Don Lee - The Collective

So it was with us, although we had a longer and better run than most. It began with Joshua, Jessica Tsai, and me as freshmen at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1988.

Joshua was from Cambridge, a 1.5—born in South Korea but raised in Massachusetts, not first generation or second, but somewhere in between — and his last name at the time had been Meer, not Yoon. His parents were Jewish professors of history and sociology at Harvard, and they had adopted Joshua late in life, when they were both well into their fifties.

Jessica was second-generation Taiwanese American, her father an optometrist in Saratoga Springs, New York.

I was third-generation Korean American from Mission Viejo, California, the son of an engineer for an aeronautics firm that built navigational equipment for Lockheed, and although I hadn’t gotten accepted into Princeton, as I’d dreamed, I was ecstatic merely to have escaped the banality of Orange County, where I had lived all my life.

Freshmen at Macalester were required to take a first-year course, which often had a residential component, all the students in the class living on the same dorm floor. Even though it wasn’t our first choice, the three of us were thrown together into a course called “The Vietnam War: Apocalyptic Visions and Imperialist Hegemony,” team-taught by professors from the English and humanities departments.

At the initial meeting during orientation, Joshua sidled into the room late and took a seat next to me near the back. It was hot outside, but he was wearing a raggedy gray car coat and Doc Martens. He had a stringy goatee and lank hair that flopped over his eyes, and he reeked of cigarettes. He badly needed a shower. He was of average height and rather thin, but, incongruously, he had a noticeable paunch. Coming from Southern California, land of ab-defined, yogafied, body-obsessed boobletons, where even I — never much of an athlete — had felt compelled to work out and keep trim, this impressed me.

He glanced at the name tag stuck to my shirt. “Eric Cho,” he read. “What do you know, another Korean.” He wasn’t wearing a name tag himself. An act of defiance, apparently. He took a look around at the other kids in the Vietnam War class — overwhelmingly midwestern, upper-middle-class, white-bread — and said to me, “What do you think, bro? We were put in here to provide the Oriental perspective, weren’t we?”

Jessica, who was sitting in the row in front of us, peered around and gave us a brief head-to-toe.

Joshua raised his eyebrows. “You like that?” he nudged me.

I had been staring at her from the start of the session, wondering how I might broach a conversation. She was petite, tiny, really, with long fine hair that curled at the ends. She had a small flat nose without much of a bridge, making her eyes appear slightly crossed and farther apart than they were, and her eyebrows were set unusually high, so her neutral expression seemed to be one of haughty annoyance. Attracted as I was to her, she frightened me a little. She had on a sleeveless Neil Young T-shirt, no bra, nipples poking in the air-conditioning, bell-bottom jeans streaked with paint and smudges, and leather sandals. There was a suede sling purse with fringes on the floor beside her chair. Yet she also had on black toenail polish, and black fingernail polish, a studded wristband, earrings that seemed to be snips of real barbed wire, and a silver chain with a circle-A pendant — the anarchy symbol — her fashion sensibilities crossed between retro-hippie and post-punk. Mainly what I kept staring at was the small of her back, exposed as she leaned forward on her desk, her T-shirt lifting, the waist of her jeans gapping, to reveal a curve of skin that went all the way down to the cleft of her buttocks. She wasn’t wearing underwear.

“ Or ,” Joshua said more loudly, “you strictly vanilla ? As in boarding-school shiksas, frosty Mayflower mungie cakes, pinkaloid pooty, Ritz cracker chirp-chirp Marshas. Or maybe you prefer the local corn-fed variety, the gopher winkle Triscuits and chalky Betty Crockers and Miracle Whip doozers and tapioca hayseed cream pies.”

By now, everyone in the room had swiveled around and was looking at us.

“I’m sorry,” Joshua said, quite pleased with himself, “was I speaking out of turn?” Then, as a postscript, he told me, “Not that I have anything against white girls, understand. After all, as Kierkegaard once said, pussy is pussy.”

Jessica raised her hand. “Is it too late to transfer to another class?” she asked the professors.

“Ditto for me,” I said.

“Damn,” Joshua said. “Once again, betrayed by Asian nation.”

We were assigned single rooms on the fourth floor of Dupre Hall. Macalester — or Mac, as everyone abbreviated it — was considered a premier liberal arts college, small and selective, with fewer than two thousand students. The campus was pretty and well maintained, and the school itself was rich, its coffers bursting with donations from the founders of Reader’s Digest . Yet Dupre Hall, designated for freshmen and sophomores, was an ugly brick bunker with vertical slit windows, and it was generally acknowledged as the worst dormitory on campus. Dupre — alternately referred to as Duprojects, Duprived, and Duprison — was the only hurricane-proof building on campus, in an area that was not known to have hurricanes. Supposedly the building plans, intended for a coastal location, had been available at a discount. The single rooms in Dupre indeed felt like a prison, so narrow that the beds had to be lofted on stilts, with the desks and dressers directly underneath. There was a rumor that Macalester had to pay a fine to the state every year because the rooms violated a human-rights code, not meeting the minimum legal size for juvenile detention cells.

Joshua was on one end of the fourth floor, the smokers’ end, and Jessica and I were on the other. I was curious why we’d been given singles, unusual for freshmen, and not doubles or even triples.

“You’re complaining? You wanted a roommate?” Jessica asked.

“I wouldn’t have minded.” I had a sister, Rebecca, who was four years older, and no other siblings. She had left for college when I was entering the ninth grade, and consequently I’d gone through high school feeling like an only child. I would have welcomed the company of a roommate.

“It’s going to be claustrophobic enough around here,” Jessica told me.

She was right. The orientation schedule was chock-full of activities that weekend, everything emphasizing community : lots of meetings and group sessions and pep talks, tours, picnics, resource fairs, advising appointments, dances, and talent shows. Parents had been invited to participate in the festivities. Naturally, all three of us had asked our parents not to come, but Joshua’s were the only ones who complied. While Jessica and I grudgingly escorted our parents around the campus, Joshua sat in the quad, leaning against a tree and listening to his Walkman CD while he smoked and read a novel or scribbled in a notebook.

We were encouraged to sign up for as many student organizations as possible, and there was a dizzying number to choose from. We could join the newspaper, the student government, clubs for minorities, civic engagement, and international relations. We could join clubs with political or religious affiliations, clubs for artists and musicians, for feminists and queers, for bicycling and other athletic pursuits.