Anthony Veasna So Takes On Trauma, but Doesn’t Leave Out the Jokes

In the mid-seventies, Ted Ngoy was working the late shift at a gas station in Orange County when he tasted his first doughnut. Ngoy, then in his thirties, was instantly hooked. He trained to become a manager at Winchell’s Donuts, a popular chain, before purchasing Christy’s Donuts, a struggling shop in La Habra. Ngoy turned Christy’s around, and in the next few years he acquired more stores in the area. He is said to have popularized the pink box for to-go orders, which became a key part of doughnut iconography. By 1980, he owned twenty Christy’s Donuts throughout Southern California, and he kept expanding. He eventually became known as the Donut King, and he claimed a vast empire.

He had come to Southern California as part of a wave of refugees from Cambodia, which was being ravaged by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge had emerged in the fifties and sixties as a Communist opposition force before assuming control of the nation, in 1975. In the next four years, the paranoid, authoritarian regime killed as much as a quarter of the nation’s population.

Ngoy hired employees from among the growing numbers of Cambodian refugees in Southern California. He taught them how to make doughnuts and leased them shops of their own. In the nineties, Dunkin’ Donuts had trouble cracking the California market because of the dominance of Cambodian Americans, who, at that time, owned and operated eighty per cent of the state’s doughnut shops, despite constituting less than one per cent of the state’s population. Nearly all these doughnut-makers could trace their livelihoods back to Ngoy.

Asian Americans are acutely conscious of how new immigrants get in wherever they fit in—there are the jokey stereotypes about the Chinese and their takeout spots, the Vietnamese monopoly on nail salons, the ubiquity of the Korean-owned corner store. These businesses drive economic opportunity. For the first-generation immigrants who own and operate them, they’re significant only insofar as they insure survival. They are rarely seen, by those who spend endless hours working there, as places with stories worth telling.

In “Three Women of Chuck’s Donut,” the first story in the remarkable début collection “Afterparties,” Anthony Veasna So introduces us to sixteen-year-old Tevy and her twelve-year-old sister, Kayley. (The story appeared in this magazine last year.) Their mother, Sothy, occasionally thinks of the genocide as she’s rolling out dough at the family’s doughnut shop, and she regards the “healthy and stubborn” Americanness of her kids with a reluctant pride. Tevy and Kayley have been enlisted to help their mom work the overnight shift. Their father is only an occasional part of their lives. Mostly he exists as a lingering set of pontifications that his daughters dissect, like the one equating Khmer identity with “the smell of fish sauce and fried dough.” (The Khmer people make up the largest ethnic group in Cambodia.)

There is no Chuck—it was merely a name that Sothy felt sounded “American enough to draw customers.” The sisters aren’t ashamed of Chuck’s, which has weathered the economic decline of their California Delta town. It’s just a place where nothing happens. Life is elsewhere. They pass the time by swapping inside jokes and recollections about their father, and wondering if their workaholic mother should start smoking, if only so she would take breaks. Tevy is taking a philosophy class at the local community college, and she tries to do her homework at the shop. Every few nights, a handsome, mysterious man they presume to be Cambodian comes in by himself and orders an apple fritter. “His face wears an expression full of those mixed-up emotions that only adults must feel,” Kayley thinks. All he does is sit there and stare out the window, into the darkness, leaving his apple fritter untouched. Maybe he’s looking at them in the window’s reflection. He is almost generically withholding, precisely the kind of withdrawn, quietly scarred character one expects in a story about refugees who fled terror on the scale of that inflicted by the Khmer Rouge.

As he sits, the sisters project onto him their sense of the world, formed by Tevy’s philosophy textbooks, memories of their father, whom this man vaguely resembles, and all the well-worn tales of genocide. Chuck’s is their family business, and perhaps they will inherit it. But the birthright of the second generation is that they can tell stories.

Anthony Veasna So’s parents fled Cambodia as teen-agers, eventually settling in Stockton, in California’s Central Valley. So was born there in 1992. His father ran an auto shop, and his mother worked for the Social Security Administration. In a 2016 essay, So reflected on how his family “prioritized English over Khmer, their native language, in an effort to ensure the academic futures of my cousins and me,” surrounding them with books and letting them binge-watch “Frasier.” He attended Stanford University and worked as a teacher before pursuing his M.F.A. at Syracuse. He died last December, from an accidental drug overdose, cutting short a literary career of extraordinary achievement and immense promise.

The history of Asian American literature is one driven by a hunger for language. Classics of immigrant storytelling can often feel sparse and solemn, as characters grasp for phrases and expressions to capture the paradoxes that define their lives. So seems conscious that his work will be slotted into this broader tradition—in one story, a character holds a diversity fellowship named after Frank Chin, the pioneering Chinese American playwright and author—even if Cambodians are often marginalized as “the off-brand Asians with dark skin.” (On Twitter, So jokingly referred to himself as “tall and tan ocean vuong.”) The most successful Cambodian American books have been memoirs, like Haing Ngor’s “A Cambodian Odyssey” and Loung Ung’s “First They Killed My Father,” both of which emphasize the harshness of their shared history. Ung’s book, published in 2000, was later adapted for film by Angelina Jolie, whose adopted son Maddox may be the most famous Cambodian American ever.

As befits someone whose Twitter handle was @fakemaddoxjolie, So is hardly given to stoic silences. The young people in “Afterparties” spill forth with language. His stories are chatty and crass, as characters incessantly tease one another, make jokes about fellating Pol Pot, talk back, and talk trash, so much so that at the beginning of one story two characters have been kicked out of the house by “the grandmas” because one of them “would not shut the fuck up.” So comes from a generation that has enough distance from his community’s originating trauma that he can recognize coping mechanisms for what they are. The reason the man visits Chuck’s Donut is far more mundane than Tevy and Kayley imagine. By the end of the story, they realize that they’ve been wasting their time reading his face for pain and penitence.

The characters navigate complexity, as all young people must do. But the stories rarely follow the predictable logic one might expect from an insular, faith-driven, immigrant enclave. A gay twentysomething is confronted by his father’s friend, but not about his sexuality. “I am not saying you cannot be gay,” she clarifies. She’s just disappointed that he won’t consider a green-card marriage, in which a rich Cambodian woman pays him a small fortune to help her come to the U.S. “Your life will be established. You can be as gay as you want after your life is established. That is the plan.”

So’s young people, many of whom are queer, are growing up without role models or even a sense of guardrails. The adults in their world are often too tired to acclimate themselves to the norms and hierarchies of their adopted home. All parental advice comes across like a recurring bit about how much worse things were back when. So skillfully conjures the rhythm of conversations in which anything might become a trigger. A teen-ager sips a glass of ice water, prompting her father to observe, “There were no ice cubes in the genocide!” A college graduate, grousing about a pungent piece of fruit, is told, “You think every meal we had during Khmer Rouge was smelling right?” The younger generation scoffs at the way their parents seem fatally, comically stuck in the past; the adults rue the fickle softness of their children. And neither side quite understands how to turn the old traumas, and the survival instincts they engendered, into a meaningful American future.

In “The Shop,” an auto shop squeaks by with help from the owner’s son, a recent college graduate who has returned from a faraway land (the Midwest), until, one day, an employee accidentally loses a car. The staff’s efforts to recover it lack the requisite urgency. “What is wrong with you boys?” a local busybody asks. She’s less concerned about the missing car than about the generational decline it symbolizes: “Not one Cambodian man since my husband, Doctor Heng, has become a doctor here in America, not even those born with citizenship! My generation came here with nothing. We escaped the Communists. So what are boys like you doing?”

Immigrant stories often traffic in themes of sacrifice and intergenerational strife, where the past is meaningful only as an obligation, or a set of traumas, to be silently shouldered. But the children of “Afterparties” seek something different. As one young man tells his father, “You gotta stop using the genocide to win arguments.” It feels transgressive that “Afterparties” is so funny, so irreverent, concerning the previous generation’s tragedy. Trauma is on the edges of each story, an acknowledgment of why the adults are so messed up and why, in the words of one character, “this place is so fucked.” In the moment, though, the youth are too busy worrying about sex or college to give it much thought. Teen-agers ignore their parents’ history lessons and explain why it’s more important to comprehend the Singularity. They wield terms like the “model minority myth” to point out the false consciousness driving the adult world’s achievement-oriented dreams. And they look to one another, not their elders, for role models.

In “Superking Son Scores Again!,” the members of a high-school badminton team worship their coach, Superking Son, a nineties legend of their “Cambo hood.” It’s rumored that he was so good in his prime that he could vanquish any challenger while eating a Big Mac with his free hand. His unorthodox, aphoristic coaching style results in their winning the local championship: “The first time we called ourselves number one at anything.”

To the rest of the world, though, Son is just “the goddamn grocery-store boy.” One day, a “college-bound city kid” named Justin, who seems “too good for our team, our school, our community of Cambos,” arrives. He doesn’t understand why the teammates look up to their coach, and he delights in challenging his authority, leading practices in Son’s absence and taking everyone out for fast food afterward. But Son seems more deeply affronted by the effortlessness of Justin’s existence than by the impertinence of his manner. “Man, that dumbass kid doesn’t know shit about working hard,” Son explains. “Which means he doesn’t know shit about badminton, because badminton takes work—real work!” His outburst confuses the students. “Weren’t we supposed to aspire to the status of Justin’s family? Weren’t we supposed to attend college and become pharmacists? Wasn’t that what our parents had been working for? Why our ancestors had freaking died?”

So once remarked that he was raised on stories of genocide “that would often, somehow, end on a joke.” In his stories, the structure is inverted. His sentences are brusque and punchy, and there’s an outrageous, slapstick quality to his scenes. But the stories often end on a haunting note, resonating with the broader consequences of leaving or staying. Son and Justin eventually settle their differences with an epic badminton session, and the teammates begin to recognize the tragically static contours of Son’s life. What they fear, just as much as violence or poverty, is that they will inherit the passive, fatalistic relationship to the past that so many around them possess.

In “Maly, Maly, Maly,” two teen-age cousins, Ves and Maly, hang out and get stoned in the hours leading up to a party of sorts—the celebration of Maly’s deceased mother’s spiritual rebirth in the body of their second cousin’s baby. Reincarnation might be a pillar of Cambodian Buddhist belief, Ves reflects, yet it’s all a bit ridiculous. He contemplates “driving off to college right now, leaving behind my worthless possessions, my secondhand clothes—all of it. I could finally start my life, with a blank slate.” But he feels responsible for Maly, whose mother took her own life after looking “to the next day, and the day after that, only to see more suffering.” It’s not quite survivor’s guilt, like that experienced by their parents and grandparents. Still, Ves and Maly are “outsiders who can see through the bullshit,” and the thought of leaving her behind saddens him. As they sit together, blowing off her mom’s reincarnation with weed and porn, he tenderly imagines Maly’s future, wondering whether she will ever leave home and be reborn somewhere else.

Ted Ngoy, the real-life Donut King, burned through his fortune. A lavish home and jet-setting vacations weren’t enough for him. He became an avid gambler, imperilling both his family and his leaseholders. If the American Dream couldn’t satisfy Ngoy, how could the steady, dutiful ethos of immigrant life be sufficient for the youth of “Afterparties”?

In “Three Women of Chuck’s Donut,” Tevy and Kayley wonder if their parents’ failed relationship offers any clues about what makes life meaningful. They discuss their estranged father’s explanation that Cambodians, upon leaving the Khmer Rouge concentration camps, sought to “marry for skills,” pairing up out of pragmatism, not love: “He said marriage is like the show Survivor, where you make alliances in order to live longer. He thought Survivor was actually the most Khmer thing possible, and he would definitely win it, because the genocide was the best training he could’ve got.”

For other characters, the vision of a workable future involves a frictionless, tech-assisted grafting of old and new. In the story “Human Development,” a romantic Stanford graduate named Anthony teaches high school, a choice that differentiates him from his college buddies, all of whom dream about angel investors and seed capital. He meets Ben, a fellow Cambodian American, on a hookup app, and they begin dating. Ben is an entrepreneur who wants to create an almost utopian app that will let users find the “safe space” of like-minded people that they seek. On the side, Ben has perfected healthy versions of the fatty dishes from their homeland: “One of my aspirations is to disrupt the Khmer food industry with organic modifications.” Anthony begrudgingly loves Ben’s cooking, complimenting him in the only terms legible to the entrepreneur: “I’d pay twenty bucks for this.”

Anthony is cool and guarded, whereas Ben seems a bit of a Silicon Valley buffoon, propelled by a dream that technology might “offer people a sense of fulfillment,” even “rush them to shore, secure everyone to land.” Their unlikely relationship unfolds into something steady and comfortable. But never too comfortable: along with a sense of unease, Anthony totes around a copy of “Moby-Dick,” which he’s thinking about assigning to his students the following year. He realizes that what ultimately turns him off about Ben is his fixation on efficiency and his obsession with solutions. Anthony wants a future that is as “stupid and vast” as the novel, maybe even as futile as Ahab’s quest.

Earlier this year, the journal n+1 published “Baby Yeah,” a moving essay So wrote as a tribute to a friend who took his own life. When they were in graduate school together, So and his friend, who is described as “a half Iraqi Chaldean poet,” loved discussing José Muñoz’s notion of “queer futurity” and listening to the indie-rock band Pavement, which also escaped Stockton. They wondered if they would do something meaningful and great, despite coming from ethnic backgrounds where that seemed impossible and, more important, impractical. It’s one of the most discerning essays I’ve ever read about friendship, and it contains a clue for understanding all of So’s work, as he swoons over Pavement’s ability to make music that was simultaneously “jaded yet big-hearted, doubtful yet sentimental,” qualities he couldn’t find in literature.

Yet even his fascination with this band, with which he has little in common, is tinged with reminders of his own alterity. He realizes that one of Pavement’s best songs, “Box Elder,” was recorded in Stockton on January 17, 1989. That very day, probably no more than a few miles away, a deranged white man, aggrieved by the growing numbers of Cambodian and Vietnamese people in the city, entered Cleveland Elementary School and began firing. He killed five schoolchildren, all of them Southeast Asian, and wounded thirty-two others. It was the most fatal school shooting of the eighties and remains among the nation’s most horrific incidents of targeted anti-Asian violence. So’s mother was a bilingual aide at the school that year.

“Afterparties” is a collection of short stories, yet names and settings recur, offering a sense of how intimate the characters’ world can feel. Nearly all the protagonists of “Afterparties” resemble one another, the “jaded yet big-hearted” young men and women who yearn for history to take them beyond the Central Valley. The references to reincarnation give the book a cyclical feel, as though new bodies are always returning to old scars, hoping to figure out where they came from.

The swaggering idealism and bitter humor found throughout “Afterparties” are what make the more sombre final story, “Generational Differences,” utterly devastating. It is told from the perspective of a Cambodian woman who, like So’s mother, worked at Cleveland Elementary. She is setting down an account of her life for her son, and has reached the last section, about the day of the mass shooting, which she witnessed from inside a classroom. It’s a strange conceit for a story, and she is impossibly composed and lyrical as she tells him about the shooter, who had acted “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.”

Writing literature is one way that immigrants “humanize” themselves to their uncomprehending hosts, but in “Generational Differences” So refuses to appeal to a reader’s liberal sympathies. The mother recounts the day she told her then nine-year-old son about the shooting, and how he asked her to show him the classroom where she’d hidden, so he could make sure it would be safe if another attacker came. She took him to the school, where they ran into a white colleague of his mother’s, “whose Blond hair appeared combative, as if forcing me to register its abundance.” The white woman, seeing the boy, began crying over the “memories of dead children” and the senselessness of it all. His mother was incensed. “I wanted her to stop filtering the world through her own tears,” she later writes to her son. “I almost slapped her.”

As the mother completes her narrative, she urges her son to resist the temptation, when he grows older, to gather the raw materials of their American lives and twine them into a coherent story. “When you think about my history, I don’t need you to see everything at once,” she writes. “I don’t need you to recall the details of those tragedies that were dropped into my world.” She’s not saying that the stories are insignificant, or that they paint the community in a harsh light. Her point is that it’s an impossible task, and she wants to free him from the obligation of pursuing it: “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?” ♦