Afterparties Quotes

“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.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“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.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“Back in my own apartment, I lay in my bed, surrounded by stacks of dusty books from college. All these classic stories and groundbreaking theories I was too lazy to throw out or even organize. The next big earthquake—fuck, even a door slammed too hard—would’ve buried me in a mountain of recorded thought no one gave a shit about anymore.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“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.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“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?”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“The last thing I want is to feel the frustration, the frivolous torment, of being around a person who can’t see past her own suffering.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“Ben laughed. He was intent on finding the underbelly of positivity lurking beneath everything I said. “How do you not have a boyfriend?” “Boys can’t handle me,” I said flippantly. He smiled in response, and part of me felt tender, too much so, my insides exposed to the air. I had the perverse desire to test the limits of his optimism.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“How funny, Sothy thinks, that decades after the camps, she lives here in Central California, as a business owner, with her American-born Cambodian daughters who have grown healthy and stubborn, and still, in this new life she has created, her hands have aged into her mother’s.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“A promise is a promise, yet, in the end, it is only that.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“I thought about what I wanted to do now -- if I wanted to eat or leave the park, if I wanted to apply to grad school in the fall, if I wanted to find Ben in the crowd. Nothing sounded appealing, and I had the vague desire to slip through the cracks of what everyone else was doing.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“We drove through a few more neighborhoods after that, searching for the lost truck, listening to a CD of old Khmer songs, the same CD that had been stuck in the stereo since the Honda had belonged to mom. I barely understood the lyrics, aside from a few phrases in the choruses, but I knew the melodies, the voices, the weird mix of mournful, psychedelic tones. When I tried articulating my feelings about home, my mind inevitably returned to these songs, the way the incomprehensible intertwined with what made me feel so comfortable. 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.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“I guess that’s another part of our generational difference: you believe we deserve answers, that there is always some truth to be uncovered.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“Every slight detail you would demand to know, as if understanding that part of my life would explain the entirety of yours. Through my frustration, my clenched teeth, I didn’t have the words to say those years were never the sole explanation of anything; that I’ve always considered the genocide to be the source of all our problems and none of them.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“Looking at your visibly sticky mouth, I thought about Michael Jackson again, the absurdity of his photo jolting our day into being, how the more he tried to change to reinvent himself into something completely new, the more he seemed horrifically burdened by what he used to be.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“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 alliance sin order to live longer. He thought Survivor was actually the most Khmer thing possible, and he would definitely win, because the genocide was the best training he could've got.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“Being Khmer, as far as Tevy can tell, can't be reduced to the brown skin, black hair, and prominent cheekbones that she shares with her mother and sister. Khmer-ness can manifest as anything, from the color of your cuticles to the particular way your butt goes numb when you sit in a chair too long, and even so, Tevy has recognized nothing she has ever done as being notably Khmer.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“Dad was one of those guys who smiled and laughed constantly, but never without a sad look in his eyes. I’d realized this about him shortly after graduating.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“I raised you to care deeply, too much so. About words, for one thing. All those years spent working as a bilingual teacher’s aide, undoing what Khmer children learned at home, perhaps it had made me paranoid. I thought I needed to ensure your fluency in English, in being American. The last thing I had wanted was for you to end up like your Ba—speaking broken English to angry customers, his life covered in the grease of cars belonging to men who were more American. So I read to you as much as I could, packed your room with dictionaries and encyclopedias, played movies in English constantly in the background, and spoke Khmer only in whispers, behind closed doors. No wonder mere words affected you so much. Even now, you still think language is the key to everything. And that’s my fault—I thought the same thing.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“The dream unfolds: Somaly and I are sitting at a dinner table. She wears a white sampot covered in jewels perfectly matching her necklace. She’s almost akin to an apsara in a painting—aggressively elegant, like at any second, she’ll bend her hands backward to her wrists, and sway.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“Her future plans never referenced Dad, though sometimes she talked about a time when she'd live among Brian, me, and the grandkids she expected. "I want two kids from you and four from Brian," she'd say, and I never understood why she wanted fewer kids from me than my older brother. The fact is, I didn't want any number of kids, really. 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.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“I thought of my sister, how she always knew exactly what she wanted at any given moment, down to a disturbing power to order off menus perfectly, and how I’d always been swept into her hunger for life.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“Ben laughed. He was intent on finding the underbelly of positivity lurking beneath everything I said. “How do you not have a boyfriend?” “Boys can’t handle me,” I said flippantly. He smiled in response, and part of me felt tender, too much so, my insides exposed to the air. I had the”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“Did he think he deserved more than this, Marlon wondered, and the thought unleashed an exhaustion that had been creeping on him all night, the feeling that nothing would ever be enough, that his entire existence had started with some chemical deficiency. He wanted another drink, a hit.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“Paul strolled over from the food court, projecting that casual angst peculiar to guys who never left our hometown, who stayed committed to a dusty California free of ambition or beaches.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“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.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“Fuck everyone else, I want to say, for burdening the two of us with all their baggage. Let's go back to minding our own business, anything but this. Who cares about our family? What have they ever done but keep us alive only to make us feel like shit?”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“Seeing a sloppy wet penis enter a sloppy wet vagina, from above, going in and out with the practiced tempo of professionals, strikes me as yet another drama for the ages I am meant only to witness, rather than learn from, like the Olympics or presidential debates.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties