The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  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 peopl
e 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.”

  7

  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.