Don Lee - The Collective

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.”

“What about Pearl S. Buck? She won the Pulitzer for The Good Earth . She got the Nobel Prize.”

“Yeah, interesting, isn’t it? They’ll give the Pulitzer to a white woman for a novel about Asians, but no Asian American novelist has ever won a Pulitzer.”

“Isn’t writing supposed to be about imagining other people’s lives?” Kathryn Newey said. “Isn’t that the whole point?”

“Not when you do it by exploiting another race. Not when you romanticize or commodify the Other. I mean, come on, the humble village peasants, the despicable commie officials — could you be more patronizing? You’re stealing what you want from another people’s culture and not respecting their right to tell their own stories.”

“This could be a fascinating topic for discussion,” Peter said, trying to regain control of the class, “but why don’t we table it for—”

“Do you honestly think you have one clue what it’s like to be Chinese?” Joshua asked.

“I’ve been to China!” Kathryn Newey said. “I spent two summers there. I know Mandarin.”

“And that gives you license? So you spent a couple of summers there. So what? You were a tourist. You only saw the culture from a position of white privilege.”

“My grandfather was born in Shanghai. His parents were Presbyterian missionaries there.”

“Missionaries are just religious colonialists.”

“They are not! We’ve always loved the Chinese. We respect everything about the Chinese.”

“You’re just reinforcing stereotypes,” Joshua told her. “What you say you’re honoring, you are in fact mocking.”

“They aren’t stereotypes,” she said.

Pleadingly, she looked to Peter, but he was entirely unprepared for this kind of debate. Then she swiveled toward me. She knew that Joshua and I were friends, that I alone in the class, as the other Asian American, could intervene on her behalf, steer the tone of the discussion astern, just as Joshua had done for me. I glimpsed her thin, pale, beseeching face, and turned away.