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A review by cindypepper
Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So
5.0
I've read Afterparties over the course of a year and a half, reading and savoring each story in separate instances. Each story is sharp in dialogue and character and so vivid that I could almost feel that thick Central Valley tule fog lingering over each word. The dialogue is biting and irreverent with punctual comedic timing, yet it's accompanied by a haze of melancholy and listlessness.
My two favorites were "The Shop" and "Generational Differences".
"The Shop" features a fantastic cast of characters: the main character, his father, his father's incompetent friends who work at the car shop, monks, Dr. Heng's wife (a total riot). It is all at once a sliver of time in the life of the protagonist (a summer after finishing his college degree) and yet a rich portrait of the Cambodian-American community in which he has grown up in the past few decades. It's a lush exploration of generational trauma, what it means to be part of a community, and queerness.
"Generational Differences" -- an epistolary work about a mother trying to communicate to her young son how she survived a school shooting -- was gutting, not just in the subject matter or the tenderness but also the eerieness in which her trauma echoes today.
A common thread of So's stories is how his characters struggle to reconcile the incongruities of their everyday life and actions with the intergenerational trauma. There's the listless boy who visits the monastery. The badminton coach living in the ghost of his high school glory days. The disaffected recent college grad harboring a disdain for the tech world of San Francisco who ends up in an affair with a startup owner. The dynamics are messy but So manages to capture said messiness -- nuances and foibles and all -- in short story form.
My two favorites were "The Shop" and "Generational Differences".
"The Shop" features a fantastic cast of characters: the main character, his father, his father's incompetent friends who work at the car shop, monks, Dr. Heng's wife (a total riot). It is all at once a sliver of time in the life of the protagonist (a summer after finishing his college degree) and yet a rich portrait of the Cambodian-American community in which he has grown up in the past few decades. It's a lush exploration of generational trauma, what it means to be part of a community, and queerness.
"Generational Differences" -- an epistolary work about a mother trying to communicate to her young son how she survived a school shooting -- was gutting, not just in the subject matter or the tenderness but also the eerieness in which her trauma echoes today.
A common thread of So's stories is how his characters struggle to reconcile the incongruities of their everyday life and actions with the intergenerational trauma. There's the listless boy who visits the monastery. The badminton coach living in the ghost of his high school glory days. The disaffected recent college grad harboring a disdain for the tech world of San Francisco who ends up in an affair with a startup owner. The dynamics are messy but So manages to capture said messiness -- nuances and foibles and all -- in short story form.