The Collective (9 page)

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.”

Spring break came. Like most freshmen, I didn’t travel anywhere, and it was quiet on campus. We slept in and goofed around, not getting much done, in spite of our vows to catch up on our studies. The following week, we returned to classes and the dead doldrums of midsemester. It seemed that winter would never end, until, in mid-April, the snow slowly began to thaw, and then all of a sudden it was gone, and we celebrated at the annual Springfest, an all-day outdoor concert on Shaw Field. Impossible to believe, but we were nearing the end of our first year.

One of the last students to workshop a story in Intro to Creative Writing was a girl named Kathryn Newey. I didn’t know much about her—just that she was from outside Duluth, where her family, implausibly, owned a Christmas tree farm. She struck me as timid and odd. The entire semester, she had never joined in any of our discussions, even though class participation was twenty-five percent of the grade. The one time she had to speak, reciting her poem (a forgettable ballad about lake-effect snow), her voice was barely audible and warbled nervously, and she began hyperventilating. I worried she might faint. There was a rumor she had some sort of a heart problem, a pacemaker implanted in her chest.

Her short story was called “Water of Heaven.” It took place in a rural Chinese village in the eastern province of Shandong during the Cultural Revolution. The central character was a fifteen-year-old girl named Meihui who lived on a farm collective and worked in a boot factory, where, one day, she was raped by a party official’s son. Against her family’s wishes, she reported the rape, and instead of persecuting the rapist, the Revolutionary Committee censured Meihui, forcing her to say she had lied and shaving off her hair at a public denunciation in the village square.

I thought it extremely peculiar that this dowdy girl from Duluth would choose China as a setting, but I couldn’t help admiring the story. All the historical and panoramic details seemed authentic: the grim descriptions of the living and working conditions, the corruption and cruelty of the officials, the strictures of Chinese family and village life, the allusions to mysticism and folklore. There were even Chinese words and proverbs sprinkled throughout the piece. Kathryn Newey somehow seemed to know this world, inhabit it. Moreover, the story, despite its overwrought elements, was gripping and emotional.

“I thought this was stunning,” Tyson said.

“Gorgeous,” Cory said. “I loved how carried away I was into life in this village.”

“It was really touching,” Megan said. “I cried when I got to the end.”

“I have to agree,” I said, then quickly added, “although I didn’t cry”—which got a laugh—“but I was surprised by how moved I was.”

The plaudits kept coming—unanimous and lavish—until Joshua said, “I guess I’ll have to be the lone dissenter here.”

“Yes?” Peter said.

I hadn’t had a chance to talk to Joshua about the story before class. We’d gotten copies two days before, but, as usual, didn’t peruse them until the last minute. I knew he would have qualms with certain sections of the story, which was hammy and purplish in spots, but naively I assumed he would give Kathryn Newey credit for exploring an Asian society so convincingly, and that he might even consider it a tribute.

“I thought this was fatuous and interminable,” he said. “It’s contrived and melodramatic and bogus in every respect. I found it completely offensive.”

We were used to Joshua’s provocations, but this sort of wholesale condemnation was unlike him. A zinger or two notwithstanding, he generally played along with Peter’s entreaties to be diplomatic and constructive.

Peter, who was leaning against the lip of his desk, shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I wouldn’t—”

“Offensive to my aesthetic sensibilities, and, above all, offensive to me, personally, as an Asian. This author,” Joshua said, “had no right writing a story about China.”

“Why not?” someone blurted.

I turned around, and was startled to see that Kathryn Newey had asked the question, and she was not quaking or palpitating, about to swoon. She was livid.

Peter cautioned, “Let’s remember our rule about the author not being allowed to—”

“Why can’t I write about China?” she asked.

“Have you looked in a mirror lately?” Joshua said.

“I’m Caucasian, so I can’t write about Chinese people?”

“Ah, clarity begins to beckon.”