The only difference between college and adulthood was that my peers could now afford custom tables built for drinking games.

To my knowledge, this kind of indoctrination existed exclusively at the most elite of private high schools, the ones whose names started with a capitalized The and ended with a capitalized School, as if only the wealthy possessed a real capacity to “develop.”

I felt like bottoming. And didn’t feel like being a hypocrite by letting a white predator colonize my rectum.

People of all races, even other Asian men, thought my exact ethnic composition impressed a specific bearing on the way I handled a penis.

curriculum. I wanted my students to understand the doomed nature of Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick, the profound calm of Ishmael’s aimless wandering, the difference between having “purpose,” like Ahab, and finding “meaning,” like Ishmael. I thought my students should learn the best ways to be lost.

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.

What’s the difference between birth and death, anyway? Aren’t they just the opening and closing of worlds?

47 loads into the playground before shooting himself in the head, all 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.

No, the universe had already spit their children right back into the world that had destroyed them, reincarnated, reborn to live and die and live again, destined to an eternity of being exhausted, as everything, even the privilege of living, is exhausting when set on repeat.

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?