The Collective

8

The 3AC did not become a formal organization until 1998. After Macalester, we scattered to different parts of the country, all for our graduate degrees. Joshua received a scholarship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he became Frank Conroy’s darling. Afterward, he landed another coveted sinecure, the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, then was given a Jones Lectureship, a cushy teaching gig that allowed him to stay in Palo Alto.

He didn’t get published in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, but his stories started to appear with regularity in literary journals. He was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and one of his pieces was reprinted in an anthology of Asian American writers. Things were going well for Joshua, it seemed, but then he went off the rails.

Both his parents, in their late seventies, died in quick succession in 1997. During the funerals, Joshua wept inconsolably — genuine anguish that was heartrending for me to witness. “I didn’t deserve them,” he sobbed to me. “I took them for granted because they weren’t my real parents, because they weren’t Asian.”

On several occasions, I had seen him together with the Meers, both of them bespectacled and spindly. They had been extraordinarily kind people, but Joshua’s relationship to them — and, I have to say, theirs to him — had seemed to be one of gentle indifference.

Be that as it may, their deaths precipitated several perplexing, contradictory episodes in Joshua’s life.

First, he took a temporary leave from his Jones Lectureship and went to Korea, spending weeks in search of his birth parents. At the orphanage in Pusan, he learned of a rumor that he had actually been born on Cheju-do, and he took a ferry to the island, hoping he might be able to uncover more, but the trip was to no avail. With no further leads, he migrated north, up the peninsula. He had an amorphous idea that he might repatriate and stay in Seoul, yet he felt uncomfortable in the city, and in the country as a whole. By bureaucrats and policemen, by clerks in hotels and stores, by waitresses in restaurants, by bus and taxi drivers, he was chastised for not being able to speak Korean well enough, for not being a real Korean, for being too American — all of the things he used to berate me for. He felt denigrated for having Meer as his last name, for being an adoptee, someone who was unwanted, illegitimate, abandoned, who had no lineage or family history he could claim as his own. He felt baekjeong to them, an outcaste, the lowest class, contemptible and polluted, untouchable, unspeakable. He didn’t belong in Korea.

Returning to Palo Alto, he legally changed his name from Meer to Yoon. He started a KAD support group in the Bay Area, helped organize a Korean heritage festival, became a Big Brother to a Korean teenager, joined a Korean dragon boat team, taught ESL to Korean immigrants, and, briefly, unbelievably, became born-again and attended a Korean Baptist church.

Then, abruptly, he withdrew from all these activities, denouncing them as preposterous and futile. He began siding with the burgeoning anti-TRA (transracial adoption) movement, arguing that white families who adopted Asian children were selfish and ultimately cruel, that snatching Asian babies from their homelands was a vestigial, devious form of imperialism, colonization by kidnapping, nullifying the adoptees’ ability to ever identify with any ethnicity, an effacement equivalent to genocide.

“Asian babies should grow up in Asian households,” he told me. “Otherwise, they don’t stand a chance.”

Then, just as swiftly, he rescinded this stance, deciding that the Meers had been decent and compassionate and should be honored for their altruism. He gave up his Jones Lectureship and, bankrolled by his inheritance, moved to Paris for five months.

Jessica had a tough time of it as well. Her parents might have found it acceptable for her to date Loki, but not what she chose to do next. She applied to all seven Ivy League medical schools and, unexpectedly, got into two: Harvard and Penn. She had only cursorily prepared for the MCATs, intending to do poorly on them and rid her family of this Ivy League fixation once and for all, and perhaps as a consequence — no pressure, no panic attacks — she aced the test. But she decided to turn down Harvard and Penn and attend the one other school to which she had secretly applied, the Rhode Island School of Design, to get her MFA in studio art.

Her parents disowned her. She took out loans to pay for her tuition to RISD. When she graduated, she moved to the Lower East Side in Manhattan, but floundered trying to make a name for herself as an artist while working two different jobs as a waitress and a third as an after-hours proofreader at a law firm. Enervated and losing hope, she at last found rescue through a one-year fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. It meant living in a tiny, makeshift, barely insulated studio from October through April, seasons that were gloomy and desolate on the tip of Cape Cod, and the stipend was paltry, but Jessica leapt at the opportunity for a respite.

I went to Boston, of all places, for my MFA. Unlike Joshua, I was rejected by Iowa, and UVA, and Michigan, and every other top creative writing program in the country. Walden College, a former secretarial school in the Back Bay, was small and third-rate. It didn’t have a single famous author on the faculty, and it didn’t offer me a scholarship, but I went, anyway, because they were the only ones willing to take me. “Why an MFA instead of an MBA?” my mother asked me, as if it were only a matter of changing a consonant. But I had prepared her and my father over the years, tamping down expectations of my going to law school or having any comparable professional ambitions. I was going to be a writer. Nothing they said or did could stop me. I think back now, and wonder what might have happened if I had not met Joshua. As a freshman, I had not even known a master’s of fine arts in creative writing existed.

As mediocre as Walden was, it had one redeeming attribute, an affiliation with a literary journal called Palaver, where I signed on as an intern my first semester. It was edited by my principal workshop teacher, Evan Paviromo, a British-Italian scholar, bon vivant, and wastrel. He was a charismatic, towering presence at six-foot-five, beefy verging on portly, with thick brown hair he kept long and swept back, always elegant in his blue Savile Row suits, bow tie, and matching hankie. He had no money of his own and relied on his wife’s income to fund his indulgences, including the magazine (he told me he’d come to the U.S. from London “looking for a rich widow with a bad cough”). A raconteur extraordinaire, he unfurled story after story to anyone who would listen. Stories about producing art-house films, hanging out with movie stars and politicians, spending weekends at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, and running guns and drugs for Central American dictators under the aegis of the CIA. I had a hard time believing any of it, and came to suspect that Paviromo was a con artist, questioning the authenticity of his credentials and even his Oxbridge accent.

There was no question, however, about Palaver’s reputation, which was outsized compared to its meager resources, its office a rented shithole in Watertown. Palaver had a history of discovering young writers, their stories and poems regularly plucked for prize annuals. Agents and book editors kept close tabs on the journal, scouting for new talent. A publication in Palaver had the potential to launch a career, and Evan Paviromo kept promising to launch mine.

As Joshua had predicted, with discipline I had gotten better as a writer, and in such a lackluster MFA program, I was treated with almost Joshuaesque regard. In general, Paviromo was admiring of my fiction, although I can’t say he was of much value to me as a mentor — lackadaisical and distracted and not terribly interested in his students’ work. Joshua still served that role for me, reading all my short stories and critiquing them exhaustively during late-night phone calls from Iowa City. “Paviromo said what?” he’d ask. “That asshole doesn’t know shit. Where the fuck does he come off? He’s not even a writer.” Then Joshua would break down my stories, pointing out each blunder in the structure and prose, nitpicking about words like “desultory,” “recalcitrant,” and “askance.” The ritual was withering, excruciating, but it helped, and by the time I finished my master’s thesis, a mélange of various projects that included a screenplay and a long story called “The Unrequited,” Joshua said about the latter, “Now you’re fucking cooking. This is the best thing you’ve ever done, by far. Honestly, unequivocally, all bullshit aside, you know I wouldn’t say this unless I meant it, it’s brilliant. You’ve made a huge fucking leap.” Paviromo agreed, telling me, “You know, I believe this is eminently publishable. In fact, I might want to publish it myself in Palaver,” and for years he kept stringing me along with that pledge.

Joshua tried to circumvent matters, submitting “The Unrequited” for me to journals in which he’d previously appeared, telling the editors they’d be blind to pass up such a gem, yet they always did, saying the story had come close but wasn’t quite right for them. Every week I’d send out photocopies of “The Unrequited,” wait eight months to a year for a response, and each time, I’d get the copies back in their self-addressed, stamped envelopes with the same apologetic rejections. I could not, for the life of me, get anything into print.

After I graduated, I was hired as an adjunct instructor at Walden, mostly assigned freshman comp and the occasional Intro to Creative Writing class. Paviromo also took me on as the office manager of Palaver, a quarter-time, minimum-wage job. I had loan payments, no health insurance, and a mounting balance on my credit card. I was making $17,000 a year.

I lived in a basement studio apartment on Marlborough Street, and the bay windows — covered with iron bars — faced the rat-infested back alleyway and were right next to the rear door, which tenants kicked open at all hours to lob their garbage into the trash cans. I was miserable there. I was miserable in Boston.

It was an old, crumbling, restive city. People were brusque and rude. No one ever said “Excuse me” or “Thank you” or held a door for you. And, yes, as Joshua had warned, it was a racist town. I didn’t have my eyelids duct-taped open, but a lot of the sinister, corrosive, subtle shit that had happened to him, I experienced, too. Everywhere I went, I found myself to be the only nonwhite person in the room. I got so tired of the where-are-you-from, what-are-you inquiries, I began to answer, “I’m a third-generation Korean American, born and raised in Mission Viejo, California,” hoping specificity would curtail stupidity, and still I got: “Hey, you speak pretty good English.” The assumption was always that I was an MIT student. That I studied engineering. That I was a foreigner fresh off the boat. That I was an overachiever, a model minority, a wimp.

Paradoxically, I kept dating white girls, mostly other aspiring writers, but there was a difference now. I no longer predicted a future with any of them, and it could have been, in fact, that I subconsciously chose women who were so fucked up, disaster was virtually assured, providing fodder for the stories I was now writing about Asian guys who dated fucked-up white girls.

The most recent one, Odette, had been from Atlanta, an assistant editor at the literary journal Agni. Things had been going swimmingly, if a little quickly. Almost right away, she began discussing marriage, kids. “What do you think of the name Genevieve if it’s a girl?” she asked. “I want to have three children, the first when I’m twenty-nine, okay? Do you think your mother will like me?”

Odette spoke on the phone to her own mother in Atlanta, who asked what my name was. “Is he Asian? What? Korean?” Then her mother shouted to her father, “Did you hear that, Sam? You’re going to have slanty-eyed grandchildren.”

But we didn’t have children. The relationship didn’t last more than a few months. Out of the blue, Odette’s ex-boyfriend sent me a letter, claiming that every day for the last two weeks he had been fucking her in the afternoon, just hours before Odette came to my basement apartment to fuck me. He added that, according to her, I was lousy in bed and had the penis of a pygmy.

“That is fucked, man,” Joshua told me. “You are fucked. Why do you keep going out with these rimjobs?”

By then, the spring of 1998, Joshua had returned from Paris and had moved into his parents’ old house on Walker Street, in Cambridge for good now — or at least as permanently as he could foresee. A few probate issues notwithstanding, he had money from his parents’ estate — their retirement and investment accounts, their life insurance. If he was frugal and sold the house, a three-story Victorian worth well over a million dollars, he could write full-time almost indefinitely and live anywhere. He was in a quandary, unable to decide what to do or where to go, not prepared to put the house on the market just yet. “It’s the only home I’ve ever known,” he said. So for the moment he was living in the house alone, four bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms to himself. Again and again, he asked me to move in with him. “Come on, man, I won’t even charge you rent.” It was a tempting offer. Certainly it would have been a welcome financial reprieve for me, but I kept hesitating.

It wasn’t that the house was inhospitable. Far from it. It was over a hundred years old, gray, weathered clapboards outside, but the interior had been continually renovated, decorated in a minimalist, modern aesthetic that was inviting: Swiss Bauhaus furniture with clean, straight lines and warm blond woods, Max Bill stools, Alvar Aalto bentwood tables. There was an Eames chair and ottoman. There were comfy upholstered sofas, faded red Persian rugs, bright still lifes and black-and-white landscapes on the walls, lots of light and quiet, stainless steel appliances, central heat and air-conditioning.

And it wasn’t just that Joshua was a slob. It was a given that he wouldn’t pick up after himself, do the dishes, pitch in with chores. I’d have to take care of all of those things if I moved in, I knew. That didn’t bother me so much — an acceptable trade-off if I were living there gratis.

Rather than domestic, it was more the prospect of emotional servitude that made me waver. I remembered our sophomore year at Mac, when Joshua had gotten a tattoo on his upper left arm that read, in inch-high, mineral-black Futura Bold letters, 3AC. Jessica and I had first thought it was fake — stenciled with a marker. Temporary tattoos were all the rage then, and there had been a fuss when some high school kids in Maple Grove had supposedly been given lick-and-stick blue star tattoos that were soaked in LSD, prompting Mac officials to put out an advisory.

But Joshua had told us no, it was real. “So when are you guys going to get yours?” he’d asked.

“No fucking way,” I’d said.

“Why not? It’s a badge of solidarity.”

“We’ll probably have a falling-out next week and never speak to each other again,” Jessica said.

“No, no, you don’t understand,” Joshua said. “This — this thing with us — it can never die.”

We did not get matching tattoos. A part of me had agreed with Jessica. The three of us had become close at Mac, especially in the wake of the brouhaha with Kathryn Newey, but I hadn’t felt our friendship warranted an indelible symbol of commitment and fidelity.

Now that Joshua and I had known each other for ten years, however, I had the opposite concern. Although I relished his counsel and company, I was wary of him at times, wary of how critical, noisome, and dogmatic he could be, of his predilection for creating drama and havoc, of the inequity in our roles, and wary, too, of his dependence on me, his neediness. Already there were the phone calls, the panicked intuitions that he might have leukemia and maybe should get a lumbar puncture, or that he might have a brain tumor and maybe should get a CT scan. More systemically, there were the calls, both during the day and late at night, when he thought it imperative to convey an idea he’d had, an epiphany, or to read me a particularly piquant passage he’d just written or read, or calls about nothing, really, just wanting to check in, shoot the breeze.

There were the spontaneous hankerings for pizza or Bass ale or a movie or a hike, for just hanging out, because he was bored and lonely. There were the favors to help him trim a tree or fix the gutters, to go with him to Tags Hardware or Home Depot, to pick up a prescription at CVS or do some research in the microfiche archives of the BPL for him. He didn’t understand that I had work to do, grading papers and prepping for classes and stuffing envelopes in Palaver’s shithole. He didn’t understand that not everything revolved around him, that I might have a life of my own. The impositions were bad enough living in the same city. What would they be like living in the same house?

His side of the river, I had to admit, had its allure, namely Wu Chon in Somerville’s Union Square, where we could get our fill of Korean food — bibimbap, kalbi, and jaeyuk bokkeum — and the Porter Square Exchange, which housed the Japanese market Kotobukiya and a handful of small Japanese restaurants that were practically stalls, yet offered cheap and tasty comfort foods.

Our favorite was Cafe Mami, where we usually sat at the counter, and it was there that Joshua dispensed his latest harangue about my dating habits.

“All these years, it’s like you haven’t learned a thing,” he said. “You haven’t changed at all.”

“I could say the same about you. You’ve never had much luck with the ladies.”

“By choice, man. It’s by choice.”

During college, Joshua hadn’t had a single real girlfriend, and the same held true when he was in Iowa and the Bay Area, a fling here and there, never lasting longer than three weeks, at the end of which the women invariably left him. He was lazy, not interested in expending the least amount of effort required to sustain a relationship. He couldn’t be bothered with courtship, with sharing, with being complimentary or attentive or supportive or sensitive. He couldn’t care less about flowers or romantic gestures or fun excursions. He didn’t want to go out on dates or hold dinner parties. He didn’t want to talk to the women on the phone (why would he, when he had me?). He didn’t really want to spend any time with them. He needed to protect his time, for writing and mulling, for reading and pondering. He needed space and sovereignty, not be tied down with commitments and compromises. He needed women only to slake the periodic biological urge. In other words, the last thing he wanted was a girlfriend or a wife, though he could do with a mistress or a married lover, but, barring that, he would settle for a prostitute, which he still employed on occasion.

He had solicited one not too long ago from the escort pages of the Boston Phoenix. “You know, you should watch out,” I said. “They’re cracking down on johns these days.”

“It’s so stupid and hypocritical. Everyone pays for sex in one form or another, marriage being the most common and extortionate. It’s all about money. All these laws are designed to oppress women so they can’t take control of the industry and get their fair share. It’s so parochial and anti-feminist, not to mention inconvenient for people like me.”

“Somehow I’ve never thought of you as a feminist.”

“I am, at heart. I’m an equal-opportunity asshole. But you,” Joshua said, “you’d never hire a hooker, would you? Because you believe the concept of love is real and attainable and not merely a myth perpetrated by religious demagogues and prohibitionists and crypto-fascist conglomerates.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then, if you have to go down this path of felo-de-se, at least do one thing.”

“What?”

“Look around you.”

From our perch in Cafe Mami, I looked at all the young, attractive Asian women in the Porter Square Exchange, milling through the passageway to eat at the sushi bar or the ramen place, to buy bubble tea from Tapicha or pastries from Japonaise or cosmetics from the Shiseido kiosk.

“Why can’t you just go out with a nice Asian girl?” Joshua asked me.

I had tried. My parents had set me up on a few blind dates, daughters of friends or friends of friends from their Garden Grove church, Korean girls purportedly seeking a nice Korean boy from a good Korean family. By and large, they turned out to be typical KAPs — Korean American Princesses. Stuck up, superficial, very high-maintenance. They had salon hairdos, wore heavy makeup, and dressed to the nines in designer clothes, especially prizing Gucci and Louis Vuitton handbags. They expected me to take them to dinner at Biba or Blue Ginger, Mistral or Clio, Maison Robert or No. 9 Park, then go clubbing at Aria, followed by a nightcap at Sonsie, and pay for everything. They were disappointed I didn’t wear a suit — Prada, Armani, Joseph Abboud, or at least Zegna. They were bewildered I didn’t own a car — a Benz or a Beemer, or at least a Lexus. They were flummoxed most of all by my career.

“I’m working for Palaver magazine and teaching adjunct at Walden right now.”

“Is there much money in that?”

“No, but I’m trying to become a writer.”

“What kind of writer?”

“Fiction. Short stories. Novels.”

“Is there much money in that?”

“No. Not in the type of books I’m interested in writing.”

“But — I don’t get it — what would be the point, then?”

Joshua chewed on his tonkatsu curry, and I munched on my yaki donburi, thinly sliced beef with onions and bean sprouts served over rice.

“Those girls were civilians,” he said. “What can you expect from civilians? Of any color? They can’t understand. They see an unremittingly sad film, and they think it’s depressing, whereas we’re fucking enthralled, because the catharsis for us is in witnessing great art, seeing the undiluted truth, in the shared recognition that life is pain. You need to go out with an artist. An Asian artist.”

“You find me a nice Asian artist,” I said, “and I will.”

Later that summer, Joshua told me to come over to his house, he had a little surprise for me. He opened the front door and introduced me to his new roommate — Jessica Tsai.

I broke the lease to my basement apartment in the Back Bay and moved into the house on Walker Street.