"Afterparties" by Anthony Veasna So

An audio book.

Having read that it was "about" immigrant Cambodians and gay California, I was worried that the stories would be too mono-themed for me. When I read that "Afterparties is the highly anticipated debut book by writer Anthony Veasna So, who died in December, at the age of 28, of a drug overdose" I thought that maybe the reviews were more to do with sympathy than quality. I ended up liking the book more and more.

Concentration camps and genocide are in the parents' memories. Kids are under pressure to try hard to be pharmacists. Re-incarnation is considered likely when a birth soon follows a death.

• Three Women of Chuck's Donuts - Solti, divorced, runs "Chuck's Donuts". Her 2 daughters help overnight. It was funded by her ex's uncle, a Cambodian gangster. Her ex was supposed to be repaying the loan from the profits. She finds out that for years he's paid nothing, using the money to support his new family. A man starts coming in after midnight. One of the girls thinks he looks like their father. The mother thinks he might be hired by the gangster. One of the girls interviews him for her school project - how Cambodian does he feel?). His battered wife comes in. They fight. The mother knocks him out with a saucepan. They take him to the hospital.
• Superking Sung scores again - a local badminton star has to look after the family's grocery store. A new boy arrives from a rich family who plays well. When the old star is late to a coaching session the new boy reluctantly does the coaching. There's a showdown match - man against boy.
• Mali Mali Mali 4 - The narrator's gay. He's leaving for university soon. He hangs around with his niece. Her mother died years ago. Her boyfriend's mother died. The narrator fancies the boyfriend, has learned how to do blowjobs from the niece. They watch a porn tape.
• The Shop - The narrator's father owns a garage. He tries to employ as many people as possible. Dr Heng's wife often hangs around, showing off about her husband. When the narrator (who has a degree) tells her he's gay she advises him to marry a rich Cambodian so she can get a Green Card. His boyfriend (non-Cambodian) is in a long-term relationship with a girl. His boyfriend's thinking of coming out. When the narrator's mother casually asks the narrator which boy he's going out with, he denies it. When the garage is in financial trouble, Dr Heng's wife gets monks to help. The narrator's ever-generous father gives them a donation that will cripple the business even more.
• The Monks - He's in a monastery for a week, the traditional thing for a Cambodian to do when a father dies. He's missing sex with Mali. He's obsessional about counting. Soon he'll be off to do combat training. He and a monk toss off while looking at a picture of Mali.
• We would have been princes - After a wedding event a famous singer (40, female, beautiful) goes to an afterparty. Marlon has done rehab in a monastery. His brother Bond has a humanities degree. Marlon's been trying for jobs but he's relapsing.
• Human Development - 3 years out of Stamford and all the first-person narrator (Anthony, Cambodian, who has a philosophy degree -having first, dutifully, tried Chemistry then economics) has managed to find is a poorly paid job in an expensive school, teaching diversity. He's thinking of teaching "Moby Dick", the white sperm whale as failed closure. He's using apps to find gay dates. He's heard that lots of gays work for Apple as UX designers. He finds a lover twice his age, Ben. Anthony's twin sister (who also went to Stamford, who no longer lives near) says that Ben sounds like the sort of man their mother would get her to meet. Ben's writing an app using the algorithms of Grinder etc to help people find friends and safe spaces. He works with Vinny (Vietnamese). The narrator starts having sex with someone else (white). He tries to break up with Ben just before Ben gets $500,000 to develop his app. Vinny comes over and they celebrate with a successful threesome.
• Somali Serai, Serai Somali - The first-person female Cambolian nurse, who's been told she's a re-incarnation, works in an Alzheimer ward, ends up looking after a relative. The relative's father was a rice king, brutally murdered. The nurse has many dreams. When the relative dies, the nurses sees her as a ghost
• Generational Differences - A Cambolian mother writes about her life, for her son's sake. There was a massacre at her mother's school in 1989. Michael Jackson visited much later, to offer sympathy. The mother thinks that language doesn't solve all the problems of integration despite what her son believes, and that past Genocide doesn't excuse/explain everything. Her brother killed himself before Pol Pot.

I like "The shop" and "Human development".

Other reviews

• goodreads
• Summer Kim Lee (He had tried computer science, but after failing courses, he switched his major and started developing his own artistic practice — a combination of photography, painting, printmaking, and collage. At the same time that he was attending lectures on Renaissance paintings, he was also helping his parents maintain duplexes in Stockton that his father rented out to other Cambodian families. On weekends, So would drive to the Central Valley to fumigate empty rooms, deep clean carpets, re-tile floors, and paint walls)