Don Lee - The Collective

The question — so obvious, it was overlooked by everyone until the flyers were already posted on the bulletin boards — was not asked until the next afternoon, in Nordquist’s office: “Do you know of anyone who might’ve wanted to target the three of you?”

“Kathryn Newey,” Joshua said without hesitation.

As he recounted to Nordquist what had happened in the workshop, I wondered why I had not thought of her immediately. Subconsciously, I must have suspected her all along. Yet it had been more than a week since that class, and in the life of a college student, a week was an eternity, other matters promptly taking precedence: needing to finish Middlemarch and Howards End ; writing two term papers, the theses for which were eluding me; trying to arrange a summer job at Dutton’s Books in Brentwood, even though it would mean driving through two hours of traffic each way on the 405; and flirting with a sophomore named Amber, who said she might be in SoCal in July. There was also another factor. If it had indeed been Kathryn Newey, her sole object of ire should have been Joshua. Maybe me in addition, as a casualty of association, and because I had not defended her in class, but why include Jessica? It didn’t make sense.

“There had to have been more than one person,” Jessica said. “The handwriting on the boards doesn’t match. And there were two different types of chalk.”

None of us — not being artists like Jessica — had noticed the disparity in the white chalk or in the hastily scribbled, childlike block letters. We examined the three chalkboards, which had been unscrewed from the doors and ferried to Nordquist’s office, and saw that Jessica was right.

The likelihood of an accomplice abruptly changed things. This was racially motivated after all, not merely a personal vendetta between Joshua and Kathryn Newey. Jessica and I were implicated in this as much as he was. We had been targeted because we were Asian.

“Tyson Wallafer,” I said to Nordquist. “Her boyfriend. He must have been in on it, too.”

Everything proved anticlimactic. All the fuss I had dreaded, the protests and rallies, never materialized, because Kathryn Newey, once confronted, confessed. She had followed a progressive — a series of parties that moved from one off-campus house to another — and had gotten wasted on beer pong. It was the first time she had imbibed so much alcohol, she said. In the middle of the night, getting up to use the toilet on the third floor of Dupre, she had gone up the stairs and written GOOK PIG on Joshua’s door in a foolish, drunken moment of spontaneity.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Joshua said. Yes, he had, but then I wondered why he hadn’t accused her from the start. Why had he waited until the incident was made public?

Kathryn Newey would not, however, own up to writing the slurs on the other two chalkboards, and neither would Tyson Wallafer. He vehemently denied any complicity. He said he had passed out once he and Kathryn returned to Dupre from the progressive, and didn’t realize anything was amiss until the flyers were put up. His own brother back home in St. Cloud was a KAD, a Korean adoptee (before then, I had not heard of the acronym, nor did I know that Minnesota had one of the largest populations of KADs of any state). He would never, ever consider doing such a horrible thing to another Asian American, he told Nordquist, and then he had cried.

Nordquist negotiated a settlement. Kathryn Newey agreed to apologize to Joshua in person, write a statement admitting she had been drinking and had put the slur on his board, and submit a signed apology to him and to the entire community for publication in the Mac Weekly . She would be suspended for one semester and, to be considered for readmission, would have to enroll in a racial sensitivity course, attend AA meetings, and receive treatment from a therapist.

In the agreement were also stipulations that the school would amend its student handbook, adding penalties and procedures for hate incidents, and create a racial harassment committee. There were also pledges that, sometime in the future, Mac would institute diversity awareness workshops for all incoming freshmen, establish a multiculturalism center, and make an ethnic studies course a core requirement.

In exchange, we all consented, with our signatures, that we wished to resolve the matter without litigation or any further proceedings.

It was important, what we did, I feel now. We made the right decision, and a lot of good came out of it — a perforation in the parchment. The following year, despite my apprehensions, I joined Joshua and Jessica on the twenty-seven-member racial harassment committee, and I participated in a few forums.

Kathryn Newey never returned to Mac. She transferred to Winona State University, I heard. I don’t know what became of her, how much the incident altered the course of her life, although it must have. Winona State was not Macalester. The notation of a suspension on her academic record must have made it difficult for her to get into a better school, or to go on for a graduate degree, if that had been her plan. She was, I’m sure, bitter and depressed. She might have spent the rest of her days working on her family’s Christmas tree farm in Duluth, ruing the unfairness of her fate. Or maybe she wasn’t much affected at all, and, wherever she is, she’s fulfilled, Mac a distant and negligible memory.

In retrospect, I think we killed a promising literary career in the making — maybe not as a serious fiction writer, but possibly as a commercial novelist. She had had incipient talent as a storyteller, certainly more than I did at that juncture. I could have stood up for her during workshop and precluded all the ensuing events, but I did not. Sometimes I feel guilty about it. Just as often, I acquit myself. She was not, after all, altogether innocent. Maybe she was a racist. Maybe her story was, at its roots, patronizing and exploitative.

No evidence was ever found to connect her, Tyson Wallafer, or anyone else to the other slurs. Of course, then, after a while I began to speculate that Joshua had fabricated them. Perhaps he had heard Kathryn Newey bumping against his door that night and, after discovering what she had written, had shuffled down the hall, found a piece of chalk, and inscribed the epithets on our chalkboards. It was, given the lack of alternatives, the likeliest explanation. Maybe his intentions were even noble, albeit manipulative and perverse: to incite our ethnic pride and stir our ideological passions. Joshua would refute any suggestion of chicanery to his grave. But I always thought, and still do, that it would have been very much like him, doing something like that, in order to bind us together.

The 3AC did not become a formal organization until 1998. After Macalester, we scattered to different parts of the country, all for our graduate degrees. Joshua received a scholarship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he became Frank Conroy’s darling. Afterward, he landed another coveted sinecure, the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, then was given a Jones Lectureship, a cushy teaching gig that allowed him to stay in Palo Alto.

He didn’t get published in The New Yorker or The Atlantic , but his stories started to appear with regularity in literary journals. He was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and one of his pieces was reprinted in an anthology of Asian American writers. Things were going well for Joshua, it seemed, but then he went off the rails.