Afterparties

It's kind of difficult to me to be really honest in my review because I learned, during my reading, that Anthony Veasna So died, at the age of 28, a little while before his book had come out, which broke my heart. "Afterparties" is a collection of short stories about a community of cambodian refugees who had settled in California. The main characters of these stories are the sons and daughters of these refugees, young people who feel a profound dissonance between their american life and its limits imposed by racism, and a their khmer identity, with its heavy generational trauma. Some of these stories are a gem (like "Maly, Maly, Maly"). These are the stories that seem more personal to the writer, cinematographic, at times, in their themes, their dialogues, but never trivial, very genuine. It doesn't work as good whenever the author imagines a story which is evidently far from its own. They seem so focused and choosing the right words and syntax that it doesn't feel real, which is a shame because it takes out off the profound ideas that he is able to share. I also feel wrong about irking at the many references (at least 2 in every story) to the cambodian genocide. I felt like, at times, it was forced into the paragraphs, almost transforming the characters into one dimensional beings. Otherwise, it was heartbreaking to feel the scar left on an entire community and its descendants.