Afterparties E-Book

Anthony Veasna So

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'So's distinctive voice is ever-present: mellifluous, streetwise and slightly brash, at once cynical and bighearted...unique and quintessential' Sunday Times 'So's stories reimagine and reanimate the Central Valley, in the way that the polyglot stories in Bryan Washington's collection Lot reimagined Houston and Ocean Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous allowed us to see Hartford in a fresh light.' Dwight Garner, New York Times '[A] remarkable début collection' Hua Hsu, The New Yorker A Roxane Gay's Audacious Book Club Pick! Named a Best Book of Summer by: Wall Street Journal * Thrillist * Vogue * Lit Hub * Refinery29 * New York Observer * The Daily Beast * Time * BuzzFeed * Entertainment Weekly Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tender-hearted, balancing acerbic humour with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship and family. A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle's snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a 'safe space' app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter. With nuanced emotional precision, gritty humour and compassionate insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities, the stories in Afterparties deliver an explosive introduction to the work of Anthony Veasna So.

Leseprobe

AFTERPARTIES

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © 2021 by Ravy So and Alexander Gilbert Torres

The moral right of Anthony Veasna So to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

An extension of this copyright page appears on page 261.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Designed by Michelle Crowe

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 651 4

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 883 9

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

For everyone who underestimated me, including myself.

Oh, and Alex, my love.

CONTENTS

THREE WOMEN OF CHUCK’S DONUTS

SUPERKING SON SCORES AGAIN

MALY, MALY, MALY

THE SHOP

THE MONKS

WE WOULD’ VE BEEN PRINCES!

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

SOMALY SEREY, SEREY SOMALY

GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES

Acknowledgments

AFTERPARTIES

THREE WOMEN OF CHUCK’S DONUTS

The first night the man orders an apple fritter, it is three in the morning, the streetlamp is broken, and California Delta mist obscures the waterfront’s run-down buildings, except for Chuck’s Donuts, with its cool fluorescent glow. “Isn’t it a bit early for an apple fritter?” the owner’s twelve-year-old daughter, Kayley, deadpans from behind the counter, and Tevy, four years older, rolls her eyes and says to her sister, “You watch too much TV.”

The man ignores them both, sits down at a booth, and proceeds to stare out the window, at the busted potential of this small city’s downtown. Kayley studies the man’s reflection in the window. He’s older but not old, younger than her parents, and his wiry mustache seems misplaced, from a different decade. His face wears an expression full of those mixed-up emotions that only adults must feel, like plaintive, say, or wretched. His light-gray suit is disheveled, his tie undone.

An hour passes. Kayley whispers to Tevy, “It looks like he’s just staring at his own face,” to which Tevy says, “I’m trying to study.”

The man finally leaves. His apple fritter remains untouched on the table.

“What a trip,” Kayley says. “Wonder if he’s Cambodian.”

“Not every Asian person in this city is Cambodian,” Tevy says.

Approaching the empty booth, Kayley examines the apple fritter more closely. “Why would you come in here, sit for an hour, and not eat?”

Tevy stays focused on the open book resting on the laminate countertop.

Their mom walks in from the kitchen, holding a tray of glazed donuts. She is the owner, though she isn’t named Chuck—her name is Sothy—and she’s never met a Chuck in her life; she simply thought the name was American enough to draw customers. She slides the tray into a cooling rack, then scans the room to make sure her daughters have not let another homeless man inside.

“How can the streetlamp be out?” Sothy exclaims. “Again!” She approaches the windows and tries to look outside but sees mostly her own reflection—stubby limbs sprouting from a grease-stained apron, a plump face topped by a cheap hairnet. This is a needlessly harsh view of herself, but Sothy’s perception of the world becomes distorted when she stays in the kitchen too long, kneading dough until time itself seems measured in the number of donuts produced. “We will lose customers if this keeps happening.”

“It’s fine,” Tevy says, not looking up from her book. “A customer just came in.”

“Yeah, this weird man sat here for, like, an hour,” Kayley says.

“How many donuts did he buy?” Sothy asks.

“Just that,” Kayley says, pointing at the apple fritter still sitting on the table.

Sothy sighs. “Tevy, call PG&E.”

Tevy looks up from her book. “They aren’t gonna answer.”

“Leave a message,” Sothy says, glaring at her older daughter.

“I bet we can resell this apple fritter,” Kayley says. “I swear, he didn’t touch it. I watched him the whole time.”

“Kayley, don’t stare at customers,” Sothy says, before returning to the kitchen, where she starts prepping more dough, wondering yet again how practical it is to drag her daughters here every night. Maybe Chuck’s Donuts should be open during normal times only, not for twenty-four hours each day, and maybe her daughters should go live with their father, at least some of the time, even if he can hardly be trusted after what he pulled.

She contemplates her hands, the skin discolored and rough, at once wrinkled and sinewy. They are the hands of her mother, who fried homemade cha quai in the markets of Battambang until she grew old and tired and the markets disappeared and her hands went from twisting dough to picking rice in order to serve the Communist ideals of a genocidal regime. How funny, Sothy thinks, that decades after the camps, she lives here in Central California, as a business owner, with her American-born Cambodian daughters who have grown healthy and stubborn, and still, in this new life she has created, her hands have aged into her mother’s.

WEEKS AGO, Sothy’s only nighttime employee quit. Tired, he said, of her limited kitchen, of his warped sleeping schedule, of how his dreams had slipped into a deranged place. And so a deal was struck for the summer: Sothy would refrain from hiring a new employee until September, and Tevy and Kayley would work alongside their mother, with the money saved going directly into their college funds. Inverting their lives, Tevy and Kayley would sleep during the hot, oppressive days, manning the cash register at night.

Despite some initial indignation, Tevy and Kayley of course agreed. The first two years after it opened—when Kayley was eight, Tevy not yet stricken by teenage resentment, and Sothy still married—Chuck’s Donuts seemed blessed with good business. Imagine the downtown streets before the housing crisis, before the city declared bankruptcy and became the foreclosure capital of America. Imagine Chuck’s Donuts surrounded by bustling bars and restaurants and a new IMAX movie theater, all filled with people still in denial about their impossible mortgages. Consider Tevy and Kayley at Chuck’s Donuts after school each day—how they developed inside jokes with their mother, how they sold donuts so fast they felt like athletes, and how they looked out the store windows and saw a whirl of energy circling them.

Now consider how, in the wake of learning about their father’s second family, in the next town over, Tevy and Kayley cling to their memories of Chuck’s Donuts. Even with the recession wiping out almost every downtown business, and driving away their nighttime customers, save for the odd worn-out worker from the nearby hospital, consider these summer nights, endless under the fluorescent lights, the family’s last pillars of support. Imagine Chuck’s Donuts a mausoleum to their glorious past.

THE SECOND NIGHT THE MAN orders an apple fritter, he sits in the same booth. It is one in the morning, though the streetlamp still emits a dark nothing. He stares out the window all the same, and once more leaves his apple fritter untouched. Three days have passed since his first visit. Kayley crouches down, hiding behind the counter, as she watches the man through the donut display case. He wears a medium-gray suit, she notes, instead of the light-gray one, and his hair seems greasier.

“Isn’t it weird that his hair is greasier than last time even though it’s earlier in the night?” she asks Tevy, to which Tevy, deep in her book, answers, “That’s a false causality, to assume that his hair grease is a direct result of time passing.”

And Kayley responds, “Well, doesn’t your hair get greasier throughout the day?”

And Tevy says, “You can’t assume that all hair gets greasy. Like, we know your hair gets gross in the summer.”

And Sothy, walking in, says, “Her hair wouldn’t be greasy if she washed it.” She wraps her arm around Kayley, pulls her close, and sniffs her head. “You smell bad, oun. How did I raise such a dirty daughter?” she says loudly.

“Like mother, like daughter,” Tevy says, and Sothy whacks her head.

“Isn’t that a false causality?” Kayley asks. “Assuming I’m like Mom just because I’m her daughter.” She points at her sister’s book. “Whoever wrote that would be ashamed of you.”

Tevy closes her book and slams it into Kayley’s side, whereupon Kayley digs her ragged nails into Tevy’s arm, all of which prompts Sothy to grab them both by their wrists as she dresses them down in Khmer. As her mother’s grip tightens around her wrist, Kayley sees, from the corner of her eye, that the man has turned away from the window and is looking directly at them, all three of them “acting like hotheads,” as her father used to say. The man’s face seems flush with disapproval, and, in this moment, she wishes she were invisible.

Still gripping her daughters’ wrists, Sothy starts pulling them toward the kitchen’s swinging doors. “Help me glaze the donuts!” she commands. “I’m tired of doing everything!”

“We can’t just leave this man in the seating area,” Kayley protests, through clenched teeth.

Sothy glances at the man. “He’s fine,” she says. “He’s Khmer.”

“You don’t need to drag me,” Tevy says, breaking free from her mother’s grip, but it’s too late, and they are in the kitchen, overdosing on the smell of yeast and burning air from the ovens.

Sothy, Tevy, and Kayley gather around the kitchen island. Trays of freshly fried dough, golden and bare, sit next to a bath of glaze. Sothy picks up a naked donut and dips it into the glaze. When she lifts the donut back into the air, trails of white goo trickle off it.

Kayley looks at the kitchen doors. “What if this entire time that man hasn’t been staring out the window?” she asks Tevy. “What if he’s been watching us in the reflection?”

“It’s kind of impossible not to do both at the same time,” Tevy answers, and she dunks two donuts into the glaze, one in each hand.

“That’s just so creepy,” Kayley says, an exhilaration blooming within her.

“Get to work,” Sothy snaps.

Kayley sighs and picks up a donut.

ANNOYED AS SHE IS by Kayley’s whims, Tevy cannot deny being intrigued by the man as well. Who is he, anyway? Is he so rich he can buy apple fritters only to let them sit uneaten? By his fifth visit, his fifth untouched apple fritter, his fifth decision to sit in the same booth, Tevy finds the man worthy of observation, inquiry, and analysis—a subject she might even write about for her philosophy paper.

The summer class she’s taking, at the community college next to the abandoned mall, is called “Knowing.” Surely writing about this man, and the questions that arise when confronting him as a philosophical subject, could earn Tevy an A in her class, which would impress college admissions committees next year. Maybe it would even win her a fancy scholarship, allow her to escape this depressed city.

“Knowing” initially caught Tevy’s eye because it didn’t require any prior math classes; the coursework involved only reading, writing a fifteen-page paper, and attending morning lectures, which she could do before going home to sleep in the afternoon. Tevy doesn’t understand most of the texts, but then neither does the professor, she speculates, who looks like a homeless man the community college found on the street. Still, reading Wittgenstein is a compelling enough way to pass the dead hours of the night.

Tevy’s philosophical interest in the man was sparked when her mother revealed that she knew, from only a glance, that he was Khmer.

“Like, how can you be sure?” Kayley whispered on the man’s third visit, wrinkling her nose in doubt.

Sothy finished arranging the donuts in the display case, then glanced at the man and said, “Of course he is Khmer.” And that of course compelled Tevy to raise her head from her book. Of course, her mother’s condescending voice echoed, the words ping-ponging through Tevy’s head, as she stared at the man. Of course, of course.

Throughout her sixteen years of life, her parents’ ability to intuit all aspects of being Khmer, or emphatically not being Khmer, has always amazed and frustrated Tevy. She’d do something as simple as drink a glass of ice water, and her father, from across the room, would bellow, “There were no ice cubes in the genocide!” Then he’d lament, “How did my kids become so not Khmer?” before bursting into rueful laughter. Other times, she’d eat a piece of dried fish or scratch her scalp or walk with a certain gait, and her father would smile and say, “Now I know you are Khmer.”

What does it mean to be Khmer, anyway? How does one know what is and is not Khmer? Have most Khmer people always known, deep down, that they’re Khmer? Are there feelings Khmer people experience that others don’t?

Variations of these questions used to flash through Tevy’s mind whenever her father visited them at Chuck’s Donuts, back before the divorce. Carrying a container of papaya salad, he’d step into the middle of the room, and, ignoring any customers, he’d sniff his papaya salad and shout, “Nothing makes me feel more Khmer than the smell of fish sauce and fried dough!”

Being Khmer, as far as Tevy can tell, can’t be reduced to the brown skin, black hair, and prominent cheekbones that she shares with her mother and sister. Khmer-ness can manifest as anything, from the color of your cuticles to the particular way your butt goes numb when you sit in a chair too long, and even so, Tevy has recognized nothing she has ever done as being notably Khmer. And now that she’s old enough to disavow her lying cheater of a father, Tevy feels completely detached from what she was apparently born as. Unable to imagine what her father felt as he stood in Chuck’s Donuts sniffing fish sauce, she can only laugh. Even now, when she can no longer stomach seeing him, she laughs when she thinks about her father.

Tevy carries little guilt about her detachment from her culture. At times, though, she feels overwhelmed, as if her thoughts are coiling through her brain, as if her head will explode. This is what drives her to join Kayley in the pursuit of discovering all there is to know about the man.

ONE NIGHT, Kayley decides that the man is the spitting image of her father. It’s unreal, she argues. “Just look at him,” she mutters, changing the coffee filters in the industrial brewers. “They have the same chin. Same hair. Same everything.”

Sothy, placing fresh donuts in the display case, responds, “Be careful with those machines.”

“Dumbass,” Tevy hisses, refilling the canisters of cream and sugar. “Don’t you think Mom would’ve noticed by now if he looked like Dad?”

By this point, Sothy, Tevy, and Kayley have grown accustomed to the man’s presence, aware that on any given night he might appear sometime between midnight and four. The daughters whisper about him, half hoping that where he sits is out of earshot, half hoping he’ll overhear them. Kayley speculates about his motives: if he’s a police officer on a stakeout, say, or a criminal on the run. She deliberates over whether he’s a good man or a bad one. Tevy, on the other hand, theorizes about the man’s purpose—if, for example, he feels detached from the world and can center himself only here, in Chuck’s Donuts, around other Khmer people. Both sisters wonder about his life: the kind of women he attracts and has dated; the women he has spurned; whether he has siblings, or kids; whether he looks more like his mother or his father.

Sothy ignores them. She is tired of thinking about other people, especially these customers from whom she barely profits.

“Mom, you see what I’m seeing, right?” Kayley says, to no response. “You’re not even listening, are you?”

“Why should she listen to you?” Tevy snaps.

Kayley throws her arms up. “You’re just being mean because you think the man is hot,” she retorts. “You basically said so yesterday. You’re like this gross person who thinks her dad is hot, only now you’re taking it out on me. And he looks just like Dad, for your information. I brought a picture to prove it.” She pulls a photograph from her pocket and holds it up with one hand.

Bright red sears itself onto Tevy’s cheeks. “I did not say that,” she states, and, from across the counter, she tries to snatch the photo from Kayley, only to succeed in knocking an industrial coffee brewer to the ground.

Hearing metal parts clang on the ground and scatter, Sothy finally turns her attention to her daughters. “What did I tell you, Kayley!” she yells, her entire face tense with anger.

“Why are you yelling at me? This is her fault!” Kayley gestures wildly toward her sister. Tevy, seeing the opportunity, grabs the photo. “Give that back to me,” Kayley demands. “You don’t even like Dad. You never have.”

And Tevy says, “Then you’re contradicting yourself, aren’t you?” Her face still burning, she tries to recapture an even, analytical tone. “So which is it? Am I in love with Dad or do I, like, hate him? You are so stupid. I wasn’t saying the man was hot, anyway. I just pointed out that he’s not, like, ugly.”

“I’m tired of this bullshit,” Kayley responds. “You guys treat me like I’m nothing.”

Surveying the damage her daughters have caused, Sothy snatches the photograph from Tevy. “Clean this mess up!” she yells, and then walks out of the seating area, exasperated.

In the bathroom, Sothy splashes water on her face. She looks at her reflection in the mirror, noticing the bags under her eyes, the wrinkles fracturing her skin, then she looks down at the photo she’s laid next to the faucet. Her ex-husband’s youth taunts her with its boyish charm. She cannot imagine the young man in this image—decked out in his tight polo and acid-washed jeans, high on his newfound citizenship—becoming the father who has infected her daughters with so much anxious energy, and who has abandoned her, middle-aged, with obligations she can barely fulfill alone.

Stuffing the photo into the pocket of her apron, Sothy gathers her composure. Had she not left her daughters, she would have seen the man get up from the booth, turn to face the two girls, and walk into the hallway that leads to the bathroom. She would not have opened the bathroom door to find this man towering over her with his silent, sulking presence. And she would never have recognized it, the uncanny resemblance to her ex-husband that her youngest daughter has been raving about all night.

But Sothy does now register the resemblance, along with a sudden pain in her gut. The man’s gaze slams into her, like a punch. It beams a focused chaos, a dim malice, and even though the man merely drifts past her, taking her place in the bathroom, Sothy can’t help but think, They’ve come for us.

SINCE HER DIVORCE, Sothy has worked through her days weighed down by the pressure of supporting her daughters without her ex-husband. Exhaustion grinds away at her bones. Her wrists rattle with carpal tunnel syndrome. And rest is not an option. If anything, it consumes more of her energy. A lull in her day, a moment to reflect, and the resentment comes crashing down over her. It isn’t the cheating she’s mad about, the affair, her daughters’ frivolous stepmother who calls her with misguided attempts at reconciliation. Her attraction to her ex-husband, and his to her, dissolved at a steady rate after her first pregnancy. The same cannot be said of their financial contract. That imploded spectacularly.

Her daughters have no idea, but when Sothy opened Chuck’s Donuts it was with the help of a generous loan from her ex-husband’s distant uncle, an influential business tycoon based in Phnom Penh with a reputation for funding political corruption. She’d heard wild rumors about this uncle, even here in California—that he was responsible for the imprisonment of the prime minister’s main political opponent, that he’d gained his riches by joining a criminal organization of ex–Khmer Rouge officials, and that he’d arranged, on behalf of powerful and petty Khmer Rouge sympathizers, the murder of Haing S. Ngor. Sothy didn’t know if she wanted to accept the uncle’s money, to be indebted to such dark forces, to commit to a life in which she would always be afraid that hit men disguised as Khmer American gangbangers might gun her and her family down and then cover it up as a simple mugging gone wrong. If even Haing S. Ngor, the Oscar-winning movie star of The Killing Fields, wasn’t safe from this fate, if he couldn’t escape the spite of the powerful, how could Sothy think that her own family would be spared? Then again, what else was Sothy supposed to do, with a GED, a husband who worked as a janitor, and two small children? How else could she and her husband stimulate their dire finances? What skills did she have, other than frying dough?

Deep down, Sothy has always understood that it was a bad idea to get into business with her ex-husband’s uncle, who, for all she knew, could have bankrolled Pol Pot’s coup. And so, now, seeing the man’s resemblance to her ex-husband, she wonders if he could be some distant gangster cousin. She fears that her past has finally caught up with her.

FOR SEVERAL DAYS, the man does not visit Chuck’s Donuts. But Sothy’s worries only deepen. They root themselves into her bones. Her daughters’ constant musings about the man only intensify her suspicion that he is a relative of her former uncle-in-law. He has come to take their lives, to torture the money out of them, perhaps to hold her daughters as collateral, investments to sell on the black market. Still, she can’t risk being impulsive, lest she provoke him. And there’s the possibility, of course, that he’s a complete stranger. Surely he would have harmed them by now. Why this performance of waiting? She keeps herself on guard, tells her daughters to be wary of the man, to call for her if he walks through the door.

Tevy has started writing her philosophy paper, and Kayley is helping her. “On Whether Being Khmer Means You Understand Khmer People,” the paper is tentatively titled. Tevy’s professor requires students to title their essays in the style of On Certainty, as if starting a title with the word On makes it philosophical. She decides to structure her paper as a catalog of assumptions made about the man based on the idea that he is Khmer and that the persons making these assumptions—Tevy and Kayley—are also Khmer. Each assumption will be accompanied by a paragraph discussing the validity of the assumption, which will be determined based on the answers provided by the man, to questions that Tevy and Kayley will ask him directly. Both Tevy and Kayley agree to keep the nature of the paper secret from their mother.

The sisters spend several nights refining their list of assumptions about the man. “Maybe he also grew up with parents who never liked each other,” Kayley says one night when the downtown appears less bleak, the dust and pollution lending the dark sky a red glow.

“Well, it’s not like Khmer people marry for love,” Tevy responds.

Kayley looks out the window for anything worth observing but sees only the empty street, a corner of the old downtown motel, the dull orange of the Little Caesars, which her mother hates because the manager won’t allow her customers to park in his excessively big lot. “It just seems like he’s always looking for someone, you know?” Kayley says. “Maybe he loves someone but that person doesn’t love him back.”

“Do you remember what Dad said about marriage?” Tevy asks. “He said that, after the camps, people paired up based on their skills. Two people who knew how to cook wouldn’t marry, because that would be, like, a waste. If one person in the marriage cooked, then the other person should know how to sell food. He said marriage is like the show Survivor, where you make alliances in order to live longer. He thought Survivor was actually the most Khmer thing possible, and he would definitely win it, because the genocide was the best training he could’ve got.”

“What were their skills?” Kayley asks. “Mom’s and Dad’s?”

“The answer to that question is probably the reason they didn’t work out,” Tevy says.

“What does this have to do with the man?” Kayley asks.

And Tevy responds, “Well, if Khmer people marry for skills, as Dad says, maybe it means it’s harder for Khmer people to know how to love. Maybe we’re just bad at it—loving, you know—and maybe that’s the man’s problem.”

“Have you ever been in love?” Kayley asks.

“No,” Tevy says, and they stop talking. They can hear their mother cooking in the kitchen, the routine clanging of mixers and trays, a string of sounds that just fails to coalesce into melody.

Tevy wonders if her mother has ever loved someone romantically, if her mother is even capable of reaching beyond the realm of survival, if her mother has ever been granted any freedom from worry, and if her mother’s present carries the ability to dilate, for even a brief moment, into its own plane of suspended existence, separate from past or future. Kayley, on the other hand, wonders if her mother misses her father, and, if not, whether this means that Kayley’s own feelings of gloom, of isolation, of longing, are less valid than she believes. She wonders if the violent chasm between her parents also exists within her own body, because isn’t she just a mix of all those antithetical genes?

“Mom should start smoking,” Kayley says.

And Tevy asks, “Why?”

“It’d force her to take breaks,” Kayley says. “Every time she wanted to smoke, she’d stop working, go outside, and smoke.”

“Depends on what would kill her faster,” Tevy says. “Smoking or working too much.”

Then Kayley asks, softly, “Do you think Dad loves his new wife?”

Tevy answers, “He better.”

HERE’S HOW SOTHY AND HER ex-husband were supposed to handle their deal with the uncle: Every month, Sothy would give her then husband 20 percent of Chuck’s Donuts’ profits. Every month, her then husband would wire that money to his uncle. And every month, they would be one step closer to paying off their loan before anyone with ties to criminal activity could bat an eyelash.

Here’s what actually happened: One day, weeks before she discovered that her husband had conceived two sons with another woman while they were married, Sothy received a call at Chuck’s Donuts. It was a man speaking in Khmer, his accent thick and pure. At first, Sothy hardly understood what he was saying. His sentences were too fluid, his pronunciation too proper. He didn’t truncate his words, the way so many Khmer American immigrants did, and Sothy found herself lulled into a daze by those long-lost syllables. Then she heard what the man’s words actually meant. He was the accountant of her husband’s uncle. He was asking about their loan, whether they had any intention of paying it back. It had been years, and the uncle hadn’t received any payments, the accountant said with menacing regret.