Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

  “She’s dead,” I whisper to myself, and the tears finally emerge and pour out of me. I feel endlessly sad, like a chunk of me has eroded away. I can barely breathe, I am crying so hard, but Sammy doesn’t even notice. “Ma,” I hear her saying, “this drawing is a dragon in her garden.”

  I half expect Ma Eng to yell, Go back to work before the Communists come. Pretend the rice fields are your goddamn garden. But that’s not what happens, of course. Sammy and her stupid drawings have no effect on Ma Eng’s corpse. Now she’s showing Ma Eng a purple dragon eating a rainbow.

  I shut my eyes, the darkness comforting in its blankness, and when I open them again, the sight of Somaly’s ghost appears before me. I’m not surprised to see her; I’ve lived with her so long. She stands behind Sammy, dressed the way she always does in my dreams, her dress a vision of white, pure white, and we lock eyes for what feels an eternity. Finally, she places her hand on Sammy’s shoulder.

  Staring at Somaly, I find myself clutching the necklace in my hand, and I know what I need to do. Undoing its clasp at the back of my neck, I walk over to Sammy’s side of the bed and kneel down. “Let’s give Ma some space,” I say, as Somaly stares us down.

  “But I have more drawings.” Sammy holds up a portrait of Ma Eng riding the purple dragon. She fires a stubborn look, but it dissolves as I dangle the gold chain in front of her face, the jade pendant twirling, a planet, an entire world of its own, rotating on its axis.

  “I have something for you,” I say, and loop the chain around her neck. “It belonged to your other Ma.”

  “Thank you,” she says, incredulous, before hugging me out of obligation.

  Her hair sticking to my wet cheeks, I look out the window, straight through Somaly’s transparent figure, at the burial ground for all those gang victims. It seems fitting that no matter where I look, I am facing what the dead have touched. “If your mom asks,” I say, as she releases me from her embrace, “Ma Eng gave it to you.”

  Then I grab Sammy’s shoulders and peer into her eyes. Maybe I am gripping her too hard, but I can’t stop, I am trying to see if she knows Ma Eng is dead, if she can sense Somaly’s ghost hovering above us, ready to inflict her with nightmares of our family’s past. She’s not fazed at all, and I wonder if she’s just that comfortable around death, whether the force of my grasp does nothing to her new flesh. 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?

  “It looks nice on you,” I say, pulling her into another hug.

  Feeling the warmth of her little body, part of me wants to spare Sammy, to protect her from the history of her grandmother and her great-great aunt, from the ghosts of all our suffering. Part of me wants to throw the necklace into the Delta, let that heirloom be carried off by the murky, polluted water, right through California, through the Pacific, so that no one but me has to live this burden. Part of me wonders if the new generation should be allowed some freedom from the dreams of the dead. But I’m also tired and don’t see any other path. I need the dreams to stop. For once, I will preserve the self I want.

  Generational Differences

  1989

  Cleveland Elementary, Stockton

  By now you’ve read the story of my life. You asked me to document my memories, and I’ve written down what you and my grandkids need to know. I was hesitant at first, I won’t lie. Why would anyone want to relive that? But you were persistent, kept saying, “We can’t let your history become lost in time,” among other intimations that I’m too decrepit to avoid my own mortality, especially now that your Ba has died. So I relented. For months I culled my memory for gruesome details, the shrapnel of the past you want stowed away for future generations, but mostly for yourself, I suspect. And if you’re reading this last section, you’re now probably exhausted, defeated from those earlier pages about my time in the camps, my witnessing of all those deaths. My life isn’t easy to digest. But forgive me for being your mother, because I am writing this section about you, my only son. Even if you already know the story, I want to explain one more thing, properly. A memory that has gnawed at me for years. This, you should also keep.

  I remember with clear eyes, even in my old age, the first time you encountered tragedy. It was in August 2000, and we had just moved into our first real home. It would take a lifetime for your Ba and I to pay off the mortgage, but we were still ridiculously grateful, so much so that I was anxious to set up the house, quickly and efficiently, before the school year started. Remaining in that transitory state for too long, I thought, would leave our family forever adrift and uncertain, vulnerable to outside forces.

  Naturally, though, unpacking was taking longer than I’d wanted. It was your Ba’s fault. He had ordered you—and only you—to sort through the boxes peppering the clean white carpets, all crammed with worthless junk. He needs to learn to work, he told me, when I insisted on doing everything myself. To prepare boys for what the world will give them, that’s what your Ba called nuanced parenting; in those days, he wanted desperately to be a good father. Our son’s only nine years old, I told him, to no effect, and of course, a week later, you hadn’t accomplished much of anything. Even when I scolded you to stop dilly-dallying, you bided your time by flipping through the family albums. I believe that was how you came across the photo of Michael Jackson visiting my ESL students.

  “Mom, what’s in this photo?” you asked, coming up from behind me in the kitchen. I was busy right then, chopping lemongrass and garlic to freeze in the plastic containers that reeked of kroeung, the knife heavy in my overworked hands, the grassy citrus burrowing deep into my nose and piercing my eyes. But you wouldn’t stop bothering me for an answer.

  “That’s Michael Jackson,” I said finally, my hands dotted with sticky yellow-green bits. “He’s a musician that cared enough to visit us survivors.”

  Stepping back, you hesitated over your next words. “What do you mean, ‘survivors’?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “I don’t mean anything by it.”

  “Tell me what you mean!” you shouted, and kept shouting, your pleas clawing at my eardrums, your thirst for answers growing with each passing second.

  I washed my hands and knelt down before you. Heat radiated off your trembling body. “What’s wrong, oun?” I asked, placing my hand on your dampened forehead. You felt like a doughy space heater.

  “Your hands stink like garlic and soap,” you said, pushing my hands away. “That’s worse than just garlic.”

  I smelled my fingers and laughed, because you were right.

  “Why are you laughing?” you asked in a flurry. “I know what that word means. I’m not stupid.”

  “Sometimes I wish you were,” I responded, rubbing my cold hands together. You were often hot, ready to burst, while my circulation had always been pathetic, as if the blood in my veins had exhausted itself long ago. It was part of our generational difference.

  “Well, are you going to tell me?” You crossed your arms, straightened your back, which you often did to seem older, closer to the height of the other boys in your class. Something about the look in your eyes felt insurmountable and sad.

  “Fine,” I said, defeated, thinking about what your Ba would do. “If you really want to know, you can know.”

  We sat down at the kitchen table. Stacks of dishes and a sewing machine lay between us. I thought about that horrible day—the five kids shot dead, four of them Khmer, all around your age. Then the piercing gunshots and the heartbreaking screams, the chaos of three hundred bodies running in all directions, and then the thirty other kids wounded, decorated with bullet holes, experiencing pain no one should experience, let alone anyone that young, and then the blood pooling on the chalked-up concrete, the jungle gym and the monkey bars scarred by a massacre, and then, finally, the man dressed in army-green combat gear, who had shot sixty AK-47 loads into the playground before shooting himself in the head, all to defend h
is home, his dreams, against the threat of us, a horde of refugees, who had come here because we had no other dreams left. What other choice was there but to escape to this valley of dust and pollen and California smog? Where else was there to go in the aftermath of genocide? Then I asked myself, How am I supposed to tell you this? Where do I even start?

  “Before you were born,” I began, trying my hardest to look directly in your eyes, “a very sick man came to Cleveland Elementary . . . with a gun . . . and then he shot bullets into the playground.” I took a deep breath, studied your face for a reaction, but you didn’t give me one. “Some kids died,” I continued, “many were injured. This was in 1989, so two years before you were born. That photo you’re holding, it was taken because Michael Jackson came to pay his respects to the dead.”

  I finished speaking and we plunged into silence. I still don’t know if it was good parenting to let you know about such events. But I can tell you it was intoxicating, strangely so, to unload a whole chunk of the past onto you, and this intoxication in turn made me feel ashamed, like I had gutted myself in front of my only son.

  “What were you doing when it happened?” you finally asked. I could tell that your mind was spinning in circles, that you had a thousand other things to say but couldn’t get them out.

  “I was alone in my classroom,” I said, “watching through the window.”

  “Mom, that’s so bad!” you cried, lurching forward and slamming your hands onto the table. “You’re never supposed to stand at a window during a shooting! I’m only in the third grade, and even I know that.”

  “Control yourself,” I said, because I had no further explanation. Of course it was dumb. We lived in a city of gang violence, where campuses went into lockdown whenever a teenage boy dressed in red or blue walked down the street. There was no excuse for not forcing myself to move from the window, the view, to do anything but stand there and watch history bleed out over the playground. All this I knew very well, and I was annoyed to be reminded of that.

  The photo was in your hands again, and you were staring at it intently. I remember wondering why exactly, in the first place, you were drawn to this image. Did it catch your eye because it was free of our unsmiling relatives? Was it the Khmer students in the background, the boredom and gloom stuck to their faces, the way their bodies tilted in those half-broken desks? Were you already resentful, as you would be later on in your life, that we’d moved away from the old neighborhood, from all those kids who looked exactly like you?

  Or was it Michael Jackson himself? How his skin was simultaneously light and dark and see-through? How his jacket stuck out like a sore thumb in front of kids dressed in hand-me-downs, how it almost glowed, reducing the surrounding students’ faces to a dull blue film? You have always been drawn to what couldn’t be defined, especially what couldn’t be defined by me. And if there was something I couldn’t figure out, back then at least, it was Michael Jackson. Come to think of it, though, it was probably just my perm that you noticed in the photo. To this day, I can still feel the curly weight of that unnatural hair.

  “Take me to your work,” you demanded, and then started rambling. We had to investigate the premises of my classroom, you were saying, to make sure it was safe in case of future attacks. It was clear you had no idea what you’d hunt for once there, but I could also see a stubbornness in your face that would only fester if left unaddressed. I guess that’s another part of our generational difference: you believe we deserve answers, that there is always some truth to be uncovered.

  “Fine, let’s go,” I said, getting up to wash the residual garlic stench off my hands. I figured it was pointless to fight you on this, and I needed to prep my classroom, anyway. Before we left the house, I told you to seal the photo into its album, and then the album into the closet. At least one thing I wanted you to put away.

  As I write this section, I can recall many instances when I have been worried about your attitude toward the world, about your acute sense of . . . awareness. But driving to Cleveland Elementary that afternoon might have been the first real occurrence of these worries. Other boys, you see, I can’t imagine them being so disturbed by their mothers saying survivors in passing. A mere slip of the lips was enough to jar your imagination. A single word had sent your thoughts running wild in all directions.

  I suppose I am to blame for how upset you got. I don’t just mean my clumsy explanation of the photo. 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.

  Several cars were in the parking lot when we arrived at Cleveland Elementary. It surprised me to see them there, a week before school would start up again. I knew other teachers needed to prep their classrooms, too, but you and I were just on a wholly different mission, and right then, the idea of talking to my coworkers made my face burn.

  I turned the engine off and the radio cut into silence. Your light snoring filled the car’s interior, along with the one-hundred-degree heat. You had fallen asleep during the thirty-minute drive, exhausted not from your own experiences, I suspect, but from mine. I reached back from the driver’s seat and softly stroked your cheek. I didn’t want to wake you, not yet.

  After a few minutes, you yawned and stretched your arms out wide, as if trying to hold the world in your wingspan, or at least all of Cleveland Elementary. “I had a dream where I found Michael Jackson hiding in your classroom,” you said, eyes barely open. “He was up to no good, so I scared him off with my karate moves.” For a brief moment, as you punctuated your story with kicks in the air, our day seemed perfectly normal.

  I looked at you sternly, pretending to be unamused. “Michael Jackson’s a good person for coming to our school. Newspapers took notice of us after that. People gave us donations.”

  “Yeah, but why didn’t he visit sooner, so that people could notice us before?” Defiance crept through your voice. “Then no one would’ve messed with us. We would’ve been important.”

  There was an air of truth to the sentiment, even if it sprang from your dream of combat with Michael Jackson; still, I felt the responsibility to say, “Oun, that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Come on!” you cried, now fully awake and unbuckling your seat. “I don’t have all day!” So I followed you out of the car and through the parking lot. I allowed you to be our leader.

  In my classroom, I sat at my desk, preparing worksheets of mildly useful English words. The stale dust of two months was settling into my lungs. You were on the floor, on your hands and knees, looking under the desks speckled with stale gum, under the crusty old rugs that were never properly vacuumed, which covered sticky floors never properly mopped. Every step in my classroom was a fight to get your shoes unstuck.

  Using a system I didn’t understand, you tested all the windows, tapping, knocking, and pressing your ears against the glass. After that, you thoroughly examined the cabinets for anything suspicious, opening each one quickly before you hopped back, assumed a fighting stance, and screamed, “Ah hah!” Then you thumbed through the books on the shelf, in case there were secret notes stuffed inside the pages, any clues as to the location of potential dangers. It would’ve been cute if I hadn’t been so exhausted, my classroom a burning furnace, if this whole day hadn’t been overtaken by a massacre I had tried to forget. A number of times I wanted to yell at you to be quiet, but I s
topped myself. I wanted you to have closure. To forget these ugly feelings.

  By the time you were flipping rugs over to examine the hidden patches of tile, I decided you were sufficiently engrossed in your antics to be left alone. And so, gathering a stack of papers I needed to copy and laminate, I told you I would be right back, and then left the room.

  The sunlight pounded me in the face as I marched down the hall. I thought about how odd it was for California schools to be made up of detached buildings connected by outdoor halls. The sprawling landscape immediately outside made the school feel too integrated with the outer neighborhood, neither a real end to one nor a start to the other, all the borders just blurring together. Walking around, you felt that anything that happened at the school was happening in the streets was happening in people’s very front yards. Maybe that was why, even before the shooting, I had never felt like I belonged on the campus.

  When my copying was done, I stood outside my classroom and watched you from behind the windows. You were under the desks now, worming your way through a tight maze of tubular metal legs, your expression creased with lines of concentration. You were lost in your own world, and for a while, I admired your sense of purpose.

  Then someone touched my shoulder, startling me from behind. I nearly dropped my copies. “Ravy!” this person exclaimed, and I turned around to see my younger coworker, Ruth, also carrying a bunch of papers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. “How’s your summer been?” Her blond hair appeared combative, as if forcing me to register its abundance. A broad smile widened across her face.

  “It’s been okay,” I responded, briskly. After spending two months away from school, I’d forgotten how to interact with someone like this, someone who wore flowery blouses and frilly skirts and had actually chosen, with every door open to her, to be a teacher. I gestured toward the windows. “I’m here with my son.”