The Collective

6

It was a school for the bookish and nerdy, for geeks and losers, for kids who liked to study, who actually wanted to learn. During our four years at Mac, we would read Foucault, Hegel, Derrida, Saussure, Gadamer, Lacan, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari — never the full texts, mind you, just xeroxed scraps and smidgens that still we would not understand, but from which we could lap up the lingua franca of pseudo-intellectualism. We’d sling around words like synecdoche and hyperbole, ontology and eschatology, faute de mieux and fin de siècle. We’d describe things as heuristic, protean, numinous, and ineffable. We’d discuss Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Plato’s cave and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Laffer’s curve and Schrödinger’s cat. We’d embrace poststructuralism and existentialism and epistemology, semiotics and hermeneutics. We’d see everything as an allegory or a metaphor for something else, and ultimately we’d deconstruct everything as divisive or patriarchal or sexist or homophobic or racist or neofascist — a product of heteronormative exclusivity, a metanarrative propagated by the oligarchy. We’d answer almost every question by decrying it as a syllogism, or a trope, or tautological, or phallocentric, or reductive, or hegemonic (undoubtedly our favorite buzzword). We’d come to believe that any text — be it Shakespeare or a comic book or a supermarket circular — had the same intrinsic value, and we’d insist that all truth was relative, that there was no reality without signifiers, that there was no there there, that nothing, in fact, really existed. We’d argue and rant, we’d foment for empowerment and paradigm shifts and interstitial hybridity, we’d make grand, sweeping pronouncements about subjects of which we knew nothing. We would become articulate, well read, sensitive, open-minded, totally insufferable twits. We would graduate as nihilistic, atheistic, anarchistic, moralistic, tree-hugging, bohemian, Marxist snobs. We would love every minute of it.

All of this we did without a trace of irony. Only Joshua, ever the devil’s advocate, would call us out at times (although, on the whole, he tended to be the most pretentious and reactionary of any of us: “Hemingway was a racist.” “Flannery O’Connor was a racist”).

“Look, this is all just intellectual masturbation,” he said once in class. “The fact is, no one here will ever be poor. In ten years, what do you think you’ll be doing? Maybe the best-intentioned of you will be working for a nonprofit, but you’ll be living off your trust funds. More likely everyone will have caved in and become corporate attorneys.”

That spring semester of my freshman year, I took Problems of Philosophy, Metaphysical Diasporas, Faith and Doubt in Nineteenth-century Literature, and Introduction to Creative Writing. Jessica was in the first class, Joshua in all four. Our education began in earnest, and so, too, did our friendship, Joshua and Jessica working assiduously to lift me out of my funk over Didi. (I’d see her now and again on campus, and each encounter would fill me with heartache. I could not imagine then that, after a year, we’d reach a rapprochement of sorts, born mainly out of disinterest, since we’d both be involved with other people, and that eventually, when I left Mac, I’d forget about her almost entirely.)

Jessica got me to start running with her on the treadmills in the Field House. To counteract such a frightening aspiration for health, Joshua got me to start smoking cigarettes. We watched reruns of Magnum, P.I., of which Joshua, peculiarly, was an aficionado, and for each viewing in the lounge, he’d make us wear Hawaiian shirts and drink mai tais. We visited the Walker Art Center. We spent hours browsing in Cheapo Records and Hungry Mind Books, inhaling the musty acid odor. We ate greasy fish fries (made with the ever-present walleye) at the St. Clair Broiler. We listened to live jazz at the AQ. We rolled frames at BLB, the Bryant-Lake Bowl, a combo restaurant-coffeehouse-performance space-bowling alley. We rented snowshoes and clumped up Summit Avenue, past the Victorian mansions, and trekked along the Mississippi. We had long bull sessions about the meaning of life (“Do you see the world as mean or sublime?” Joshua would ask, and he’d shake his head pityingly when we answered sublime).

We spent so much time together, people began referring to us as the three musketeers, the three amigos. “No,” Joshua said, “you know what we should call ourselves? The 3AC. The Asian American Artists Collective.” And thereafter, especially when we were drunk, we’d use the acronym as a rallying cry, a toast to our solidarity: “To the 3AC!”

Mostly what we did, though, was study and read (I entered college with 20/20 vision and left needing contacts). My grades had suffered the first term, and I was determined to do better overall in the spring. Nonetheless, the only course that I truly cared about was Intro to Creative Writing.

In the class, we started by reading selections from a poetry anthology and then taking a stab at writing our own poems. This was, without exception, a ludicrous exercise. None of us were poets. We didn’t understand poetry. We didn’t know what to write about. There were sixteen students in the class, and the majority were not English majors. Intro to Creative Writing was considered a Mickey Mouse course at Mac, and it fulfilled a fine arts requirement.

So we presented weepy elegies for our grandmothers and family dogs, self-pitying monologues about teenage angst, hackneyed pastorals about meadows and fluorescent moons, angry apostrophes to divorced parents, soaring heroic couplets about unrequited love, mawkish paeans to pain and sorrow, and fiery sonnets about loneliness. It was the most wretched stuff. Everything alliterated and rhymed. Most of it was incoherent drivel. There were repeated appearances of tears and rain, usually in combination. But, true to the ethos of Mac, no one in the class laughed or disparaged any of these sorry efforts. We were supportive and kind. We made gentle suggestions. We lauded the intentions.

The poetry part of the class didn’t matter to me. What I was nervous about was the second part of the course, when we would write fiction. For all my ambitions to be a writer, and for all the encouragement I had received in high school, told by more than one teacher that I possessed a creative flair, I had never written an actual short story, just unfinished vignettes or scenes.

We did a few fiction writing exercises, and then we scheduled ourselves for the real thing: a workshop rotation wherein we would make photocopies of our stories and pass them out in advance, then have them critiqued in class after reading a handful of pages aloud.

Joshua, of course, volunteered to go first. After he finished his brief recitation, we sat in silence in the classroom. The story portrayed a ten-year-old boy in Seoul after the Korean War who accompanied his father every day as they pushed a cart to deliver and sell charcoal. It was a quiet story, with not much happening and hardly any dialogue, the only fracas of significance an argument with a racist GI. Yet the language was lyrical and precise, with none of the bombastic flourishes and hyperkinetic rhythms I had expected from Joshua. At one point, the boy recalled a long-ago trip to visit relatives in Inchon: “He remembered looking out over the Yellow Sea, where the water lay undulant in the sun, the waves glinting as they moved toward shore, folding over one another like the ruffling of curtains.” The story had grace and gravitas. There wasn’t, as far as I could discern, a single misstep in it.

The professor, Peter Anderegg, cleared his throat. He wasn’t a real professor, just a visiting instructor, an adjunct. He was fairly young, perhaps twenty-seven, and was in his first year out of graduate school. He had published a few stories in some obscure journals, but not a book. Bashful, diffident, at any other college he would have been run over by the students.

“This is really… extraordinary,” he said. “It’s really quite beautiful. ”

Our initial reaction confirmed, the class began chiming in, ladling out our own effusive praise. Peter had a workshop rule, which was that the author could not speak during the roundtable critique, but I kept sneaking peeks at Joshua, and he was beaming with obvious pride. With his literary references and quips, he had already established himself as the class leader, but now he had elevated himself so he wasn’t just another blowhard. He had authentic talent, and from then on, his authority in the workshop was unassailable.

We walked to the Tap, a neighborhood dive, for burgers and beers, and sat across from each other in one of the big wooden booths. I asked Joshua, “How about giving me that story for Chanter?”—the literary magazine at Mac.

“That little rag?” he said. He swigged his Summit IPA. He had made Jessica and me get passport photos, without revealing why, and then had procured fake IDs for us. Mine was laminated with the name Nick Carraway. His said Seymour Glass, Jessica’s Frida Kahlo. “It’d be kind of a waste, don’t you think? Those guys are idiots.”

I was low man on the totem pole on the journal’s staff, but I was certain I could convince Chanter’s editors — who were known to be snitty, once turning down a story they had solicited from a prominent author who’d read on campus — to take Joshua’s piece. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll guide it through.”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” Joshua said. “I was thinking I’d submit the story to a real magazine.”

“Yeah? Like where?”

“Maybe The Atlantic Monthly.”

“No shit?”

“Or maybe Esquire or Harper’s,” he said. “Fuck it, I might as well go for The New Yorker.”

Such an idea would never have occurred to me. His story was good, but it seemed arrogant — outrageous, really — of Joshua, an unpublished eighteen-year-old, to presume he had a chance at any of those prestigious venues.

As my turn in the workshop approached, my anxiety ratcheted. I kept eking out opening paragraphs of short stories and then tossing them. Finally, I finished a hasty draft, typed it out on a computer in the library, and ran off copies. It was about a couple standing in an alleyway next to the man’s motorcycle, a Suzuki Katana, having an argument. There were vague allusions to illegality: a rigged poker game, a pimp. The woman wore a sequined dress slit on the sides, and there was a recurring image of her blond hair falling aside, exposing the curved nape of her neck, as she reached down to adjust the clasp on her stiletto shoe. It was called “Nighthawks Rendezvous.”

I had rushed the story, I knew. Twelve pages long, it was filled with mangled phrasings and inexplicable tangents and more than a few typos. Writing it, I had had severe doubts that it displayed any merits whatsoever, yet, irrationally, as I read the first four pages out loud in class, I began to think that it wasn’t that bad. As a matter of fact, I thought it might be pretty inventive and original — kind of edgy.

“Comments?” Peter said to the class. “What did you think?”

No one said a word, just like when Joshua had presented his story, and I wondered if the class was similarly awed.

Ben, a political science major, raised his hand. “I’m not sure I understand what’s going on in the story.”

“Yeah, is this real, or, like, the guy’s dream?” Stephanie said.

“I was kind of confused, too,” Tyson said.

“I’m wondering what the author intended,” Elizabeth said. “Was the author intentionally trying to be abstruse?”

This was another one of Peter’s commandments. In order to protect students from feeling they were being attacked, we never addressed the author by name or by saying “you.” We were told to use “the author” exclusively. We weren’t supposed to look at the author, either. We were to pretend that the author was not in the room.

Rules for decorum aside, the discussion began to take a bad turn — the first time in any of our sessions, in fact, that the critiques were unequivocally negative.

“It’s like a really slick music video,” said Geoff, “but I don’t know if it has any more depth to it than that.”

“I don’t think there’s enough of a character arc,” said Cory. “No one changes during the course of the story.”

“We don’t know enough about them,” said Jeremy. “They aren’t developed very much.”

“There’s no conflict that I can define. What’s at stake? Is anything resolved?” asked Drew.

“The prose gets a little grandiose,” said Lara. “It’s reaching for highfalutin but it comes off as ostentatious.”

“The hair and neck thing got to be really tedious,” said Carey.

I waited for Joshua’s verdict. The hair and neck thing — at that moment I realized, with panic, that I had completely ripped the image off, almost word for word, from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de Rendez-vous, a novel that had been on Joshua’s recommended books list.

At last, Joshua said, “You’re all missing the point. The story’s working on an atmospheric or impressionistic level, on mood rather than plot. Character development and conflict are irrelevant in a modality like this. There’s an inherent tension beneath the recurrences, the circularity, of the sado-erotic imagery, and the entire story relies on the flux of linguistic excess. Stylistically it has a kinship to the nouveau roman. It’s phenomenological, in the Heideggerian sense. Structurally and conceptually this story is really sophisticated — I’d say it’s even brilliant. I loved it.”

God bless Joshua’s soul.

After a pause, Megan said, “You’re right. It’s surreal, that’s what it is. The unpredictable way it flows is disturbing and kind of magical.”

“I’m going to retract what I said before,” Geoff said. “I didn’t get it. Now I see how intense the story is.”

“The story’s actually very sexy,” Carey said.

More revisionist compliments accrued, and Peter concluded, “I think there’s a great lesson here, which is that we need to be more flexible in our approach. Not everything’s going to be in the conventional realist tradition, so we have to be prepared and more open to ambitious work like this, not be knee-jerky judgmental when anything smacks of the experimental. Otherwise we’ll be blind to this kind of stylistic innovation.”

Joshua and I went to the dining hall. It was Tortellini Thursday. The kitchen staff had celebratory themes for nearly every day of the week: Sundae Sunday, Chili Monday, Taco Tuesday. I said, “You didn’t really love it, did you?” I knew the story hadn’t been great — in no shape or form had I meant it to be experimental — but, illogically, I was angry that it hadn’t been universally extolled by my classmates. During the workshop, I had felt myself on the verge of crying, and I still trembled with wounded indignation.

“I loved parts of it,” Joshua said.

“Not the part I stole from Robbe-Grillet.”

“Sometimes the distinction between theft and homage is murky.” One half of his plate was piled with tortellini with tomato sauce, the other half with tortellini with alfredo sauce. He sampled each mound, then mixed them together.

“They hated it,” I said. “If you hadn’t stepped in, it would’ve gotten truly ugly. I would’ve been hosed. Deservedly so. That story’s a piece of shit. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, ever believing I could be a writer. I should just give up right now.”

Joshua tasted his tomato-alfredo tortellini, and then shook a sizable amount of salt and parmesan on it. “Let me ask you something. How long did it take you to write that story?”

“Forever!” I told him. “Like, seven hours. I pulled an all-nighter.”

“So you got the idea for it at midnight or something and wrote the whole thing in a Kerouacian binge, all bagged out and wired?”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty impressive, then. Shows a lot of promise. But look, you can’t claim ownership over something you spent so little time on. You know how long it took me to write my story? I’d say seventy hours on the first part alone. Just think what you might be able to do if you were more disciplined. That’s what it takes to be a writer, Eric. Grinding it out, showing up at your desk every day and clocking in and clocking out. It doesn’t happen overnight, you know. It’s work, man.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said despondently.

“Listen, don’t worry about it. You’ll write other stories. You’ll get better. I’d say you were trying too hard to impress, that was the main problem, but there was something genuinely interesting happening there, a vision, you know, a leitmotif of people searching for transcendence amid the muddle. It’s indisputable, man. You’re a writer.”

“You really think so?” I said, more than willing to be persuaded.

“Absolutely.” He showered red pepper flakes onto his tortellini. “Let me ask you something else, though.”

“What?”

“Why did you make all the characters white?”

I was nonplussed by the question. I hadn’t consciously made my characters anything. “They’re not white.”

“No? The girl has blond hair. The guy’s last name is Lambert.”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. “I didn’t realize.”

“The only thing that’s Asian in your entire story is the motorcycle.”

“I don’t know why I did that.”

“It’s all the writers you used to idolize. They fucking brainwashed you into whitewashing yourself, man.”

“All the authors you like, the ones you’ve been recommending, they’re all white, too.”

“Yeah, but the difference is they’re subversive.”

A feeble justification, I thought. “For the sake of argument, what’s wrong with having white characters?”

“What’s wrong with it?” Joshua said. “Isn’t it obvious? It’s tantamount to race betrayal.”

“Come on. Seriously?”

“Are you ashamed of being Korean?”

I thought of what I had asked Didi: Are you ashamed of me? “No,” I told Joshua, “I’m not.”

I’d gone to Korea only once, when I was eleven, with my family. In Seoul, I had been shocked by how chaotic and dirty everything was, the traffic and noise and pollution, the old men pulling carts on the street with flattened cardboard boxes stacked fifteen feet high, the women who’d lower into a kimchi squat without thought, the drunk businessmen pissing against buildings, everyone cutting in line and pushing you aside, the phlegm-gathering and spitting, the profuse smoking and drinking, the slurping and masticating with open mouths, the toilet paper rolls on the dining table in lieu of napkins, the gaudy materialism and unabashed sexism. It had all seemed so vulgar, crude, Third World. In truth, I never wanted to go back.

“So why make your characters white,” Joshua said, “when you could just as easily make them Korean? What do you gain by doing that? A bigger audience? You haven’t even started your career yet, and you’re already selling out.”

That wasn’t the issue for me. The problem was, I didn’t feel Korean. I didn’t know what it meant to be Korean, or Asian, or Asian American. I only felt American.

“Are you saying I’m obligated to always have Asian characters?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Joshua told me.

“And write about race?”

“I don’t know, something like that. I mean, don’t you think your stories would have more power and emotion if you tap into your personal experience? You can’t deny that’s a part of who you are.”

“But I haven’t experienced racism.”

“That’s a joke, right? Of course you have,” Joshua said. “You’ve never had someone ask, ‘What are you?’ or ‘Where you from?’ or ‘What’s your nationality?’ because there’s no fucking way you can be a real American? You’ve never had a kid pull his eyes slanty at you or some asshole tell you it’s National Hate Chinese Week? You’ve never had anyone tell you your English is pretty good or ask you to ‘chop chop,’ hurry it up? You’ve never walked by a bunch of punks singsonging, ‘Ching chong, Chinaman’? What about all the jokes implying you’ve got a small penis or that you can’t possibly parallel park?”

Our experiences, East and West Coasts, couldn’t have been any more different. Yes, I had always been acutely aware of my ethnicity, but that awareness had been almost wholly self-inflicted, not because I had been the victim of taunts. “No, not really. Maybe the what-are-you stuff, but that’s mostly been from other Asians.”

“What about what went down with Sourdough?”

“Okay, maybe,” I said. “All that shit’s happened to you?”

“And worse.”

He told me about coming to the U.S. as a five-year-old, speaking only Korean. He had been in the orphanage in Pusan since he was a few days old, literally left on the doorstep. Nothing was ever uncovered about his parents or background, and the director of the orphanage had arbitrarily named him Yoon Dong-min. But now he was Joshua Meer, living on Walker Street, a stone’s throw from Harvard Square, with two extraordinarily tall, white professors as parents. They could have afforded sending Joshua to Shady Hill or Fayerweather, then to Concord Academy or BB&N, but the Meers believed in public schooling, and he attended Baldwin and Cambridge Rindge & Latin.

He received the predictable abuse: ridiculed for not knowing English and being placed in special needs; having it regularly pointed out to him that the Meers were not his real parents; asked if he ate dog; called pancake face and yangmo; told his skin looked like mustard — did he have a liver problem, was he full of bile?; asking a girl to dance and having her turn away from him, saying, “I don’t understand you. I only speak English”; entering a junior high writing contest and being given third place instead of first because the judges — once they learned he was Korean American — suspected he had plagiarized the essay.

The nadir was in eleventh grade. A classmate named Stevie was going fishing off Pleasure Bay in South Boston, and Joshua tagged along. On the pier, four thugs started taunting him. “Hey, Mr. Miyagi, do you know karate? Haiya!” All afternoon, they badgered Joshua, who refused to respond to them. At last the men disappeared, and Joshua thought it was over, but then they returned with a rope. “Hey, slope, where’re your glasses? How do you see out of those slits? Can you see at all?” Joshua’s friend dropped his fishing rod and ran away. “Stevie!” Joshua yelled after him. “Don’t leave me!” The men tied Joshua to a railing and left him there after duct-taping his eyelids open. Two cops found him hours later (dozens of people had walked by and done nothing, just laughed at him), and when Joshua began describing the four men to the cops, they told him to forget about it. “It was just a stupid prank, kid. No harm done, right? They didn’t hit you or nothing. Boys will be boys, right?”

“Jesus,” I said to Joshua. “That’s unbelievable.”

“It’s not just Boston,” he said. “It’s everywhere. You need to wake up to it.”