Don Lee - The Collective

My father, Andrew, came, strictly speaking, from peasant stock, and it had apparently taken a herculean effort to convince my mother and her family that he was worthy of her. My grandfather had been among the first wave of Korean immigrants, recruited as laborers for sugar plantations in Hawaii. Later, he became the manager of a small Brussels sprouts farm in Rosarita Bay, California. My father was the last of three children to be born, but the first to go to college, at UCLA. He met my mother at a social in Koreatown, and thereafter, almost daily, drove the twenty-five miles between campus and Monterey Park on the pretext of mailing a letter or needing stamps, claiming he was, just by chance, in the neighborhood, in order to see my mother at the post office where she worked.

“You sure mail a lot of letters,” she once said. She invariably weighed each envelope and checked the zip code (which, perplexingly, always needed to be corrected) before stamping the postmark, stalling their time together.

“I like writing letters.”

“Pen pals?”

“They’re friends. People I met in my travels.”

“You’ve been to Kalamazoo, Michigan? Weeki Wachee, Florida? Eros, Louisiana?”

He blushed red. He hadn’t intended the double entendre of the last address. He had never been to any of these places, had never journeyed outside of California. He picked the cities randomly from a road atlas and fabricated the names of the recipients and the street addresses. All the envelopes contained blank sheets of paper and were, in due course, returned to sender. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a beautiful country, if you have the time to explore it properly.”

“Lucky man,” she told him.

I’m thankful that, during that first Christmas home from Macalester, I began to thaw toward my mother and initiate a long-overdue détente, although my behavior could hardly have been called angelic. I could still be unforgivably judgmental, condescending, and pissy, and for that, I blamed Didi.

Joshua, in addition to his lists, had given me a calling card number and code, ostensibly to report my impressions of the recommended books and records to him. The number, he told me, was a covert account that was charged to the FBI, which I never verified yet which terrified me for years, thinking I might be arrested retroactively for interstate fraud. However, that December and January I used it with impunity to phone Didi every day, and what distressed me, each time I called, was that she was not as miserable as I was.

“Doesn’t everyone seem like a stranger to you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, nothing’s really changed, but we’ve changed. Don’t you see the hypocrisy and futility of everything all of a sudden? Like, it was there all along, but now that we’ve been away, now that our eyes have been opened vis-à-vis what we’ve been studying and discussing, it’s blatantly obvious just how sad and empty everything is, the bourgeois vapidity of everything that surrounds us.” I was cribbing a few of Joshua’s expressions. “Like, the people who used to be our friends — I mean, I get so bored talking to them. They’re going to end up just like their parents— our parents. Do they ever think about anything other than money? There’s this inertial deadness that’s pulling everyone down. I mean, they should all just shoot themselves right now and get it over with. Why even bother? Doesn’t it seem like that to you?”

“Not really.”

“It’s like Pynchon says: entropy reigns supreme.”

“What?”

“It’s the heat-death of culture.”

“Eric,” Didi said, “have you been smoking dope?”

I wished I did have some dope. Didi seemed so happy . Each phone call, there was a bustle of jocularity, gaiety, in the background, people talking and cackling — a party every minute, it seemed. Didi was always distracted, continually interrupted. “What’s going on there?” I’d ask.

“Oh, it’s just my family,” she’d say. She had three sisters and a brother, a plethora of aunts, uncles, and cousins.

In contrast, my house in Mission Viejo was marked by an unearthly silence. My father would come home from work in his short-sleeved white dress shirt and clip-on tie, fix himself a bourbon and Sprite, and read the newspaper before the three of us sat down to dinner, during which no one would utter a word. I’d look at my father as he cut into my mother’s chicken cacciatore (her stab at Western food, made with Campbell’s tomato soup, yet admittedly tasty), and I’d try to recall any advice he had ever imparted to me, father-to-son, any statement of profundity or wisdom, even a bad joke, and I’d come up with zilch. After we finished eating, I’d help my mother with the dishes, and then they’d go to the den to watch TV while I went to my bedroom, from which I could hear purls of canned laugh tracks, but never my parents’ own laughter. Not a titter.

Even when my sister visited, the decibel level barely wavered. Rebecca had graduated from Whittier College — Richard Nixon’s alma mater — with a business degree and gotten a job at First Federal Savings & Loan in Hacienda Heights, processing mortgage applications. She was renting a one-bedroom apartment in West Covina and had a Chinese American boyfriend who was in dental school. It was about as dull a life as I could imagine. My father and mother approved of it wholeheartedly.

Parents believe they have such an impact on their children’s lives, yet I knew, from the moment I had set foot on Mac’s campus, that I’d become a different person, unfettered from whatever gravitational influence they had tried to extend. I’d moved beyond them. They only served now as proscriptive examples.

One afternoon, while my mother slipped freshly laundered, neatly folded briefs into my chest of drawers, I asked her, “Why don’t we have any books in the house?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you read to me as a kid?”

“That’s what school is for. Do you want something to eat?”

“How come you never sang any lullabies to me?”

“What?”

“It’s like I was in a coffin of sterility and cultural deprivation, growing up.”

She stared at me, baffled. “Maybe you should get out of the house. Do something.”

I drove to Laguna Beach and walked up the pathway bordering the ocean to Heisler Park. It was a weekday, but there were plenty of people about, playing volleyball, basketball, jogging, rollerblading. I passed by a group of twenty or so adults of various ages, sitting in a circle on the grass, and I caught a snippet of what was being said. Only in California would they hold, outside like this beside a beach, in full view and earshot of the public, an AA meeting.

What I mainly noticed, though, and what made me ache, were all the couples. They seemed to be everywhere, cuddling on benches, spooning on towels, strolling with arms encircling each other, all smiling goofily, brazenly in love. They repulsed me. I despised them, because I knew now the full range of things that couples did behind closed doors, and I was beginning to suspect that Didi might be doing those things with someone else. I wondered if she had lied to me that first night in my dorm room: perhaps she had had another date after all.

She did not love me — not like I loved her. How else to explain the fact that she did not seem to miss me one iota, that more and more she wasn’t home in Chestnut Hill when she said she would be, and then did not return my messages right away?

“Where were you tonight?” I asked.

“Oh, we went to see a movie in Cleveland Circle.”

“Where?” I wasn’t familiar with the geography of Massachusetts. As far as I knew, she could have flown to Ohio for the day.