Don Lee - The Collective

“No?” Joshua said. “Look at this. ‘Her long, lustrous blue-black hair,’ ‘her deep, fathomless almond-shaped eyes,’ ‘her neck, delicate as a swan’s.’ Those aren’t stereotypes? What’s sacrificed in their stead? Oh, I don’t know — originality, wit, genuine emotion, one or two other things. It wouldn’t be as egregious if, at the very least, your prose weren’t so atrocious. It’s almost laughable, how bad it is. I’ve never read so many insipid clichés. This has all the craft and profundity of a romance novel. Maybe that’s being too generous, an insult to romance novels.”

“That’s so unfair!”

“Your story is a maudlin, lugubrious, exploitative piece of tripe.”

“You’re a racist,” Kathryn Newey said.

“ I’m a racist? That’s quite a spin.”

“An asshole,” she said, eyes watery with rage.

Joshua smiled. “Now you’re talking, sister.”

After class, Joshua said to me, “You agree with me, don’t you?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know if I did or not.

I discussed it with Jessica in the Field House. Recently we’d taken to jogging outside, but it was raining that afternoon, and I preferred the treadmills, anyway. It felt more intimate, being side by side with Jessica like this, being able to chat.

“Joshua is an asshole,” she said. “And a racist. One of these days, someone’s going to pop him one. Tyson Wallafer’s in that class, isn’t he?”

“Yeah. Why?” I had never given much thought to Tyson — a nice enough kid, not handsome, not ugly, not smart, not dumb, just average in every respect.

“He’s Kathryn’s boyfriend. Didn’t you know? He lives in Dupre, the floor below us. She’s always hanging around there. It’s not a secret or anything.”

It had never occurred to me that Tyson and Kathryn Newey might be a couple. They sat next to each other in class, but I had never noticed any signs of affection. “I had her pegged as a spinster till the day she died.”

“Was her story that bad?” Jessica asked.

“I thought it was good, actually, but now I’m not so sure. I’m starting to doubt my ability to judge. The things Joshua pointed out, I have to admit, they were pretty hokey, but I don’t know — I think she deserved better.”

“It’s a stupid argument, Joshua’s.”

“Do you think, as an Asian American artist, you should have Asian themes in all of your work? That it’d be a betrayal not to?”

“Is that something else Joshua told you? He’s fucking whacked. You need to stop listening to him.”

She had complained to me recently that I had started talking (and growing a goatee, in addition to smoking occasionally) exactly like Joshua, but she, too, had picked up on some of his mannerisms, particularly his use of profanity. “You’re doing exactly that in your drawings,” I told her.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Coincidence,” she said. “Art should not be a polemic.”

I was confounded. The political context of her drawings was obviously more than coincidental, and I couldn’t understand how she could deny it so baldly. “That’s a total contradiction.”

“No, it’s not.”

She had been working with ink on paper this semester, and her newest project was a series on Mao. The largest piece measured four-by-three feet and was an adaptation of Zhang Zhenshi’s famous portrait of the Communist leader. Seen from afar, the contours of his face appeared to be composed like a topological map, with ragged, pixilated lines and blobs. But the drawing drew you in, and, looking closely, you could see that the lines and blobs were actually made up of infinitesimally tiny, intricately etched tanks and ships and cannons and soldiers, thousands of them. It was fiendishly elaborate, painstakingly detailed. You could make out the facial features on the soldiers, the threaded hilts of their bayonets. The hours, the dedication, the obsessiveness that must have been required to do this was breathtaking. Staggering. But you walked away not so much with admiration for the artist as concern for her mental health.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m starting to think all art is political, whether you intend it to be or not.”

“I still say Joshua’s full of shit,” she told me. “His story, yeah, everything was well done”—I had lent her my copy to read—“but a poor Korean merchant and his kid in postwar Seoul — has Joshua even been to Seoul? He’s from Pusan, right? What the hell does he know? He’s so assimilated, he’s no more Korean than I am now.”

“It could be that he’s just fucking with us. Maybe he’s not serious about any of this. Sometimes I get the feeling he does things just to get a rise out of us.”

“It’s easy being outrageous. Much harder to offer real meaning.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead and glanced at herself in the mirrors that lined the wall. “Do you think I got fat? Loki told me I got fat.”

Like the rest of us, she had not been immune to the freshman fifteen, but the extra weight, just five or seven pounds, became her. More filled out, curvier. She was wearing green sweatpants, rolled at the waist, and a T-shirt with the midriff cut off, exposing that lovely swale on the small of her back. “You look good,” I said.

I still carried a little torch for Jessica, although her relationship with Loki Somerset seemed more secure than ever. During spring break, she had finally introduced him to her parents, and she had been both pleased and stumped by how welcoming they were to him, particularly after he began speaking to them in Mandarin.

“You know, maybe Loki and Kathryn ought to get together,” I said. “They could geek out in Chinese.”

“That rice-chaser comment still burns me,” Jessica said. “Fucking Joshua.”

I had let that comment slip. I considered myself a discreet person, yet it was sometimes difficult for me not to let a few things leak. I was in an awkward position, being between Joshua and Jessica. From time to time, each would criticize the other, and they would make me promise to keep it private, but did they really expect such things to remain submerged? Frequently I felt that these confidences were a sneaky stratagem, ensuring that their scorn would be conveyed, but allowing them to avoid confrontation. We were friends, we were the three amigos, the 3AC, yet occasionally I wondered if we even liked each other.

On each dorm-room door was a small chalkboard for messages. The Saturday morning before finals week, we arose to find communiqués scrawled on all three of our boards. Joshua’s read GOOK PIG. Mine read DINK WEENIE. Jessica’s read CHINK COIN SLOT.

First the RA came. Then the Dupre Hall director. Then the residential life director. Then the dean of students, Bob Nordquist. They each looked at the chalkboards, pursed their lips, and shook their heads mournfully. At another college, this might have been dismissed as a regrettable yet relatively minor act of vandalism. But not here. At Mac, this was sacrilege. This was the worst kind of profanation, an affront to every belief held dear. Nordquist asked the residential life director to have a custodian wash the boards clean, making sure no remnants were visible.