by Don Lee
The thought of giving up gains appeal. People might not change, but situations do. You’ve acquired different priorities, and inevitably some things must be left behind. Your parents always told you that life is about money, and you refused to believe them, but as you’ve gotten older, you’ve begun to reconsider. You wouldn’t mind a few bourgeois creature comforts, a new car, vacations, actually owning property instead of living in rented shitholes, and you start to admit that there is something to having money.
Would it be so shameful to give up? Of course you’d never admit to giving up. You’d say you’re continuing to toil, you’re making great progress, you’re almost finished. One by one, your friends begin dropping out. If they haven’t compromised themselves already, in their hearts they want to, because being true to one’s art, keeping the dream alive, is utterly exhausting.
What stops you is fear—fear that you’ll always see yourself as someone who couldn’t hack it, fear that you’ll become even more bitter than you already are, that you’ll always wonder what could have, should have, and would have happened if you’d kept at it a bit longer. Mainly, you’re afraid of abandoning the sole thing that makes you distinctive, your identity as a bohemian artist, that allows to you be blasé and condescending about your mindless service job or your soul-sapping position as an admin assistant in an office where everyone talks in acronyms.
I hung on for about five more years, until I was thirty-four, although I never finished my novella, never got a story published, never assembled enough material for a book manuscript. I withdrew my story, “The Unrequited,” from Palaver’s Fiction Discoveries issue at the last minute, when the issue was already in final galleys. I told Paviromo that I wanted to earn my first publication, not weasel my way into print through favoritism, and that he should publish Esther Xing’s story in its stead. I will confess that, at the time, I was pretty certain I could get “The Unrequited” taken elsewhere, but I was never able to. A pity, since it really was, as Jessica said, the only good story, the only honest story, I ever wrote. It was about my parents’ courtship, the months that my father went to the post office in Monterey Park to woo my mother, mailing blank letters to phantom recipients.
I stayed at Palaver for another year and a half to finish out the Lila Wallace program, then worked a series of freelance and temp jobs, doing everything from copyediting business articles to writing newsletters for a trade association of bus operators. Finally, in 2004, I accepted a full-time job in downtown Boston at Gilroy Prunier, a boutique marketing firm that catered to investment banks and financial services companies. My primary area of responsibility was direct marketing, i.e., direct mail. I wrote and edited the copy that went on letters, envelopes, slip-sheets, forms, brochures, and postcards.
Joshua told me I was squandering my talent. I was betraying our vow to be artists. I was no longer a believer. I had sold out.
In truth, I felt relieved.
We all moved out of the Walker Street house after Noklek immolated herself. How could we stay there, with the scorched wood on the deck, the soot whispers on the clapboards, the singed patches of grass? And the smell—the smell that could not have possibly lingered, yet that we imagined did.
When skin burns, the blood vessels below begin to dilate and weep. The skin bubbles and blisters. It chars and blackens. As flames eat through the flesh, raw tissue starts to appear. Fat is exposed, and it sizzles. There’s an awful odor. It’s like charcoal at first, not unpleasant, then quickly becomes putrid and vinegary, almost metallic, like copper liquefying. The hair is the worst—sulfurous—but then, mixed in there, there’s a queerly sweet scent, the searing of fat and tissue blossoming into a thick, greasy perfume.
Unlike the monk Thích Quang Đuc, who had remained silent and still while he burned, Noklek began screaming at once. She tried to stand, but her ankles and wrists were tied by the string, and she tumbled, knocking over the shrine and crashing against the side of the house and keeling back onto the deck. I grabbed her and rolled her on the grass in the backyard, using my own body to smother the flames, then, as she shrieked and writhed, I sprayed her with the garden hose until she passed out, steam rising from her flesh and what was left of the white silk robe.
I was burned on my hands, forearms, and chest, the dim scars of which I carry to this day, but of course they’re nothing compared to what Noklek had to endure. She spent over a year in Bigelow 13, the burn unit at Mass General, and in a rehabilitation center. She suffered second- and third-degree burns on sixty-five percent of her body and required agonized procedures of debridement and grafting. More than once it was questionable whether she would survive, in danger of sepsis, renal failure, and infection. I had saved her life, but what kind of life did I leave her? I sometimes wondered, in the brutal light of her pain and disfigurement, if it would have been more merciful to have let her die.
I never told anyone about my conversation with Barboza, which undoubtedly had provoked the police investigation into Pink Whistle. For once, instead of waffling in indecision, I had done something, just as Joshua had always exhorted me to do, and it had been the wrong thing. The guilt I feel over this will never abate, it cannot be absolved.
I couldn’t bring myself to visit Noklek in the hospital very much, as opposed to Joshua, who went to see her every day. He put the house on the market, rented an apartment in Beacon Hill, and paid for the entire cost of Noklek’s hospitalization. He still wanted to marry her (the assistant district attorney had dropped the prostitution charge, and the INS chose not to pursue her), but she said no, and as soon as she could, she left the U.S. for Thailand, where Joshua sent her international money orders for two years, until the envelopes started to get returned, forwarding address unknown.
The Walker Street house was sold at the height of the real estate boom. Joshua, however, did not invest the proceeds very wisely, putting a lot of it in tech stocks, which took a dive during the dot-com bust. He became an itinerant, going from one artists’ colony to another for extended residencies or accepting short-term visiting writer gigs at colleges, only reappearing in Boston for sojourns of one to six months. I missed him. Regardless of what I’d told him that horrible day, I was never really done with Joshua. We would remain friends, though it would be a changed friendship, less urgent, less pervasive, with an unspoken falseness that would stiffen with time, neither one of us able to overcome a niggling discomfort with each other.
He got the attention he wanted from the Fiction Discoveries issue—calls from several literary agents. He signed up with the most prominent one, and the agent sent out his novel for auction when he finished it, but puzzlingly there were no takers. In the end, just before his thirtieth birthday, they were able to sell the book to a small press, a prestigious house as far as noncommercial publishers went, but nonetheless it was a disappointment to him.
Upon the Shore was about the inhabitants of Cheju Island during the rebellion that began there in 1948 and resulted in the massacre of tens of thousands of people by the (U.S.-backed) Korean government. Almost universally, the novel engendered stellar reviews, even getting a half-page rave in the New York Times Book Review, yet not much else happened. No bestseller lists, no book prizes, no esteemed fellowships. Joshua complained that it was because he had been marginalized, dismissed, as an ethnic writer. There might have been some truth in this. One midwestern newspaper presumed he was a South Korean writer, that his book had been translated from Korean into English.
His second novel, The Base, was set in the 1970s and portrayed the Itaewon merchants, bargirls, and civilian workers who serviced the American soldiers on Yongsan Eighth Army base. His third novel, And I Will Be Here, was about a drug-addicted Korean American female poet in a wheelchair who was stalking her Cambridge neighbor. The critical reception was less glowing, often dwelling on how unlikable or unsympathetic his characters were (the first line of And I Will Be Here was: “Just so you know, I am a hateful person”), and neither book sold well. They weren’t crossin
g over. With all the screeds on racism, readers felt they were being preached to. He wasn’t connecting, even, with Asian Americans. The younger generation, he was baffled to discover, wasn’t interested in the subject of race.
To me, each book was more profound and lyrical than the last. All three were beautifully bleak, quietly heartrending. They deserved better. (For years, whenever I went into a bookstore, I would locate the spines of his latest novel, rearrange the shelf, and turn the copies of his book ninety degrees so the cover would face out. I still do that now, though more and more, I cannot find any of his books in stores.)
Obsessively Joshua checked the sales rankings for his novels online. He tortured himself by reading book industry blogs and Publishers Weekly, fulminating whenever he learned about a large advance that was being given to a pretty young white writer. He railed and brooded whenever a contemporary received a rhapsodic review or prize, especially when it pertained to one writer—“our nemesis,” he called her—Esther Xing, who was offered, after her story appeared in the Discoveries issue, a two-book deal from Knopf for a story collection and a novel. The latter, which had all white main characters, became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a first for an East Asian American writer.
The person from the 3AC who had the most success was Tina Nguyen, with her wall cuts. Annie Yoshikawa was also able to make a living from her large-format photographs, although she never reached the stature of Dijkstra or Lockhart. Leon Lee and Cindy Wong did fairly well, exhibiting their paintings regularly and teaching in an art school—a joint appointment they shared as a married couple until they divorced. Phil Sudo started an improvisational jazz band, Avant Garbage, then wrote a book called Zen Guitar and traveled around the country, giving motivational speeches about incorporating Zen philosophy into music, art, everyday life, and business. He died of stomach cancer at the age of thirty-five.
Jimmy Fung served his mandatory two-year sentence in state prison, MCI-Norfolk, then disappeared. I lost track of a lot of people. Jessica withdrew the malicious destruction complaint against Barboza, and, in kind, he dropped the obscenity complaint against her. She moved to San Francisco and then to L.A., and we kept in frequent touch for a while, but talk less now.
After our breakup, I never spoke to Mirielle Miyazato again, but occasionally I checked up on her on the Internet. She didn’t go to an MFA program in poetry. She became a research assistant at a think tank in D.C., then ended up in Miami, where she sold commercial real estate. A few years ago, she married the founder of a sustainable building company. High-res images of their wedding were online, posted by the photographer to market his services. Mirielle looked beautiful, ecstatic. More than once, I clicked through the album. In one photo, she was holding what might have been a wineglass, but I couldn’t be sure what was in it—possibly just water. Her husband was about her age, good-looking, stylish with his short dreads, Afro-Cuban American. Recently they had a baby, I read on her website. I’ve always regretted telling her that she was a bad person.
The last time I saw Joshua was in July 2008, two months before he killed himself, when I drove out to his rented cottage in Sudbury to say goodbye to him. I was leaving Cambridge for good—a relocation, a wholesale life change, that had come about swiftly.
“Unbelievable,” he said as I got out of my car. “You never got rid of your mayonnaise streak, did you?”
Two years earlier, I had gone to the Boston Athenaeum, the private library catty-corner from the State House. The Athenaeum was trying to recruit a younger membership, and they were hosting a mixer that day. These receptions, besides the draw of exceptional wine and hors d’oeuvres, had acquired a reputation as a meat market.
I was already a member. I often spent my lunch hour at the library, and that evening I had gone there after work to get a novel I wanted to reread, not knowing a mixer was being held. After checking the catalog, I wended through the crowd, past the busts of Petrarch and Dante, into the reading room with its leather chairs, vaulted ceiling, and arched windows. A woman was leaning against the very bookshelf I needed to access, listening to a fellow trying to chat her up.
She had an old-fashioned air about her, blond hair parted in the middle and tied into a thick ponytail that ran down her back, a vintage indigo dress with subtle white piping rather than the ubiquitous power suit. She wore little makeup, and had a narrow face.
I waited, not wanting to interrupt their conversation, but finally said, “Excuse me, could I reach behind you for a second?”
She looked at me blankly, then said, “You trying to find a book?”
“It’s supposed to be on that shelf. If I could—”
“I don’t think you understand the parameters here.”
“Sorry?”
“I saw a sign posted at the entrance. You didn’t see the sign?”
“Which sign?”
“The one that said no reading allowed. It was very explicit.”
She grinned slyly, and I knew then who she was. I hadn’t seen her in fourteen years. “I guess I was misinformed,” I said. “This isn’t a library?”
“Apparently not,” she said. “Which book?” She stepped aside, and I pulled out William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow from the shelf. “Oh, I’ve read that,” she told me.
“You have?”
“Sure, several times. My father went to elementary school with the author.”
“No kidding.”
“He said Billy was a smart kid, but kind of antisocial. The sort of kid who goes to cocktail parties and sits in a corner with a book.”
“I didn’t know elementary kids went to cocktail parties back then.”
“Astonishing, isn’t it?” she said. “A different era. They started them young.”
Her prospective suitor excused himself and retreated into the crowd.
“Do you think it was something I said?” she asked me.
“How have you been, Didi?”
I moved in with her less than a year later. “Why’d we break up at Mac again?” she asked. “I can’t remember.”
In many ways, it was as if she were an entirely different person. I remembered what Joshua had told me once, long ago—that Didi had no soul—but she was nothing like she’d been in college.
After Macalester, Didi had gone to Manhattan, working as a computer programmer for an insurance corporation before landing at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center. In 2000, she was transferred to Cantor’s Milan office, and the following year, all her friends and colleagues in New York died on 9/11. She quit Cantor, found a job at an Italian brokerage firm in Rome, met Alessandro Pacelli, the creative director of an ad agency, and almost immediately got pregnant by him. They had three children in quick succession, Matteo, Wyatt, and Finnea. Didi became a stay-at-home mom and was content, she thought, until she discovered that Alessandro had been sleeping with two different women, one of whom was their housekeeper. She fled to Chestnut Hill with the kids, and their divorce proceedings, involving U.S. and Italian courts, were a contentious mess, Alessandro calling Didi all manner of Italian variants for bitch, his favorite being stronza, fucking bitch, saying she had never loved him, had trapped him by deliberately getting pregnant when she knew he’d never wanted children, which was supremely ironic, since ten months after they separated he had a son with one of the women he’d been fucking (not the housekeeper).
Didi got what she wanted, sole custody of the kids, bought a house in Huron Village, and then looked for a job, a formidable challenge since she had been out of the workforce for almost five years. At last, she was hired as a software engineer at Fidelity Investments, specializing in Web applications for their online brokerage program.
She was with the technology group, not on the investment side, so she wasn’t being yoked and pummeled by the upheavals in the market like the fund managers and portfolios analysts. Nonetheless, there had been two rounds of layoffs at Fidelity in the space of a year, and she was nervous. So was I. Everyone in the finan
cial sector—and in businesses like Gilroy Prunier that depended on it—was on tenterhooks in the spring of 2008. Then Fidelity announced that it was consolidating some of its operations, and Didi was presented with a transfer to the Research Triangle in North Carolina. We talked about it. I applied for a job in Fidelity’s marketing communications department down there, and was offered a position as a senior copywriter. I proposed to Didi. (We would join the circle of sixty percent of Mac grads who purportedly marry one another.) We were moving to Chapel Hill next week.
“I don’t get it,” Joshua said in his driveway. “Isn’t her father loaded?”
“We want to support ourselves.”
“But his money will always be there, won’t it? It’ll corrupt you eventually,” he said. “You’ll get emasculated by it.”
I chose not to remind Joshua that he’d had money himself, that he had never really had to work a day in his life.
I liked Didi’s parents, actually. Mr. O’Brien sometimes told me stories about his father, who had been the first in the family to immigrate to Boston from Ireland, and who, upon arrival, had been confronted with NINA signs: HELP WANTED—NO IRISH NEED APPLY. Mr. O’Brien thought the Irish and Koreans had more in common than any other ethnic groups: they shared a history of subjugation and divided homelands, they had violent tempers yet liked to carouse and sing, and they both drank like fish.