The Collective (10 page)

“What about Pearl S. Buck? She won the Pulitzer for The Good Earth. She got the Nobel Prize.”

“Yeah, interesting, isn’t it? They’ll give the Pulitzer to a white woman for a novel about Asians, but no Asian American novelist has ever won a Pulitzer.”

“Isn’t writing supposed to be about imagining other people’s lives?” Kathryn Newey said. “Isn’t that the whole point?”

“Not when you do it by exploiting another race. Not when you romanticize or commodify the Other. I mean, come on, the humble village peasants, the despicable commie officials—could you be more patronizing? You’re stealing what you want from another people’s culture and not respecting their right to tell their own stories.”

“This could be a fascinating topic for discussion,” Peter said, trying to regain control of the class, “but why don’t we table it for—”

“Do you honestly think you have one clue what it’s like to be Chinese?” Joshua asked.

“I’ve been to China!” Kathryn Newey said. “I spent two summers there. I know Mandarin.”

“And that gives you license? So you spent a couple of summers there. So what? You were a tourist. You only saw the culture from a position of white privilege.”

“My grandfather was born in Shanghai. His parents were Presbyterian missionaries there.”

“Missionaries are just religious colonialists.”

“They are not! We’ve always loved the Chinese. We respect everything about the Chinese.”

“You’re just reinforcing stereotypes,” Joshua told her. “What you say you’re honoring, you are in fact mocking.”

“They aren’t stereotypes,” she said.

Pleadingly, she looked to Peter, but he was entirely unprepared for this kind of debate. Then she swiveled toward me. She knew that Joshua and I were friends, that I alone in the class, as the other Asian American, could intervene on her behalf, steer the tone of the discussion astern, just as Joshua had done for me. I glimpsed her thin, pale, beseeching face, and turned away.

“No?” Joshua said. “Look at this. ‘Her long, lustrous blue-black hair,’ ‘her deep, fathomless almond-shaped eyes,’ ‘her neck, delicate as a swan’s.’ Those aren’t stereotypes? What’s sacrificed in their stead? Oh, I don’t know—originality, wit, genuine emotion, one or two other things. It wouldn’t be as egregious if, at the very least, your prose weren’t so atrocious. It’s almost laughable, how bad it is. I’ve never read so many insipid clichés. This has all the craft and profundity of a romance novel. Maybe that’s being too generous, an insult to romance novels.”

“That’s so unfair!”

“Your story is a maudlin, lugubrious, exploitative piece of tripe.”

“You’re a racist,” Kathryn Newey said.

“I’m a racist? That’s quite a spin.”

“An asshole,” she said, eyes watery with rage.

Joshua smiled. “Now you’re talking, sister.”

After class, Joshua said to me, “You agree with me, don’t you?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know if I did or not.

I discussed it with Jessica in the Field House. Recently we’d taken to jogging outside, but it was raining that afternoon, and I preferred the treadmills, anyway. It felt more intimate, being side by side with Jessica like this, being able to chat.

“Joshua is an asshole,” she said. “And a racist. One of these days, someone’s going to pop him one. Tyson Wallafer’s in that class, isn’t he?”

“Yeah. Why?” I had never given much thought to Tyson—a nice enough kid, not handsome, not ugly, not smart, not dumb, just average in every respect.

“He’s Kathryn’s boyfriend. Didn’t you know? He lives in Dupre, the floor below us. She’s always hanging around there. It’s not a secret or anything.”

It had never occurred to me that Tyson and Kathryn Newey might be a couple. They sat next to each other in class, but I had never noticed any signs of affection. “I had her pegged as a spinster till the day she died.”

“Was her story that bad?” Jessica asked.

“I thought it was good, actually, but now I’m not so sure. I’m starting to doubt my ability to judge. The things Joshua pointed out, I have to admit, they were pretty hokey, but I don’t know—I think she deserved better.”

“It’s a stupid argument, Joshua’s.”

“Do you think, as an Asian American artist, you should have Asian themes in all of your work? That it’d be a betrayal not to?”

“Is that something else Joshua told you? He’s fucking whacked. You need to stop listening to him.”

She had complained to me recently that I had started talking (and growing a goatee, in addition to smoking occasionally) exactly like Joshua, but she, too, had picked up on some of his mannerisms, particularly his use of profanity. “You’re doing exactly that in your drawings,” I told her.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Coincidence,” she said. “Art should not be a polemic.”

I was confounded. The political context of her drawings was obviously more than coincidental, and I couldn’t understand how she could deny it so baldly. “That’s a total contradiction.”

“No, it’s not.”

She had been working with ink on paper this semester, and her newest project was a series on Mao. The largest piece measured four-by-three feet and was an adaptation of Zhang Zhenshi’s famous portrait of the Communist leader. Seen from afar, the contours of his face appeared to be composed like a topological map, with ragged, pixilated lines and blobs. But the drawing drew you in, and, looking closely, you could see that the lines and blobs were actually made up of infinitesimally tiny, intricately etched tanks and ships and cannons and soldiers, thousands of them. It was fiendishly elaborate, painstakingly detailed. You could make out the facial features on the soldiers, the threaded hilts of their bayonets. The hours, the dedication, the obsessiveness that must have been required to do this was breathtaking. Staggering. But you walked away not so much with admiration for the artist as concern for her mental health.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m starting to think all art is political, whether you intend it to be or not.”

“I still say Joshua’s full of shit,” she told me. “His story, yeah, everything was well done”—I had lent her my copy to read—“but a poor Korean merchant and his kid in postwar Seoul—has Joshua even been to Seoul? He’s from Pusan, right? What the hell does he know? He’s so assimilated, he’s no more Korean than I am now.”

“It could be that he’s just fucking with us. Maybe he’s not serious about any of this. Sometimes I get the feeling he does things just to get a rise out of us.”

“It’s easy being outrageous. Much harder to offer real meaning.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead and glanced at herself in the mirrors that lined the wall. “Do you think I got fat? Loki told me I got fat.”

Like the rest of us, she had not been immune to the freshman fifteen, but the extra weight, just five or seven pounds, became her. More filled out, curvier. She was wearing green sweatpants, rolled at the waist, and a T-shirt with the midriff cut off, exposing that lovely swale on the small of her back. “You look good,” I said.

I still carried a little torch for Jessica, although her relationship with Loki Somerset seemed more secure than ever. During spring break, she had finally introduced him to her parents, and she had been both pleased and stumped by how welcoming they were to him, particularly after he began speaking to them in Mandarin.

“You know, maybe Loki and Kathryn ought to get together,” I said. “They could geek out in Chinese.”

“That rice-chaser comment still burns me,” Jessica said. “Fucking Joshua.”

I had let that comment slip. I considered myself a discreet person, yet it was sometimes difficult for me not to let a few things leak. I was in an awkward position, being between Joshua and Jessica. From time to time, each would criticize the other, and they would make me promise to keep it private, but did they really expect such things to remain submerged? Frequently I felt that these confidences were a sneaky stratagem, ensuring that their scorn would be conveyed, but allowing them to avoid confrontation. We were friends, we were the three amigos, the 3AC, yet occasionally I wondered if we even liked each other.

On each dorm-room door was a small chalkboard for messages. The Saturday morning before finals week, we arose to find communiqués scrawled on all three of our boards. Joshua’s read GOOK PIG. Mine read DINK WEENIE. Jessica’s read CHINK COIN SLOT.

First the RA came. Then the Dupre Hall director. Then the residential life director. Then the dean of students, Bob Nordquist. They each looked at the chalkboards, pursed their lips, and shook their heads mournfully. At another college, this might have been dismissed as a regrettable yet relatively minor act of vandalism. But not here. At Mac, this was sacrilege. This was the worst kind of profanation, an affront to every belief held dear. Nordquist asked the residential life director to have a custodian wash the boards clean, making sure no remnants were visible.

“Wait a minute,” Joshua said. “What about fingerprints?”

“Pardon?” Nordquist said.

“You’re not going to call the St. Paul police?”

“Why don’t we talk about this.”

We sequestered ourselves in Jessica’s room, just the four of us. “I’m so sorry this has happened to you,” Nordquist said. “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry. We’re a college that respects each other’s differences, that’s committed to tolerance and understanding. When something like this happens, it’s an attack on our entire community.”

We were all standing, huddled in a cramped circle. For a moment, Nordquist was distracted, looking over our heads at Jessica’s sketches, drawings, watercolors, and oils pinned to the walls. He had wavy reddish blond hair and rimless eyeglasses, and he was dressed neatly in a mango-orange Mac polo shirt and pressed khakis. “These are very good,” he said to Jessica.

“Thank you,” she said tentatively.

“My immediate concern is the three of you. I want you to know, we’ll do everything within our power to meet your every need.” He told us that if we felt threatened and wanted safety escorts, even round-the-clock security, they would accommodate us. The head of Campus Security, the nurse and counselor from Health Services, the minority program director, the provost, the president—they would all come to visit us soon. “So will the chaplain, if you so wish. I don’t know your spiritual affiliations.” He would talk to our teachers. If we wanted to leave campus right now and postpone our final assignments and exams, we’d be free to do so without academic penalty. They’d make special arrangements, and we could worry about the makeups later. “I’ll talk to your families as well, if you so wish. Our biggest concern is that you don’t suffer the aftereffects of this trauma any more than you have to. So my question to you at this point is, how do you want to proceed? You said you want to call the St. Paul police?”

“Damn straight,” Joshua said. “I want to find the son of a bitch who did this.”

“Let me assure you, we all do,” Nordquist said. “But in incidents like these in the past—”

“What incidents?” I asked. “Things like this have happened a lot?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘a lot,’ but unfortunately, yes, there have been a few in the twelve years I’ve been here.” He mentioned a noose found in the library, a swastika drawn on the wall outside Doty Hall, KKK painted on the dorm doors of several Japanese students, a hate-mail letter sent to a Native American student. “We all like to think of Mac as a perfect place, but the sad reality is, it’s not perfect. The measure of a community, however, is in how we respond to these situations. In some instances in the past, students wanted the incidents to go unreported.”

“You mean you covered it up,” Joshua said.

“It was entirely the students’ choice.”

Needless to say, Joshua’s inclination was to distrust all authority figures. I wasn’t of the same mind back then, at least when it came to the administrators at Mac. Nordquist might have had a tendency to pontificate, but he was an honorable man, I thought.

“We’ll do whatever you want us to do,” Nordquist said. “It’s completely up to you. But let me give you a couple of scenarios and gradations therein. The reason why some of those students chose not to go public was because they wanted their privacy protected. The last thing we want is for victims to feel they’re being revictimized. Conversely, going public could be an opportunity, a teachable moment, for the entire college. It could be a platform for us to recommit ourselves to our principles and values of tolerance and”—he searched for a word he hadn’t already used—“inclusion. We could open a campus dialogue on diversity.”

“What do you mean by ‘campus dialogue’?” Jessica asked.

“I’m not sure what could be done so close to the end of the term, but meetings, forums, perhaps a convocation in Weyerhaeuser Chapel.”

If we decided to go public, he said, they would post flyers on every bulletin board on campus, describing the incident and asking anyone with information to come forward. They would not reveal our names, and they could—“if you so wish”—describe the epithets in nonspecific language to keep our ethnicity hidden.

“We’re different ethnicities,” Joshua said. “Korean and Taiwanese. You mean race.”

“Yes. I’m sorry,” Nordquist said.

After the flyers, articles would appear in the Mac Weekly, the student paper, and perhaps, especially if we involved the police, in the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune, the St. Paul and Minneapolis dailies.

“So I need for you to decide,” Nordquist said. “How do you feel about all of this? What do you want to do? It’s a big decision. These sorts of things tend to have larger ramifications than you can imagine. They can gain a certain traction or momentum.”

He left us alone to ruminate, telling us to call him at his office once we’d reached a decision.

“We’re all in agreement here, right?” Joshua said. “We go public.”

“I don’t know,” Jessica said.

“I don’t, either.”

“Why the fuck not? We can’t let this racist bullshit stand, man.”

“It’s not such a big deal,” Jessica said. “I’ve been called worse. I don’t want this thing to become a carnival act.”

I felt the same way. I could imagine the hysteria that would surely erupt, the overkill of political correctness. I could imagine the pitying looks, everyone expressing their sympathy and outrage, the teachins and speak-outs, the candlelight vigils and songs of unity, worst of all the convocation in Weyerhaeuser Chapel, having to speak in front of four, five hundred people.