Afterparties and "Human Development"

Anthony Veasna So certainly has views about how the world should work. But he doesn't write social theory. He writes life.

Anthony Veasna So died a year and a half before the publication of his first book, Afterparties: Stories. His debut collection was an instant New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction, and named a Best Book of the Year by a number of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. I bought the book because I wanted a collection of contemporary funny short stories, and Mary Karr had praised its “mind-frying hilarity.”

This is the second book to make me sob this year (the other being Michael O’Loughlin’s Hidden Mercy). But Afterparties also made me laugh (So at one point had sought a career as a standup comedian), and it raised in embarrassingly relatable detail tough questions about the structure of my life. Its Cambodian characters, from young girls in a donut shop to a mother who survived a school shooting, create both mirrors and portals: they reflect familiar contemporary American life for many, but also present perspectives which are likely new and unfamiliar to most.

His stories also explore the meaning of liberation, social movements in various contexts of California life, the ongoing effects of inter-generational trauma and identity, race and racism, queer sexuality, and being a second generation of genocide. As Hau Hsu wrote of So in The New Yorker, “the birthright of the second generation is that they can tell stories…. So has enough distance from his community’s originating trauma that he can recognize coping mechanisms for what they are.” According to Hau, So has enough distance from the trauma which his elders cannot face, that he can write on it in a way that is both reflective and funny. Here, I’ll share a bit about just one of the stories from Afterparties, “Human Development.” In this story, So explores two types of responses to a history of marginalization: a stance of critique which stands apart from popular movements, and an explicit pursuit of liberation that engages (in some ways unreflectively) with systems that themselves contribute to oppression. (Spoiler alert! If you want to wait to read the story for yourself, stop reading this newsletter here!)

A caricature of liberation

“Human Development” gives a glimpse into the life of Anthony, a gay Khmer high school teacher, the Frank Chin Endowed Teaching Fellow for Diversity. Anthony notes the ironies in his position, teaching at an elite private high school that seems to pursue issues related to diversity and inclusion through caricaturish responses:

“My job was to teach rich kids with fake Adderall prescriptions how to be 'socially conscious... and the class I taught for the service learning department was called Human Development. To my knowledge, this kind of indoctrination existed exclusively at the most elite of private high schools, the ones whose names started with a capitalized The and ended with a capitalized School, as if only the wealthy possessed a real capacity to 'develop.'"

Anthony's own social consciousness pervades the story, and causes him to make moves that seem paradoxical at times. For example, Anthony had decided to abandon the "socially conscious" lessons that had been prescribed for the Human Development:

"My plan was to abandon the glib lessons on microaggressions, the cringey videos of teenagers role-playing scenes of consent, the PowerPoints that neutered ‘big’ political issues into handy vocabulary terms—everything that was deemed by the social learning department, which was hilariously Caucasian, as ‘fundamental yet appropriate.’ After a lacrosse player in my previous class had equated using the N-word to the tone of liberals saying ‘conservative voter,’ I decided that high school sophomores would learn more about being decent human beings by reading Moby-Dick. I felt very serious about this new direction for my pedagogy as the Frank Chin Endowed Teaching Fellow for Diversity, so serious that I was altering the established curriculum without informing my white woman boss.”

Anthony does not reject the approach of the “social learning department” because he fails to recognize the problems it seeks to address. Anthony agrees that a lacrosse player equating use of the N-word to liberal disparagement of “conservative voter” is problematic. He just doesn’t believe that the approach taken by the department really gets at the root of the problem, or contributes to meaningful change. From the start of the story, Anthony sets himself apart from and above the department, making a pedagogical decision which likely would make little sense to it: responding to social issues by teaching American classics.

The story opens with Anthony at a Memorial Day Barbecue in the gentrifying Mission District of San Francisco, three years after graduating from Stanford, and surrounded by fellow graduates who had all ended up in Bay Area tech jobs. Again, Anthony sets himself as apart from and above those who surround him. He feels resentment for philosophy majors who took corporate jobs. He pulls up Grindr and starts “blocking the profiles of every kickball player who was at the party” as “a political statement, not a sexual preference.” He "didn't feel like being a hypocrite by letting a white predator colonize my rectum."

A surprise

To his surprise, he gets a message from another Khmer man, Ben, who lives in a "luxury apartment complex, the kind with amenities, with doormen, a saltwater pool even." Ben presents as a successful gay who works in tech. He has a "haircut looking expensive," and his Grindr profile shows him in "tight-fitting clothes in every photo." After having sex, the two talking about their plans for the next day.

"[Ben said,] 'I'm gonna walk the Golden Gate Bridge with some friends.'

'An earthquake can send the bridge right into the bay,' I answered, 'and I wouldn't care, not at all.'

He looked up at me with confusion, his silence conveying a total uncertainty in how to respond, so I laughed to make sure he knew I was mostly joking. It was a laugh I often forced when dealing with students.'"

In this interaction, Anthony responds as if Ben were one of his rich students at his elite school. He sees his experience with Ben as a shallow hookup, occasioned by sexual desire that enables an exchange of sexual gratification and little else. For Anthony, this is what Ben has to offer. But the conversation continues.

"'What did the Gold Gate Bridge ever do to you?' he finally asked.

Surprised by his response, that he was invested in my reasoning, I laughed again, genuinely this time. Usually people dismissed my contempt for the biggest tourist attraction of the Bay Area."

Whereas Anthony had previously reduced Ben to another wealthy Silicon Valley caricature, Anthony is surprised by Ben's desire to actually see him, to explore what is beneath a comment so often unexamined by others. So far in the story, Anthony has presented himself as the only person truly interested in digging beneath the surface of things, and he is surprised to discover it in this man. For all of his critical awareness, throughout the story Anthony will find himself consistently wrong (or at least incomplete) in his judgments of others.

Anthony finds himself regularly at Ben's apartment. The two enter a sort of coupling routine. And Ben offers Anthony something which Anthony has been missing, something which Anthony is unable to quite pin down. "Something about submitting to his body, the permanent newness of his luxury apartment, and the beginning of June, it all knocked me into a kind of productivity." The relationship with Ben adds life to Anthony’s study of Moby Dick in preparation for the next academic year.

Culture in conflict

But the relationship also exacerbates internal anxieties for Anthony. Ben has Silicon Valley tech dreams, something which Anthony has considered distasteful in others. Anthony attends a mixer where he is “pissed off” by “QUEERS HATE TECHIES” stickers pasted all over a bathroom. Previously, the stickers made him laugh “because every ‘radicalized’ gay guy” he knew “worked for Apple as a UX designer.” Anthony became “furious at the management for leaving them up without committing to their politics, or, hell, even just the aesthetic… [T]he coffee shop was trying to have its cake and eat it, too.” He texts his annoyance to his sister, and follows up with a picture of Ben, adding, “the first Cambodian guy to fuck me.”

Ben penetrates both Anthony’s body and his interior sense of self. In many ways, Ben represents a Silicon Valley’d Cambodian-American way of life. Ben cooks traditional Cambodian meals “altered to be healthy,” and shares that he wants to "disrupt the Khmer food industry with organic modifications." Ben wants to offer a sort of elevation of his culture and history. Ben says:

"I wanna curate a series of online video recipes that lay out well-balanced diets for Khmer folk... See, my mom died from diabetes. And most Khmer folk have no idea white rice is unhealthy. It's basically sugar!"

But this elevation also involves a reduction, in the tendency to commodify culture in the world of technocapitalism. Anthony hides his internal critiques and plays along. He encourages Ben and says he would pay twenty dollars for Ben’s prahok, while noting internally that “[c]ommodifying his work seemed to please him.” Anthony has a desire to please Ben, but he struggles with how this dynamic also deeply unnerves and annoys him. Towards Ben, Anthony feels both warmth and a sort of skeptical repulsion.

Originally, Anthony was drawn to Ben because the other man was Khmer, and seemed to have something to offer that the white techies he knew from college did not. But Anthony will come to realize that his perceptions, of both Ben and those white techies, weren’t quite right. Later in the story, Anthony and Ben will go to a party attended by the same group of people from the party at the start of the story. At this later party, Ben will just blend in “among the other bodies.” Ben is one of them. And Anthony struggles with this. Anthony will also run into Jake, an attendee from that first party that he had blocked on Grindr. Anthony will discover that Jake is actually quite different from the others, that Jake had more to offer than Anthony's impulses against "colonizing" had previously allowed.

Ben’s great aspiration is to build an app for social connection. He wants to build “a digital interface that allows people of color, people with disabilities, people identifying as LGBTQ, to cruise for safe spaces—spaces not specifically for sex, but for the whole of their lives.” While Anthony externally expresses support for Ben's idea, he struggles internally to appreciate it. Anthony thinks to himself:

“He just… sounded like a clueless kid during his pitch, like he’d learned something new at school and was now obsessed with talking about it. Buzzwords rolled off his tongue as naturally as a robot trying to act human—LGBTQ, people of color, safe space.”

Ben seems to present the instantiation of a certain set of liberal aspirations for marginalized communities. They want to do things that sounds really nice, but they fail to grasp the full complexity of cultural oppression. They thus offer sound bytes rooted in technocapitalist dream-making that won’t disrupt the prevailing systems of power, rather than solutions grounded in deep understanding and true deconstruction.

And Ben seems plagued by an overriding sense of duty that gives Anthony a feeling of claustrophobia. Ben says that he wants to have kids with Anthony, partly because “we need to give the world more Khmer folk.” When Anthony shares with Ben that his twin sister also went to Stanford, Ben responds, “Your family is breaking new ground for Khmer folk, you know? Now the younger Cambos are gonna know it’s freaking possible to get into a school like Stanford.”

Anthony thinks to himself, “I didn’t feel like explaining to him that Stanford had allowed me to escape my hometown, my neighborhood, my Cambodian life. There was no point.”

Over the course of the story, Anthony has to struggle with the fact that he actually likes someone who operates out of the mode of existence which he's found so repulsive in others. And not only this, but through Ben, Anthony struggles with ways in which he can start to appreciate that mode of existence, even while seeking to maintain the rejection of it for himself. All the while, this tension deepens his study of Moby-Dick:

"What I did know was that Ben's 'safe space' app unsettled me. I was offended by it, really, how it struck me as something I should want, something masquerading as objectively good, a solution to all our problems. It reminded me of the established curriculum for my Human Development class. It evoked for me the lee shore in Moby-Dick, these supposed safe spaces in which we'd be forever bound, or even the white whale himself, that failed promise of closure. Ben wanted technology to offer people a sense of fulfillment, to rush them to shore, secure everyone to land, and I wanted to be indefinite, free to fuck off and be lost.

Even so, Ben's genuine enthusiasm impressed me. He seemed not to care if he made money, only that his vision be fully realized. And he was so hyper focused that I felt especially productive around him. Or was my strengthening drive to teach Moby-Dick just a product of how stupid I thought Ben's app was? I was doing meaningful work, right? Changing the lives of the younger generation? Who knew? But in ways both tender and ugly, Ben allowed me, for once, to feel good about myself. Was that what drew Ishmael to Ahab? That he saw clearly how futile Ahab's mission was, how there was no world in which he could actually kill Moby Dick? Did he watch Ahab scream into the unconquerable face of the white whale so that his own life might have meaning?"

These tensions culminate in a fight between Anthony and Ben where Anthony finally expresses how he feels: “I can’t be with a Cambodian guy just to be with a Cambodian guy.” Ben sees Anthony’s frustration for the first time, for the first time Ben does not try to unlock some sort of positivity underneath it, and for the first time the two finally have real vulnerability. Ben expresses that they owe each other something because of their shared cultural history. Anthony expresses that he knows their history, but they don’t find a meeting point. Anthony’s words hurt Ben, and then Anthony struggles with his own feelings of guilt.

Across the story is a conflict about being a successful Cambodian in a liberal American culture. Ben ultimately receives five hundred thousand dollars to fund his app, he masters “healthier” versions of Cambodian meals (which Anthony admits to himself that he likes), and he wants to continue his people’s race and culture and bring them into the American vision of success. Anthony, on the other hand, seems to have a deeper appreciation for the complexity of culture and the ways in which American life insists on solving problems in ways that participate in, benefit from, and perpetuate problems underneath the problems. Indeed, even the obsession with solving problems (which Ben exemplifies) seems to be part of the problem. But Anthony does not escape this world, as he works in schools, attends parties, and engages in romantic relationships formed by, encouraging of, and benefitting from this problematic problem solving.

A happiness

The story does not end with a logical resolution of these tensions and conflicts. Shortly after the fight between Anthony and Ben, the latter gets a phone call. He learns that he has received the funding he was seeking for his app. The excitement of the news causes the frustration and sadness to dissipate. Anthony celebrates with Ben and Ben’s friend Anthony. And then the three of them engage in an intense three-way initiated by Anthony. But unlike Anthony’s previous sexual encounters in the story, this one does not seem fraught or conflicted. The euphoria of the news of the funding seems to open up a new space:

“We took turns in each position, in each role, to the point that we became interchangeable, mere parts of an improved system of fucking. I experienced such intense moments of pleasure I could barely breathe, and the only thing preventing me from passing out, from gasping or air, was looking at Ben, our eyes locking every few moments, even as we were both intertwined with Vinny's perfect, sculpted body.

For the duration of our three-way, I saw the possibility of existing in a dynamic in which every pleasure received, every favor granted, every dick sucked, every bottom filled and every top gratified, could energize you to give back more than what you had in the first place. I saw clearly Ben’s ideal vision of the world, a way of being that could sustain communities, protect safe spaces, and ensure that political progress kept happening. I felt euphoric, high, blood rushing to my head. I felt unbearably hopeful.”

The scene ends with Anthony and Ben sharing a kiss, and Anthony listening to Ben's breathing: "I felt it resounding through his chest, and also into mine." Here, at the climax of the story, Anthony has finally offered Ben real vulnerability through the fight, Ben sees his dream materializing, and a the two men (and Vinny) discover a a space where passion and intimacy are given and received and magnified in a way that opens up imaginative possibilities for the world at large.

It's not so much that something new has happened. But, for Anthony, something new is imagined. And it transforms his relationship to the world around him. He goes into the living room and looks "out of the window, taking in the lights of the Bay Bridge, until every ounce of my former impressions had fallen away, or had maybe faded, or dissolved, into the depths of my mind." He is no longer that man who doesn’t care whether an earthquake sends the bridge into the Bay.

It may be tempting to attribute this new vision to the sexual encounter alone, but I read it more through a triad of events: the fight which brings about real vulnerability between Anthony and Ben, the app funding which begins to materialize a dream, and the sexual encounter of complete equality, full openness, and creative expansion. A trio that breaks out of dyadic tension is central to the transformation. The sex that accompanies the story’s climax presents an ecstasy which is fully Anthony and Ben but which also breaks out beyond and expands them with a third. The inclusion of Vinny, a character inserted near the end of the story and who doesn’t seem to offer much narratively beyond the sex, suggests a world where the transformation is not simply about Ben and Anthony, but might include and be about everyone.

The story ends with Anthony leaving Ben’s apartment that night and taking the train home. He starts to imagine teaching Moby-Dick. He thinks about his life in San Francisco. And he suddenly is able to focus on what he can appreciate in life:

“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.”

“Human Development” offers a look into the diverse approaches Cambodian men might take to their histories. One man seeks to gain ownership over American life and transform it. The other offers a critical look at such a project as a participation in and perpetuation of the problems of American life, but at the same time he ultimately embraces a place assigned to him by that world. He sees all this. And yet, somehow within and through it, he is still able to find happiness.

One thing Anthony Veasna So offers us here is a sort of image of futility. In the story, Ben speaks an awareness of the plight of marginalized communities, but the shallowness of this awareness is revealed when read against Anthony’s cultural awareness. On the other hand, Anthony expresses no interest in responding to this plight, offering a critical perspective that demonstrates a kind of depth but is unable to actually do anything. One might be tempted to view Ben as "in the wrong" and Anthony as "in the right" here--it's worth noting that the latter character is named after the author--but that would diminish the complexity (and reality) of the story. Anthony's critical perspective may demonstrate a deeper understanding of the challenges of liberation in a contemporary capitalist culture in Silicon Valley, but at the same time he is unable to speak this understanding to that culture. Time and again, he succumbs to the voice of that culture in the person of Ben, holding back the truths within and playing along.

Anthony understands that what Ben seeks has a certain futility. Anthony recognizes and abhors impotent measures aimed at liberation. And yet Anthony himself does not seem to offer anything towards liberation either. And for all his social consciousness, he does not seem to understand himself. He fails to understand why he offers Ben half-truths through most of the story, why he doesn't say what he's actually thinking, why he can't bring himself to "even begin to understand why I wanted to yell at him--for being weak, for making me feel weak." Anthony starts hooking up with that other man, Jake, "despite myself," a decision which he feels is inconsistent with his sense of self and which he does not fully understand. Interestingly, these hookups coincide with a departure of focus from Moby Dick: "I'd been telling him [Ben] that I was taking long, solitary walks, that I needed fresh air to mull over Moby-Dick passages, but really I was going over to Jake's." Anthony has sought to escape the Cambodian American world that he was born into, and finds himself working at an elite, thoroughly American, upper-class institution, engaging in roughly the same work which he finds distasteful in others: serving some image of liberation (as the Frank Chin Endowed Teaching Fellow for Diversity) which is more show than substance. And indeed, he operates throughout most of the story by offering a show of himself rather than the whole of substance within.

One key difference between Anthony and Ben has been the former's conscious resignation to the present state of affairs, and the decision in the context of his own job (and life more generally) to back away from overt measures towards liberation altogether, by replacing such measures with the reading of Moby-Dick and more esoteric (and hidden) forms of critique. It will turn out that Moby-Dick will offer a deeper sense of liberation, but that only comes through what Ben has to offer in relation to Anthony.

While Ben lacks a certain substance and seems caught up in the impotent efforts of half-baked liberation which Anthony abhors, what Ben is able to provide is a commitment to purpose, agency, and good in the world. After Anthony makes a sarcastic comment, he observes that Ben "was intent on finding the underbelly of positivity lurking beneath everything I said." Ben sincerely wants to better the world, and he takes active steps to do so. In a way, he humanizes the well-intentioned but deeply misguided techies, and also those who critique such techies while also actively benefitting from them (such as those "queers hate techies" gay radicals from the coffee shop). Ben offers an alternative mode of existence by at least trying.

The sort of resolution achieved by the story is not the ultimate dominance of Anthony's or Ben's approach to the world. Rather, it gives a glimpse into subtle transformations that might happen when these approaches—or, rather, these people—are able to find a certain vulnerability before each other. Though the author might more easily identify with the character who bears his name, the narrator of "Human Development" has a clear sympathy and love for each of the story's characters. The story is not simply a demonstration of the clash between racist technocapiltalism and socially conscious social critique. It is, rather, a story about complex human persons, each with their own strengths, flaws, vulnerabilities, self-delusions, and achievements despite themselves. Deep change doesn’t just come about through the dominance of the “right” theory or the implementation of a singular social vision. Rather, real vulnerable human encounter can be the catalyst that reveals life is worth living. It is often the mystery of human life, rather than “the solution” to human problems, which wants to be embraced. Anthony Veasna So certainly has views about how the world does and should work. But he doesn't write social theory. He writes life.

And this is perhaps why Moby-Dick plays such a central role in "Human Development." Early in the story, Anthony reflects on the impact of the novel as he re-explores it:

"It was the first novel I'd ever read that didn't care for resolutions. It validated for me the experience of confusion, of exploring something as stupid and vast as a white whale, as an ocean. Or, at least, it made me feel okay about the philosophy major I'd settled on after failing all my classes in chemistry, first, and then economics. Equipping teenagers to sniff out the nonsense of society, I told myself, that was the logic behind this new curriculum. I wanted my students to understand the doomed nature of Ahab's hunt for Moby Dick, the profound calm of Ishmael's aimless wandering, the difference between having 'purpose,' like Ahab, and finding 'meaning,' like Ishmael. I thought my students should learn the best ways to be lost."