Don Lee - The Collective

Jessica had had an inkling something was amiss when all of a sudden Esther was not home when she was supposed to be and didn’t return her messages right away, when she was mysteriously busy on weekends, when they spent fewer and fewer nights together, Esther saying she was tired or coming down with something. Eventually Jessica forced her to come clean. “It’s another woman, isn’t it?” she asked. “Not exactly,” Esther said, then revealed that she had fallen in love with a Strategic Studies Fellow at Harvard’s Olin Institute named Jon Stiegel.

The Tuesday Nighters never met again, and in short order — and not without coincidence, in my view — the 3AC began to lose its fervor and energy. The main problem, actually, arose with the preliminary plans for our website, or, more specifically, the notion that we needed a manifesto, a formal mission statement, to post on it.

First, we affirmed that the 3AC was a not-for-profit organization devoted to the creation, celebration, and dissemination of art by Asian Americans. Simple enough. But then Andy Kim said we should specify art by young Asian Americans, since we wanted to accentuate the hip, the new, not the traditional, and Phil Sudo said that would be ageist, and Annie Yoshikawa said young made it sound like the 3AC was an after-school program for kids, so we changed it to modern , but that word had narrow critical associations, so we settled on contemporary .

We wanted to emphasize the importance of these Sunday night gatherings on Walker Street, so we added that the 3AC was also devoted to creating a foundation to gather and exchange ideas and experiences, but creating was repetitious because we already had creation , so we changed it to building , and foundation was stodgy and made it appear that we were a philanthropic organization, so we changed it to network , and then, because network was too geeky and wonkish and corporate, we changed it to community , and we added that we exchanged resources and information as well. But then Trudy Lun thought this might come off as too insular and cliquey, since we were trying to reach out and disseminate, so we attached a clause that we promoted the intersections between art and audience.

Yet we wanted, too, to declare our commitment to social change, so we modified that to intersections between art, audience, and activism , and asserted that we were dedicated to subverting stereotypes, then decided we should also say we were confronting prejudice and discrimination and oppression against Asian Americans through our art, but scratched the last phrase, since it was something we were trying to do in all facets of our lives, not just through our art, and then we agreed we should also remove Asian Americans there, because weren’t we opposed to the oppression of any group? But then Grace Kwok wondered if this might jeopardize our future 501(c)3 application, since the IRS had restrictions on giving tax-exempt status to organizations that were involved in political campaigns or lobbying, and we thought of deleting the entire sentence, but Joshua said fuck it, this is who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish.

Cindy Wong said she wanted synergy, empowerment , and coalition somewhere in the statement, and Phil threw in diasporic , all of which we liked, but we couldn’t find a place for them. We went back to exchanging ideas, experiences, resources, and information because Jay Chi-Ming Lai said the connotation there was still primarily about networking, even though we’d expunged network , and that wasn’t all we espoused, so we put in that the 3AC was devoted — was there another word? I asked. We’d already used devoted twice, along with committed and dedicated —maybe faithful , no, believed in , no, entrusted with , definitely not — we’d fix it later — devoted to nurturing artistic expression. But what about the collaborative nature of the 3AC? Danielle Awano asked, so we inserted collaborative , but then Jessica objected, since it might seem our art projects were produced jointly as a group, so we changed it to individual and collaborative , and then Jimmy said we needed to highlight how many different types of artists comprised the 3AC, so we slid in multidisciplinary .

We had yet to clarify who our target audience was, Sandra Tran reminded us, who our constituents were, and we wrote down that we sought to engage with other Asian Americans, then had to stipulate on a local, statewide, national, and international level, then reconsidered, since what we really wanted to do was engage with people of all racial, socioeconomic, generational, and ethnic strata, don’t forget genders and sexualities and political affiliations, too, so, unable to come up with a solution, we deleted the entire sentence this time, and replaced it with another that said that we sought to build — no, already used it, I said— foster solidarity with other communities of color, or should that be all communities of color, but why just of color , it should extend to everyone, be more encompassing, so we ended the line, as a compromise, with all communities of color and beyond .

The acronym 3AC troubled Leon Lee. It was familiar shorthand to us, the phrase we all used, and it was catchy, in-the-know, hip, but wasn’t a fundamental principle of organizational marketing to have the name plainly advertise its purpose? We spelled out Asian American (hyphen? categorically no hyphen?) Artists (apostrophe or no apostrophe? singular or plural possessive?) Collective, known as the (cap or lowercase article?) 3AC (space after the number? periods after the letters?).

The real contretemps began when Joshua returned to the original statement, art by contemporary Asian Americans .

“Listen, we should specify that it’s art by and about contemporary Asian Americans,” he said.

I could feel the room curdle.

Although Esther Xing was no longer part of the collective, everyone had heard about my dispute with her, thanks to Rick Wakamatsu and Ali Ong, who now seemed to reveal themselves as converts to Xingism.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” Rick said, “especially pertaining to the goals for my own fiction. At a certain point, if we keep rehashing the same themes, always writing about being Asian, it’s going to get stale.”

“So what?” Joshua asked. “Faulkner said every writer has just one story to tell. It’s all in the telling.”

“It’s just that all this race stuff is starting to come off as, well, whining ,” Rick said. “Know what I mean?”

“Maybe it’s time to move on,” Ali said. “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking of doing with my next story.”

“How many stories have you published, Ali?” Joshua asked.

Startled, she said, “None.”

“You, Rick?”

He shrugged, embarrassed.

“Uh-huh,” Joshua said. “I’m glad we can rely on your combined authority and experience to make such pronouncements.”

“Hey,” Jessica said, “that’s a little harsh.”

Joshua launched into a peroration about being true to one’s race, about not playing into the hands of the WSCP, the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. We’d heard it all before. As much as I agreed with him — more than ever, in fact — I meditated on how monotonous Joshua had become, with a limited reservoir of ideas, some of which he borrowed without attribution, e.g., bell hooks’s WSCP. Nonetheless, it was hard for the group not to be swayed by him. He was the incontestable founder of the 3AC. After all, it was his house, therefore his rules.