Anthony Veasna So Quotes

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

A promise is a promise, yet, in the end, it is only that.

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.

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.

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.

I guess that’s another part of our generational difference: you believe we deserve answers, that there is always some truth to be uncovered.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We're minorities within minorities, I'd often repeat to my friend, in an attempt to subdue his frustration with the compounding obstacles of his life.

But—please, hear me out—don't you think difference breathes in the expanses that lie amid your monotonous thoughts? Even as you see in the future only suicide, your mind fosters so many novel meanings that are essential, rabbit holes leading to unknown hours and possibilities, and maybe if you wait, for just a bit longer, these meanings will bleed into your being, restructuring the reserves of your spirit, and maybe then, after a serious exploration of all that is true, you, my dear friend, will feel something akin to new.

Once, when Molly was complaining that her roommate never left the apartment, that all this roommate did was rattle on and on about her undiagnosed anxiety, Darren joked that Molly's roommate had traded dependence on one Molly for another.

You can only keep up the precarious act of sustaining this fantasy of a better world for so long when not much has actually changed in our favor. But as long as there's something new in our queue, after binging on a season or two, we can move on, forestalling a confrontation with the shallow, messy world we ultimately inhabit.

Brock毕业证咨询办理《Q微2026614433》购买Brock毕业证修改Brock成绩单加拿大购买布鲁克大学毕业证办理高仿学位布鲁克大学毕业证成绩单认证出国留学无法毕业买毕业证留学被劝退买毕业证（无法毕业教育部认证咨询） Brock University nmmnSMNSSVBSVSBNSVBN "The mind-frying hilarity of Anthony Veasna So's first book of fiction settles him as the genius of social satire our age needs now more than ever. Few writers can handle firm plot action and wrenching pathos in such elegant prose. This unforgettable new voice is at once poetic and laugh-out-loud funny. These characters kept talking to me long after I closed the book I'm destined to read again and cannot wait to teach. Anthony Veasna So is a shiny new star in literature's firmament and Afterparties his first classic."--Mary Karr, author of Lit: A Memoir Afterparties weaves through a Cambodian-American community in the shadow of genocide, following the children of refugees as they grapple with the complexities of masculinity, class, and family. Anthony Veasna So explores the lives of these unforgettable characters with bracing humor and startling tenderness. A stunning collection from an exciting new voice.--Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half