Don Lee - The Collective

Would this woman stop at nothing? Never mind that her assessment had some validity.

“Although I will say,” Esther then told me, “if I had to be absolutely honest, that I’d kill to be in it,” and finally she smiled, exposing a mouthful of bucked teeth. “Do you have much to do with the editorial process?”

At last I could claim a measure of superiority. Esther Xing was as susceptible as any young writer to sycophancy. “Some,” I said, lying for the second time in succession. She waited. I knew she was hoping I’d ask to read one of her stories. I let her wait. I went to the men’s room to take a leak.

When I returned to the table, our food had arrived, each dinner plate different, like the flatware that did not match. Esther tasted her risotto (she had nixed the vegetable pie after the order had gone to the kitchen), and her face wilted.

“What’s wrong now?” Jessica asked.

“Miss? Miss?” Esther said to the waitress. “I don’t want to come off as a pest, I know you hate me already, but could you ask the kitchen to reheat this a little?”

“I don’t know this person,” I told the waitress.

We managed to get through the rest of the meal without incident, although the girls talked interminably about people they had known at the Fine Arts Work Center, shutting me out. As Esther left for the women’s bathroom, Jessica picked up Esther’s pack of American Spirits.

“You don’t smoke,” I said.

“I do once in a while now.”

“Since when?”

“There wasn’t much to do in Ptown. Yoga saved me from complete dissolution.”

“Your friend’s a piece of work,” I said.

“Sometimes she doesn’t think before she speaks — a lot like someone else we know. I wish you two would get along. We’ve become really close.”

I didn’t gather how close until dessert. Jessica and Esther ordered a chocolate-chip pound cake to share, and, forking bites, they burbled and purred about its scrumptiousness. At one point, Jessica had a smidge of whipped cream on the corner of her mouth, and Esther delicately scooped the cream up with her index finger and deposited it into her own mouth. Smiling moronically, they stared at each other — finger still hooked between Esther’s lips — and held the pose for a second too long, in which all was revealed. I didn’t know how I had missed it, Esther always hovering close to Jessica, touching her arm and back, sitting so their bodies adjoined. They were lovers — former, current, soon to be, or all three.

Jessica didn’t come home that night. After the DeLux, she and Esther ditched me to go dancing at Club Café, a gay bar.

In the morning, Joshua and I sat at the kitchen counter, eating cereal. “No shit?” he said.

“Did you know?” I asked him.

“I had no idea.”

Right then, Jessica opened the back door and walked through the kitchen, bedraggled, as if she had not slept a wink. “Hey,” she mumbled, and headed upstairs.

Joshua and I were caught midspoon, suspended in the wake of her chimera.

“I guess we’ll need to think of something else for you,” Joshua said, and slurped up the rest of the milk in his bowl.

It started casually — dinners at Cafe Sushi and Mary Chung’s and Koreana, then beers at the Cellar, the Plough & Stars, and the People’s Republik — and at first there was just Jimmy Fung, the wig artist.

Jimmy was ten years older than us, in his late thirties, handsome, ponytailed, and voluble, a rather flashy guy, inclined to wear clingy shirts and black leather pants. He’d been a hairstylist in Sydney and Hong Kong and had moved to the States just before the 1997 handover. He spoke with an Aussie accent, yet had three passports, including an American one. “I’m a multinational juggernaut unto myself.” Recently he had taken over a decrepit antiques store on Arrow Street in Harvard Square and had made it into an antiques store/hair salon/art gallery called Pink Whistle. “You want Asian chicks?” he said to Joshua and me. “I’ll get you Asian chicks.”

He got Tina Nguyen, the wall cutter, to come, then Danielle Awano, a Japanese Brazilian dancer and capoeira teacher, and Marietta Liu, a Chinese Italian harmonium player. (“What’s with all these mixed-blooded Asians?” Joshua asked. “It’s like the UN had an orgy.”)

As the group grew, incorporating a filmmaker, playwright, actress, and other artists and writers — alas, some of them male — we decided it would make more sense to congregate at someone’s house, and eventually it became a regular happening, Sunday night potlucks on Walker Street.

All through the fall, the rice cooker was always going in the kitchen for our buffets of Sichuan peppercorn shrimp, futomaki, dim sum, japchae, and bulgogi, washed down with sake and OB beer. Jessica, who worked Sundays at Upstairs at the Pudding, would come home after her shift finished at ten and be befuddled to find the crowd ever larger and more raucous.

But we weren’t merely partying, we weren’t playing poker or charades or singing karaoke. We were talking, hatching plans. We talked about organizing our own exhibitions and performances and showcases and reading series. We talked about starting a newsletter, a literary journal, maybe a publishing press. We talked about volunteering in Asian communities, offering workshops and fellowships and a youth arts program, becoming a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. Already we had staked out the domain “3ac.org.”

We talked about the representations of Asians in the media, particularly in movies and on TV shows. We lamented the China dolls, the Chinese waiters, the Japanese tourists and kung fu masters and Uncle Tongs. We bemoaned the computer nerds, the dirty refugees, the gang members, the greengrocers, and the sweatshop and laundry workers. We deplored the geishas and bargirls and lotus blossoms and Suzie Wongs and dragon ladies.

“Orientalist masturbatory fantasy figures,” Joshua said.

“I hate that shit so much,” Annie Yoshikawa, the photographer, said.

“The expectation that we’re either servile or hypersexual,” Trudy Lun, a theater costume designer, said.

“Mama-sans or dirty little yum-yum girls,” Tina Nguyen said.

“It’s the Madonna/whore complex for bamboo fetishists,” Marietta Liu said.

“I’m so sick of white guys hitting on me all the time,” Danielle Awano said. “I’m, like, are you for real , asshole? You think someone like you could ever have a chance in hell with someone like me, just because I’m Asian? You think I have no standards ?”

We complained about Miss Saigon and The Killing Fields, Seven Years in Tibet and Breakfast at Tiffany’s , about yellowfacing, about always having white actors in the lead and relegating Asians to the backdrop, even when it was an Asian story.

“You know the worst?” the composer Andy Kim asked. “ Sixteen Candles .”

“The Donger!” the glassblower Jay Chi-Ming Lai said, and all the men in the group groaned, recalling the character of Long Duk Dong (“The Donger”) in the teen movie, the foreign-exchange student who had embodied every possible malignant stereotype about Asian males.

“How many of you suddenly got nicknamed the Donger after the movie came out?” the guitarist Phil Sudo asked, and they all raised their hands.

“People would run up to me — I mean, literally people I didn’t know, people on the street — and shout their favorite Donger lines at me,” the painter Leon Lee said.

“ ‘Donger need food!’ ” Andy said.

“ ‘What’s happenin’, hot stuff?’ ” Leon said.

“ ‘Oh, no more yanky my wanky,’ ” Jay said.

Some of the women laughed, which the men did not appreciate. “It’s not funny,” Andy said.