The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  “What?”

  “Have you buttered the muffin? Dipped the corn dog? Ridden the wiki wiki all the way to tuna town?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “Yeah? When?”

  “Eleventh grade.”

  “What was her name?” he asked, testing me.

  “Leigh Anne Wiatt.”

  “Ah, you see? I was right about you. A baekin. Addicted to mayonnaise.”

  “What’s a baekin?”

  “You’re such a banana,” he said—a.k.a. Twinkie, yellow on the outside, white on the inside. “It’s just disgraceful you don’t know Korean.”

  We had had this argument already. Like many third-generation Asian Americans, I had resisted learning Korean as a kid, not exactly ashamed of my ethnicity (though there was some of that), but wary of being defined solely by it. Unlike my sister, I didn’t take Korean lessons on Saturday mornings at the Garden Grove church my parents attended, and eventually I stopped going to services on Sundays as well. Most of my friends in Mission Viejo had been white or Chicano, and I was probably more familiar with Mexico’s culture and history than Korea’s.

  Joshua’s Korean, on the other hand, was quite passable. He had left Pusan at five, but in high school, when his memory of the language was beginning to dim, he retaught himself Korean with books and tapes. He also enrolled himself in Hebrew classes, much to the befuddlement of his atheist, anti-Zionist parents. He knew a lot about his homelands, was proud of his split (tripartite?) heritage. The Seoul Olympics were taking place during the start of our first semester, and, watching broadcasts, he rooted for the Koreans first and the Israelis second over the Americans. He called himself a “Kew,” and joked that Koreans and Jews had more in common than any other ethnic groups: they both begot a disproportionate number of classical musicians, both feared and were reviled by black people, and both tried to inundate Harvard with their progeny. He was always complaining he couldn’t find kimchi or a decent bagel in St. Paul.

  In many ways, our quick friendship was a surprise. In coming to Mac, I had thought my ethnicity might work in my favor, sort of as a reverse exoticism, a radical chicness, that would redound well, especially with the girls. I worried that hanging out with other Asian Americans would lessen my distinctiveness and I might be stereotyped. And the last thing I needed was someone constantly harping on me that I wasn’t Korean or Asian enough. But Joshua, for all his insistent Asianness, was, well, cool. He was putatively brilliant, always with a bon mot or clever rejoinder at the ready, he wanted to be a writer, and he seemed well versed in all manner of things to which I was not yet completely privy, like sex.

  “So,” he said in the study lounge, “was it serial mambo with this chick Leigh Anne, or was it a one-off?”

  “A one-off.”

  “She’s the only one you’ve ever schtupped?”

  “Yeah,” I said forlornly, and it almost had not counted. I’d barely had time to put on the condom and jab myself inside her (where the hell was the entrance?) before I had ejaculated. Little wonder Leigh Anne hadn’t seemed very interested in going out with me again.

  “You need to get cracking, old sport.”

  “I suppose you’ve had a lot of experience.”

  “You suppose right,” Joshua said, although I would learn later that he was lying, that at that moment he was still a virgin, on campus and otherwise.

  During the next few days, I became increasingly disconcerted every time I heard the Weyerhaeuser bell. The whole idea of it bothered me, that all these kids had already paired off and were rutting in their dorm rooms, and then broadcasting their new sexual status to the campus. Instead of a celebration, it seemed more like a taunt. To my ears, the bell began to acquire a competitive tenor, a challenge to join the initiated. It seemed, all of a sudden, imperative that I get laid and be able to ring that fucking bell myself.

  The first partner in flagrante delicto I considered was Jessica Tsai. My visceral attraction to her was somewhat mysterious to me, since, as Joshua had guessed, up to that point I had been almost exclusively partial to white girls, in particular blondes. Leigh Anne Wiatt, for example, had not been exceptionally pretty. It would have been fair to have described her as plain, verging on homely. Yet she had been blond.

  Jessica gave no indication she might be amenable to participating in my campaign. In fact, she was proving to be very elusive. I’d figured out her schedule—when she’d wake up, walk across Grand Avenue to her classes, when she’d be getting out and perhaps going to the library or the student center—and I tried to bump into her as often as possible.

  One Wednesday morning, I stepped out into the hallway of Dupre, holding my dopp kit, just as she was heading to the shower in her white silk bathrobe.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said.

  Jessica regarded me without expression. “How long you been working on that?” she said, then flipped her towel over her shoulder and brushed past me.

  Days—I’d been working on that line for days.

  I finally had a chance to corner her the next week, when I sat beside her on the bus to Dayton’s Bluff, where we were going to renovate a house for Habitat for Humanity. We’d just finished midterms, and we compared grades. She had received all A’s, and I’d gotten—typical for me, despite my prodigious efforts—mostly B-pluses.

  “How’d Joshua do?” she asked.

  “B-ish,” I said, which had shocked me until I found out that he sometimes did not hand in all of his assignments. He was bright, but lazy.

  I told Jessica I’d once asked Joshua why he hadn’t gone to Harvard. He didn’t even apply. With his off-the-chart SAT scores and as a legacy applicant, with his parents (one of whom was an alum) both professors there, he would have surely gotten in. “I thought I should learn some humility,” he’d told me, “mingle with the little people.”

  “Like us?” Jessica asked.

  “No doubt.”

  “He’s always had it so easy,” she said. “He’s been coddled. An only child, an adopted child. You know what my father did the day I was born? He sent out for applications to Harvard and Yale. He was crushed I didn’t get into an Ivy.”

  Her parents had immigrated to Flushing, New York, from Taiwan, and it took many years before her father’s English was proficient enough to pass the intensive three-part exam for his optometry license. In the meantime, he had slogged away as a lab technician at LensCrafters, and Jessica’s mother had worked in a Korean nail salon. Every day, they had reminded Jessica and her two younger sisters that they were in America for one purpose and one purpose only: so their children could attend the best universities in the world.

  Jessica had always loved drawing as a child, but until a junior high field trip to the Museum of Modern Art, she had never seen—experienced—real art in person. Thereafter, she kept returning to MoMA and venturing to other museums and galleries, not telling her parents that she was riding the No. 7 train by herself to look at paintings. By ninth grade, she knew, with a certainty and urgency she had never felt about anything before, that she wanted to be a painter, but she told no one. The following summer, her father relocated the family to Saratoga Springs, where he had bought an eyeglass shop. The move made Jessica heartsick, yet she told herself to be patient. She would be escaping to college in just a few years.

  She daydreamed about going to RISD or Pratt or the Art Institute of Chicago, but her parents, who had long-standing ambitions for her to become a doctor, would never have allowed it. She figured she could surreptitiously study art at one of the Ivies. That was her plan, but it was thwarted by an unexpected disaster: she bombed the SATs. Three times. All her prep work and practice tests aside, she had panic attacks each time she sat in the exam hall with the Scantrons and No. 2 pencils, and she could not, for the life of her, think. Although she graduated as her school’s valedictorian, she was rejected by all eight Ivy League colleges. Yet her parents still held out hope for an Ivy medical school, and they still believed J
essica would be a premed major at Mac, which explained why she was taking organic chemistry and cell biology her first semester.

  “My parents,” I told her, “still think I’m going to apply to law school. Why else would anyone be an English major? They’ve never really pushed me, though. Princeton was my idea.”

  “What’s your excuse for not getting in?”

  “Look at my midterm grades. I’m just not that smart.” All my life I had tried my best, but I had never been academically gifted, which contributed to my parents’ lowered expectations for me.

  “At least you know that,” Jessica said.

  “Do you think it was psychosomatic?”

  “What?”

  “The panic attacks. Maybe it was your mind trying to find a way out. Maybe you subconsciously wanted to fail.”

  “And join the ranks of Asian American underachievers, rare as they may be?”

  “It’s not such a bad thing. It’s kind of freeing.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I never wanted to be one of those kids, know what I mean?”

  I knew. The model minority. The Asian American nerds, goobers, spazzes, and lame-o’s, as Joshua would say. The nine-irons, bug eaters, and grinders, the panface Post-its and dim-sum tapeheads. One of the UFOs, the Ugly Fucking Orientals with their high-pitched hee-haw laughs and bowl haircuts and dweeby clothes, the obsessive-compulsive doofuses who poked at the bridge of their eyeglasses and twitch-blinked and read the fine print for everything and always followed the directions, the ping-pang ninnies who were so stultifyingly sincere, diffident, and straight, who wouldn’t recognize irony if it bit them on their no-asses, the wei-wei Hop Sings who perpetuated all the stereotypes and gave us, the Asian kids with some style and cool and fucking balls, a bad name. I never wanted to be one of those kids, either.

  The conversation on the bus changed things for us. Afterward, Jessica softened toward me, and we began to hang out more often. We had an understanding, it seemed, and I started to think there could be something between us.

  Joshua quickly quashed the thought. “You’re barking up the wrong twat,” he told me.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “She’s a yellow cab.”

  “A what?”

  “California slang for Asian chicks who’ll only date white guys.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “She’s got a haole boyfriend back home.”

  I had, stupidly, not considered this possibility. “How do you know?”

  “I asked her.”

  “The topic just came up?”

  “It’s some dude she went out with in high school named—I kid you not—Loki Somerset. He ended up staying in Saratoga and going to Skidmore.”

  “How come she’s never mentioned him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’s embarrassed. He’s fucking studying Chinese, man. He’s a rice chaser.”

  “A what?”

  “California slang for white dudes with a fetish for Asian chicks.”

  I was suspicious. I thought perhaps Joshua was interested in Jessica himself and had lobbed a verbal probe to see if there was any reciprocity. Jessica, trying to be kind, might have lied to Joshua, exaggerating the importance and currency of this high school romance. After all, how many of these adolescent relationships survived the separation of college? And perhaps Joshua, after being rebuffed, was now trying to derail my prospects with her.

  As we sat at a table for Amnesty International in front of the campus center, attempting to recruit new members, I asked Jessica, “Do you have a boyfriend back home?”

  “Joshua told you.”

  “Is it still going hot and heavy?”

  “ ‘Hot and heavy.’ That’s a quaint phrase,” she said. “Your language can be so old-fashioned sometimes. I hope that’s not indicative of your writing style—or, worse, your morality.”

  “You’re avoiding the question.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve had two boyfriends my entire life, neither of which my parents were ever aware of. What do I know about hot and heavy?”

  “You guys still writing to each other, talking on the phone?”

  “Some.”

  “I want to know something: Do you only like white guys?”

  “Joshua told you that? He is full of it. You know that thing he said in class? ‘What they lacked was testicularity’? You know where he got that? He stole it straight out of Franny and Zooey.”

  I thought it had sounded familiar, and later that afternoon I would go to the library and confirm that Joshua indeed had lifted the expression—uttered by Franny’s boyfriend, Lane, no less, that pompous little shithead—from page eleven of Salinger’s book.

  “Okay, so he’s not original all of the time,” I said. “But you have to give him credit. He says what’s on his mind. He doesn’t give a shit what people think of him.”

  “Are you kidding?” Jessica said. “That’s all he thinks about. He’s exactly like you.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You’re always trying to please everyone. You’re quick to adopt other people’s opinions, because you haven’t formed any of your own yet. You’re kind of like this empty vessel right now, a cipher, waiting to be filled up.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, stunned and insulted, while at the same time sensing she might be right about me.

  “It’s not irredeemable. You’ll grow out of it eventually.”

  “Like you’ll stand up to your parents someday?” I asked.

  “I never claimed I had any testicularity,” she told me.

  So I turned my attentions to Didi O’Brien, a freshman I’d met playing Ultimate Frisbee. I ran into her in the student union during Seventies Disco Night. There were themed dances nearly every month on campus, none of which Jessica or certainly Joshua would ever deign to attend. That night, as soon as I entered the lounge, Didi pulled me onto the floor for “That’s the Way (I Like It).”

  “You look fantastic!” I said. She was wearing a tangerine-orange minidress and white go-go boots.

  “You, too!” she shouted, admiring the powder-blue leisure suit I’d picked up at Goodwill.

  If possible, Didi was a worse dancer than I was, gawky and arrhythmic, yet wholly unselfconscious, which endeared her to me. We stayed on the floor for two more songs—“Dancing Queen” and “Cold as Ice”—and then coupled for a slow one, “Killing Me Softly.”

  “You’re kind of cute,” she murmured. She was drunk. We all were. The drinking age was twenty-one in Minnesota, but booze flowed freely in the dorms, and we always tanked up before going to the dances.

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” I said, nuzzling her. She was tall and gangly, with long legs and arms, big hands and feet, but she had a classical air about her, her face strongly angular yet alluring. She was blond, of course.

  A few days later, I asked her out to a movie that was playing at the Grandview, the theater half a mile from campus. They were showing Running on Empty, a new film starring River Phoenix as the son of two former Weather Underground–type radicals on the run from the FBI. I figured afterward I could ply Didi with what I had learned about the antiwar movement in my Vietnam class.

  But we didn’t end up staying until the end of the movie. Halfway through, I turned to her, and she to me. She was chomping on a piece of gum. I was about to ask if she wanted the rest of the popcorn, and as I opened my mouth she spontaneously spat her wad of gum right into it. Startled, I took a sharp intake of breath, which lodged the gum in my throat, and I started choking. Alarmed, Didi punched me in the solar plexus, which made me hawk the gum out, directly into the hair—a nesty brown bouffant—of the woman in front of us. Didi and I gasped, but when we realized the woman somehow had not noticed the new appendage that had been projectiled into her hairdo, we began giggling, which escalated into a paroxysm of near-pee-in-the-pants guffaws. We were kicked out of the theater.

  We went to Dunn Bros Coffee for cappuccinos and carrot cake, and talked
. Didi was from Massachusetts, Irish Catholic, and intended to major in math and computer science. Her father, like mine, was an engineer. He had grown up poor in Dorchester and gone to UMass Amherst and then had started a hugely successful company that specialized in hospital software systems. He expected Didi to work for him after she graduated.

  “Did you want to follow in his footsteps, or were you feeling forced?” I asked, thinking the story didn’t change much across ethnicities.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’m the only one of his kids with any facility in math. I actually like math.”

  “You don’t look like a math geek.”

  “What’s a math geek supposed to look like?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, “probably like me.”

  I walked her back to her dorm, Turck, and outside the front door we smooched a little, but it was all rather chaste, without presage of ardor. This might be a dead end, I thought.

  Nonetheless, the next Friday we joined a gang of students to go to the Sonic Youth concert at First Avenue, the club Prince had made famous. Macalester was in a quiet residential St. Paul neighborhood, miles from downtown Minneapolis, which usually required two buses and forty-five minutes to get to, but the school had decided to make a semi-sanctioned event of it, offering a couple of vans to transport us to the club, and we all eagerly piled into them, Joshua included.

  “This is Didi,” I told him.

  “Hey,” he said, barely registering her. “Fucking-A, how cool is this, huh? We’re finally getting off the goddamn reservation. First Ave! Sonic Youth!”

  I wasn’t all that familiar with Sonic Youth, or that entire classification of punk rock. Truth be told, before I came to Mac, my favorite musician—I’m ashamed to say—had been Billy Joel.

  Sonic Youth was touring for a new album, Daydream Nation, and Joshua ran through the song list, citing the allusions to Denis Johnson, Saul Bellow, Andy Warhol, and William Gibson. “It’s, like, a lit major’s wet dream,” Joshua said, laughing. “I mean, yeah, it’s the most mainstream, commercial thing they’ve ever done, and they’re going to get some flak for it for sure, but it’s still got its subcultural, seditious connotations, you know?”