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A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life - immersive and comic, yet unsparing - that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities.
Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.
A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle's snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a "safe space" app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter.
The stories in Afterparties, "powered by So's skill with the telling detail, are like beams of wry, affectionate light, falling from different directions on a complicated, struggling, beloved American community" (George Saunders).
This is the full text of the first story in Anthony Veasna So's Afterparties
Three Women of Chuck's Donuts
The first night the man orders an apple fritter, it is three in the morning, the streetlamp is broken, and California Delta mist obscures the waterfront's run-down buildings, except for Chuck's Donuts, with its cool fluorescent glow. "Isn't it a bit early for an apple fritter?" the owner's twelve-year-old daughter, Kayley, deadpans from behind the counter, and Tevy, four years older, rolls her eyes and says to her sister, "You watch too much TV."
The man ignores them both, sits down at a booth, and proceeds to stare out the window, at the busted potential of this small city's downtown. Kayley studies the man's reflection in the window. He's older but not old, younger than her parents, and his wiry mustache seems misplaced, from a different decade. His face wears an expression full of those mixed-up emotions that only adults must feel, like plaintive, say, or wretched. His light...
"Human Development" is the collection's standout, a carefully constructed renunciation of the trope of the model minority. Afterparties ends with a fraught story of survival that considers the way tragedy can be appropriated by outsiders who try to center themselves in a loss that is not theirs. Anthony Veasna So died in December 2020 at the age of 28, eight months before the publication of Afterparties. On the one hand, it is impossible not to mourn the enormous loss of potential in terms of the other books So might have written. On the other, one gets the sense that this collection is a perfect distillation of that potential, that there is a unique synchronicity between the author's brain and what's on the page...continued
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(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Several stories in Anthony Veasna So's short story collection Afterparties take place in Stockton, California, the author's hometown. Stockton is home to the fifth largest population of ethnically Cambodian people in the United States as of 2019, according to the Pew Research Center. A 2018 study by U.S. News and World Report found Stockton to be the most diverse city in the United States.
Stockton is located in California's Central Valley, about 80 miles northeast of San Francisco. Its racial demographic makeup in 2018 was 42% Hispanic, 24% Asian, 19% white and 13% Black. However, it is far from being a bastion of racial tolerance and equity, as there are large income, education and opportunity gaps among the races, with white ...
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