Don Lee - The Collective

“You need to get cracking, old sport.”

“I suppose you’ve had a lot of experience.”

“You suppose right,” Joshua said, although I would learn later that he was lying, that at that moment he was still a virgin, on campus and otherwise.

During the next few days, I became increasingly disconcerted every time I heard the Weyerhaeuser bell. The whole idea of it bothered me, that all these kids had already paired off and were rutting in their dorm rooms, and then broadcasting their new sexual status to the campus. Instead of a celebration, it seemed more like a taunt. To my ears, the bell began to acquire a competitive tenor, a challenge to join the initiated. It seemed, all of a sudden, imperative that I get laid and be able to ring that fucking bell myself.

The first partner in flagrante delicto I considered was Jessica Tsai. My visceral attraction to her was somewhat mysterious to me, since, as Joshua had guessed, up to that point I had been almost exclusively partial to white girls, in particular blondes. Leigh Anne Wiatt, for example, had not been exceptionally pretty. It would have been fair to have described her as plain, verging on homely. Yet she had been blond.

Jessica gave no indication she might be amenable to participating in my campaign. In fact, she was proving to be very elusive. I’d figured out her schedule — when she’d wake up, walk across Grand Avenue to her classes, when she’d be getting out and perhaps going to the library or the student center — and I tried to bump into her as often as possible.

One Wednesday morning, I stepped out into the hallway of Dupre, holding my dopp kit, just as she was heading to the shower in her white silk bathrobe.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said.

Jessica regarded me without expression. “How long you been working on that?” she said, then flipped her towel over her shoulder and brushed past me.

Days — I’d been working on that line for days.

I finally had a chance to corner her the next week, when I sat beside her on the bus to Dayton’s Bluff, where we were going to renovate a house for Habitat for Humanity. We’d just finished midterms, and we compared grades. She had received all A’s, and I’d gotten — typical for me, despite my prodigious efforts — mostly B-pluses.

“How’d Joshua do?” she asked.

“B-ish,” I said, which had shocked me until I found out that he sometimes did not hand in all of his assignments. He was bright, but lazy.

I told Jessica I’d once asked Joshua why he hadn’t gone to Harvard. He didn’t even apply. With his off-the-chart SAT scores and as a legacy applicant, with his parents (one of whom was an alum) both professors there, he would have surely gotten in. “I thought I should learn some humility,” he’d told me, “mingle with the little people.”

“Like us?” Jessica asked.

“No doubt.”

“He’s always had it so easy,” she said. “He’s been coddled. An only child, an adopted child. You know what my father did the day I was born? He sent out for applications to Harvard and Yale. He was crushed I didn’t get into an Ivy.”

Her parents had immigrated to Flushing, New York, from Taiwan, and it took many years before her father’s English was proficient enough to pass the intensive three-part exam for his optometry license. In the meantime, he had slogged away as a lab technician at LensCrafters, and Jessica’s mother had worked in a Korean nail salon. Every day, they had reminded Jessica and her two younger sisters that they were in America for one purpose and one purpose only: so their children could attend the best universities in the world.

Jessica had always loved drawing as a child, but until a junior high field trip to the Museum of Modern Art, she had never seen— experienced —real art in person. Thereafter, she kept returning to MoMA and venturing to other museums and galleries, not telling her parents that she was riding the No. 7 train by herself to look at paintings. By ninth grade, she knew, with a certainty and urgency she had never felt about anything before, that she wanted to be a painter, but she told no one. The following summer, her father relocated the family to Saratoga Springs, where he had bought an eyeglass shop. The move made Jessica heartsick, yet she told herself to be patient. She would be escaping to college in just a few years.

She daydreamed about going to RISD or Pratt or the Art Institute of Chicago, but her parents, who had long-standing ambitions for her to become a doctor, would never have allowed it. She figured she could surreptitiously study art at one of the Ivies. That was her plan, but it was thwarted by an unexpected disaster: she bombed the SATs. Three times. All her prep work and practice tests aside, she had panic attacks each time she sat in the exam hall with the Scantrons and No. 2 pencils, and she could not, for the life of her, think. Although she graduated as her school’s valedictorian, she was rejected by all eight Ivy League colleges. Yet her parents still held out hope for an Ivy medical school, and they still believed Jessica would be a premed major at Mac, which explained why she was taking organic chemistry and cell biology her first semester.

“My parents,” I told her, “still think I’m going to apply to law school. Why else would anyone be an English major? They’ve never really pushed me, though. Princeton was my idea.”

“What’s your excuse for not getting in?”

“Look at my midterm grades. I’m just not that smart.” All my life I had tried my best, but I had never been academically gifted, which contributed to my parents’ lowered expectations for me.

“At least you know that,” Jessica said.

“Do you think it was psychosomatic?”

“What?”

“The panic attacks. Maybe it was your mind trying to find a way out. Maybe you subconsciously wanted to fail.”

“And join the ranks of Asian American underachievers, rare as they may be?”

“It’s not such a bad thing. It’s kind of freeing.”

“Maybe you’re right. I never wanted to be one of those kids, know what I mean?”

I knew. The model minority. The Asian American nerds, goobers, spazzes, and lame-o’s, as Joshua would say. The nine-irons, bug eaters, and grinders, the panface Post-its and dim-sum tapeheads. One of the UFOs, the Ugly Fucking Orientals with their high-pitched hee-haw laughs and bowl haircuts and dweeby clothes, the obsessive-compulsive doofuses who poked at the bridge of their eyeglasses and twitch-blinked and read the fine print for everything and always followed the directions, the ping-pang ninnies who were so stultifyingly sincere, diffident, and straight, who wouldn’t recognize irony if it bit them on their no-asses, the wei-wei Hop Sings who perpetuated all the stereotypes and gave us, the Asian kids with some style and cool and fucking balls , a bad name. I never wanted to be one of those kids, either.

The conversation on the bus changed things for us. Afterward, Jessica softened toward me, and we began to hang out more often. We had an understanding, it seemed, and I started to think there could be something between us.

Joshua quickly quashed the thought. “You’re barking up the wrong twat,” he told me.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“She’s a yellow cab.”

“A what?”

“California slang for Asian chicks who’ll only date white guys.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“She’s got a haole boyfriend back home.”

I had, stupidly, not considered this possibility. “How do you know?”

“I asked her.”

“The topic just came up?”

“It’s some dude she went out with in high school named — I kid you not — Loki Somerset. He ended up staying in Saratoga and going to Skidmore.”