Don Lee - The Collective

“I’m not his wife,” Mirielle told her.

Halfway through the flight, I asked Mirielle for the time. She unbuckled the strap of my black chronometer watch, which she had been wearing all week, and handed it back to me.

On the first Sunday of January, the 3AC resumed its potlucks (I had to explain the scrapes on my face to everyone, and Joshua said, “You should have seen him lay out the fuckwad. It was beautiful”), and two evenings later, the Tuesday Nighters convened for the first time. With Joshua declining to participate, I was the de facto leader of the writers’ group, and I set down the ground rules.

I wouldn’t endure any of the pussyfooting that Peter Anderegg had mandated at Mac. I wanted people to be forthright, speak to the authors directly, address them by name and “you,” and have the authors respond to the critiques at will — peremptorily and contentiously, if warranted. But there were only five of us in the group: Grace Kwok, the immigration attorney; Rick Wakamatsu, who sold windsurfing gear at Can-Am, near the Galleria; Ali Ong, a sous chef at the Green Street Grill; me; and, unavoidably, Esther Xing.

It was too small and unschooled of a group for candor or asperity. Grace, Rick, and Ali did not have MFAs. They had never taken a fiction workshop other than a couple of weekend classes at the Grub Street writing center in Boston. They were complete neophytes, and they were good-humored and ebullient about it. They wrote terrible, cloddish stories, and they loved everything that was presented. They wanted the writers’ group to be supportive and fun, not confrontational — an exercise in boosterism for dabblers and tenderfoots. They were too busy to read the manuscripts ahead of time, preferring to listen to them in toto the night of the meetings, and they didn’t care for the formality of penning commentary or marginalia. It was all impromptu, the pronouncements slapdash and facile. They had nary a criticism for the opening to my novella. The sessions in the living room were bush league, amateur hour. The writers’ group was a waste of my time, without utility or challenge. Until the third Tuesday night, when Esther Xing read her story to us.

“Say What You Will” was about two women, Leona Hood and Caroline Bates, who lived in the former quarry town of Severn Springs, Vermont, in 1954. Leona ran a spa-turned-inn-turned-boardinghouse with her husband. Caroline was the assistant town clerk and a spotter for the civilian Ground Observer Corps, assigned to scan the skies and alert the Air Force to any irregular or unscheduled aircraft. Leona and Caroline were lovers, had been for many years, but in 1950s small-town Vermont, they both knew that such a relationship could never be made public. The story was a subtle portrait of their everyday routines, without sentimentality or opera, culminating in a single touch, or nearly a touch, Leona furtively brushing her fingertips across the sleeve of Caroline’s blouse as they said good night after a town meeting.

“I’m totally blown away,” Ali said.

“You know, I feel honored to have read this,” Rick said.

“It’s really, really beautiful,” Grace said.

It was. It pained me to acknowledge, but it was. The story was haunting, the prose crisp: “She caught a wink of light in the sky, at once bright and flimsy. There was no contrail, nor any sound, none of the typical buzz or hum. She didn’t think it was a spy plane or a drone, yet it had form, movement, and she had a sense that it had come from a place unfathomably far away. She found something comforting in its unexpected appearance and in the fact that she could neither explain nor identify it.”

Esther Xing was a better writer than I was, perhaps rivaling Joshua in the quality of her work. There was a patient assurance in the story, an honesty of emotion, that I had never come close to producing. Sitting there, listening to Ali, Rick, and Grace fawn over her, I knew, no matter how hard I tried, I would never be as good as Esther, and the knowledge galled me. There was, however, a conspicuous omission in the story, one that was instantly recognizable to me, toward which I could channel my envy.

“I guess I’ll have to be the lone dissenter here,” I said.

“Oh, no!” Esther said, clamping her hands to her fat cheeks in mock horror. She smiled kookily with her crooked teeth, then pouted. “You didn’t like it?”

“The story’s craft aside, I have a question for you — something more fundamental and profound.”

“Okay.”

“Why are all the characters white?”

“What?”

“Why are you writing about white people in Vermont in 1954?”

“My mom had a friend who grew up in Severn Springs. She told me about these women, and I thought it was so sad they were never able to come out, but it really, you know, touched me that they kept being lovers, till the day they died.”

“Why didn’t you make at least one character Asian?”

She laughed. “There were no Asians in Severn Springs in 1954.”

“You couldn’t have fudged it?”

“I did a lot of research on the town and period. I really wanted to get the historical details right.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Are you ashamed of being Chinese?”

“What?” She giggled. “What are you talking about?”

“I just find it very curious you’d choose to write a story like this instead of something about Asians.”

“Why should I restrict myself to writing about Asians?” Esther asked, becoming more sober. “Why can’t I write about anything I want?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“Because not doing so is denying who you are. Because it’s a form of whitewashing. Because it’s betraying your own race.”

I had to say, it was satisfying being in this position of power, assuming Joshua’s usual role for once.

“That’s ludicrous,” Esther said, then asked the others, “Don’t you think so?”

But Grace, Ali, and Rick, clearly uncomfortable with the emergent direction of the conversation, said nothing.

“Expression should be expression,” she said. “I’m interested in other things besides race, other themes. Aren’t you? Are you planning to write the same identity/racism story the rest of your life?”

“Until things change, I just might have to.”

“Come on,” she said. “Art’s not about being didactic. There’s nothing more boring or tedious than that. Art should simply be about what makes us human. Its only obligation, if anything, is to try to break the frozen sea within us.”

I knew the quote. “Kafka.”

“Look,” Esther said, “if we limit ourselves to the subject of race, it’s equivalent to self-segregation, to ghettoizing ourselves. Like, don’t you remember when you were back in college, and you’d go in the union and see all the Asians at one table, all the blacks at another table, all the Hispanics at yet another? I thought that was such a shame, these groups huddled in self-exile.”

“Whites don’t do that all the time, sit with other whites?”

“The whole victimization motif of minority narratives — they drive me crazy,” she said. “They just end up indulging in the same old tired clichés of romantic racialism that have been around since Gunga Din — characters speaking pidgin English or in that bizarre, singsong, Confucian/koan/proverb-laden Orientalese that’s supposed to pass for lyricism. I mean, if I see one more book by an Asian American with moon, silk, blossom , or tea in the title, I’m going to have to hang myself. At least give me some Asian American characters I can recognize, not just the virtuous or the persecuted, but some freaky, flawed motherfuckers like me. But really, why do we have to follow that path at all? We should be trying to de-label the identities of artists as Asian or African or whatever. We should insist on being regarded as artists, period.”