Acclaim for ‘Afterparties’ Illuminates Cambodian American Experience

WASHINGTON - The late Cambodian American writer Anthony Veasna So once reportedly described his work as “post-khmer genocide queer stoner fiction,” a narrowly defined niche blown wide open by widespread critical acclaim for his collection of short stories, Afterparties.

So’s book is hailed as an exciting and highly original work that captures what it is like to grow up in contemporary American society as a child of Cambodian refugees. Enthusiasm for So’s work bridges seemingly dissimilar universes – literary critics who see its universal appeal and the Cambodian American community that sees family. Uniting the two are So’s vivid descriptions – full of humor and compassion – of families grappling with the traumas of surviving the murderous Khmer Rouge while navigating the cultural dislocation and socio-economic challenges of refugee resettlement. Until now, most depictions of Cambodians in English-language writing and film have been memoirs, nonfiction books and a few well-known movies that focus on an older generation’s stories of surviving the Khmer Rouge killing fields -- the “purification” of Cambodia that resulted in the deaths of at least 1.7 million people in a quest by Pol Pot to create an agrarian Marxist utopia in the 1970s.