Don Lee - The Collective

Both his parents, in their late seventies, died in quick succession in 1997. During the funerals, Joshua wept inconsolably — genuine anguish that was heartrending for me to witness. “I didn’t deserve them,” he sobbed to me. “I took them for granted because they weren’t my real parents, because they weren’t Asian.”

On several occasions, I had seen him together with the Meers, both of them bespectacled and spindly. They had been extraordinarily kind people, but Joshua’s relationship to them — and, I have to say, theirs to him — had seemed to be one of gentle indifference.

Be that as it may, their deaths precipitated several perplexing, contradictory episodes in Joshua’s life.

First, he took a temporary leave from his Jones Lectureship and went to Korea, spending weeks in search of his birth parents. At the orphanage in Pusan, he learned of a rumor that he had actually been born on Cheju-do, and he took a ferry to the island, hoping he might be able to uncover more, but the trip was to no avail. With no further leads, he migrated north, up the peninsula. He had an amorphous idea that he might repatriate and stay in Seoul, yet he felt uncomfortable in the city, and in the country as a whole. By bureaucrats and policemen, by clerks in hotels and stores, by waitresses in restaurants, by bus and taxi drivers, he was chastised for not being able to speak Korean well enough, for not being a real Korean, for being too American — all of the things he used to berate me for. He felt denigrated for having Meer as his last name, for being an adoptee, someone who was unwanted, illegitimate, abandoned, who had no lineage or family history he could claim as his own. He felt baekjeong to them, an outcaste, the lowest class, contemptible and polluted, untouchable, unspeakable. He didn’t belong in Korea.

Returning to Palo Alto, he legally changed his name from Meer to Yoon. He started a KAD support group in the Bay Area, helped organize a Korean heritage festival, became a Big Brother to a Korean teenager, joined a Korean dragon boat team, taught ESL to Korean immigrants, and, briefly, unbelievably, became born-again and attended a Korean Baptist church.

Then, abruptly, he withdrew from all these activities, denouncing them as preposterous and futile. He began siding with the burgeoning anti-TRA (transracial adoption) movement, arguing that white families who adopted Asian children were selfish and ultimately cruel, that snatching Asian babies from their homelands was a vestigial, devious form of imperialism, colonization by kidnapping, nullifying the adoptees’ ability to ever identify with any ethnicity, an effacement equivalent to genocide.

“Asian babies should grow up in Asian households,” he told me. “Otherwise, they don’t stand a chance.”

Then, just as swiftly, he rescinded this stance, deciding that the Meers had been decent and compassionate and should be honored for their altruism. He gave up his Jones Lectureship and, bankrolled by his inheritance, moved to Paris for five months.

Jessica had a tough time of it as well. Her parents might have found it acceptable for her to date Loki, but not what she chose to do next. She applied to all seven Ivy League medical schools and, unexpectedly, got into two: Harvard and Penn. She had only cursorily prepared for the MCATs, intending to do poorly on them and rid her family of this Ivy League fixation once and for all, and perhaps as a consequence — no pressure, no panic attacks — she aced the test. But she decided to turn down Harvard and Penn and attend the one other school to which she had secretly applied, the Rhode Island School of Design, to get her MFA in studio art.

Her parents disowned her. She took out loans to pay for her tuition to RISD. When she graduated, she moved to the Lower East Side in Manhattan, but floundered trying to make a name for herself as an artist while working two different jobs as a waitress and a third as an after-hours proofreader at a law firm. Enervated and losing hope, she at last found rescue through a one-year fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. It meant living in a tiny, makeshift, barely insulated studio from October through April, seasons that were gloomy and desolate on the tip of Cape Cod, and the stipend was paltry, but Jessica leapt at the opportunity for a respite.

I went to Boston, of all places, for my MFA. Unlike Joshua, I was rejected by Iowa, and UVA, and Michigan, and every other top creative writing program in the country. Walden College, a former secretarial school in the Back Bay, was small and third-rate. It didn’t have a single famous author on the faculty, and it didn’t offer me a scholarship, but I went, anyway, because they were the only ones willing to take me. “Why an MFA instead of an MBA?” my mother asked me, as if it were only a matter of changing a consonant. But I had prepared her and my father over the years, tamping down expectations of my going to law school or having any comparable professional ambitions. I was going to be a writer. Nothing they said or did could stop me. I think back now, and wonder what might have happened if I had not met Joshua. As a freshman, I had not even known a master’s of fine arts in creative writing existed.

As mediocre as Walden was, it had one redeeming attribute, an affiliation with a literary journal called Palaver , where I signed on as an intern my first semester. It was edited by my principal workshop teacher, Evan Paviromo, a British-Italian scholar, bon vivant, and wastrel. He was a charismatic, towering presence at six-foot-five, beefy verging on portly, with thick brown hair he kept long and swept back, always elegant in his blue Savile Row suits, bow tie, and matching hankie. He had no money of his own and relied on his wife’s income to fund his indulgences, including the magazine (he told me he’d come to the U.S. from London “looking for a rich widow with a bad cough”). A raconteur extraordinaire, he unfurled story after story to anyone who would listen. Stories about producing art-house films, hanging out with movie stars and politicians, spending weekends at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, and running guns and drugs for Central American dictators under the aegis of the CIA. I had a hard time believing any of it, and came to suspect that Paviromo was a con artist, questioning the authenticity of his credentials and even his Oxbridge accent.

There was no question, however, about Palaver ’s reputation, which was outsized compared to its meager resources, its office a rented shithole in Watertown. Palaver had a history of discovering young writers, their stories and poems regularly plucked for prize annuals. Agents and book editors kept close tabs on the journal, scouting for new talent. A publication in Palaver had the potential to launch a career, and Evan Paviromo kept promising to launch mine.

As Joshua had predicted, with discipline I had gotten better as a writer, and in such a lackluster MFA program, I was treated with almost Joshuaesque regard. In general, Paviromo was admiring of my fiction, although I can’t say he was of much value to me as a mentor — lackadaisical and distracted and not terribly interested in his students’ work. Joshua still served that role for me, reading all my short stories and critiquing them exhaustively during late-night phone calls from Iowa City. “Paviromo said what?” he’d ask. “That asshole doesn’t know shit. Where the fuck does he come off? He’s not even a writer.” Then Joshua would break down my stories, pointing out each blunder in the structure and prose, nitpicking about words like “desultory,” “recalcitrant,” and “askance.” The ritual was withering, excruciating, but it helped, and by the time I finished my master’s thesis, a mélange of various projects that included a screenplay and a long story called “The Unrequited,” Joshua said about the latter, “Now you’re fucking cooking. This is the best thing you’ve ever done, by far. Honestly, unequivocally, all bullshit aside, you know I wouldn’t say this unless I meant it, it’s brilliant. You’ve made a huge fucking leap.” Paviromo agreed, telling me, “You know, I believe this is eminently publishable. In fact, I might want to publish it myself in Palaver ,” and for years he kept stringing me along with that pledge.