Don Lee - The Collective

I stayed at Palaver for another year and a half to finish out the Lila Wallace program, then worked a series of freelance and temp jobs, doing everything from copyediting business articles to writing newsletters for a trade association of bus operators. Finally, in 2004, I accepted a full-time job in downtown Boston at Gilroy Prunier, a boutique marketing firm that catered to investment banks and financial services companies. My primary area of responsibility was direct marketing, i.e., direct mail. I wrote and edited the copy that went on letters, envelopes, slip-sheets, forms, brochures, and postcards.

Joshua told me I was squandering my talent. I was betraying our vow to be artists. I was no longer a believer. I had sold out.

In truth, I felt relieved.

We all moved out of the Walker Street house after Noklek immolated herself. How could we stay there, with the scorched wood on the deck, the soot whispers on the clapboards, the singed patches of grass? And the smell — the smell that could not have possibly lingered, yet that we imagined did.

When skin burns, the blood vessels below begin to dilate and weep. The skin bubbles and blisters. It chars and blackens. As flames eat through the flesh, raw tissue starts to appear. Fat is exposed, and it sizzles. There’s an awful odor. It’s like charcoal at first, not unpleasant, then quickly becomes putrid and vinegary, almost metallic, like copper liquefying. The hair is the worst — sulfurous — but then, mixed in there, there’s a queerly sweet scent, the searing of fat and tissue blossoming into a thick, greasy perfume.

Unlike the monk Thích Quang Đuc, who had remained silent and still while he burned, Noklek began screaming at once. She tried to stand, but her ankles and wrists were tied by the string, and she tumbled, knocking over the shrine and crashing against the side of the house and keeling back onto the deck. I grabbed her and rolled her on the grass in the backyard, using my own body to smother the flames, then, as she shrieked and writhed, I sprayed her with the garden hose until she passed out, steam rising from her flesh and what was left of the white silk robe.

I was burned on my hands, forearms, and chest, the dim scars of which I carry to this day, but of course they’re nothing compared to what Noklek had to endure. She spent over a year in Bigelow 13, the burn unit at Mass General, and in a rehabilitation center. She suffered second- and third-degree burns on sixty-five percent of her body and required agonized procedures of debridement and grafting. More than once it was questionable whether she would survive, in danger of sepsis, renal failure, and infection. I had saved her life, but what kind of life did I leave her? I sometimes wondered, in the brutal light of her pain and disfigurement, if it would have been more merciful to have let her die.

I never told anyone about my conversation with Barboza, which undoubtedly had provoked the police investigation into Pink Whistle. For once, instead of waffling in indecision, I had done something, just as Joshua had always exhorted me to do, and it had been the wrong thing. The guilt I feel over this will never abate, it cannot be absolved.

I couldn’t bring myself to visit Noklek in the hospital very much, as opposed to Joshua, who went to see her every day. He put the house on the market, rented an apartment in Beacon Hill, and paid for the entire cost of Noklek’s hospitalization. He still wanted to marry her (the assistant district attorney had dropped the prostitution charge, and the INS chose not to pursue her), but she said no, and as soon as she could, she left the U.S. for Thailand, where Joshua sent her international money orders for two years, until the envelopes started to get returned, forwarding address unknown.

The Walker Street house was sold at the height of the real estate boom. Joshua, however, did not invest the proceeds very wisely, putting a lot of it in tech stocks, which took a dive during the dot-com bust. He became an itinerant, going from one artists’ colony to another for extended residencies or accepting short-term visiting writer gigs at colleges, only reappearing in Boston for sojourns of one to six months. I missed him. Regardless of what I’d told him that horrible day, I was never really done with Joshua. We would remain friends, though it would be a changed friendship, less urgent, less pervasive, with an unspoken falseness that would stiffen with time, neither one of us able to overcome a niggling discomfort with each other.

He got the attention he wanted from the Fiction Discoveries issue — calls from several literary agents. He signed up with the most prominent one, and the agent sent out his novel for auction when he finished it, but puzzlingly there were no takers. In the end, just before his thirtieth birthday, they were able to sell the book to a small press, a prestigious house as far as noncommercial publishers went, but nonetheless it was a disappointment to him.

Upon the Shore was about the inhabitants of Cheju Island during the rebellion that began there in 1948 and resulted in the massacre of tens of thousands of people by the (U.S.-backed) Korean government. Almost universally, the novel engendered stellar reviews, even getting a half-page rave in the New York Times Book Review , yet not much else happened. No bestseller lists, no book prizes, no esteemed fellowships. Joshua complained that it was because he had been marginalized, dismissed, as an ethnic writer. There might have been some truth in this. One midwestern newspaper presumed he was a South Korean writer, that his book had been translated from Korean into English.

His second novel, The Base , was set in the 1970s and portrayed the Itaewon merchants, bargirls, and civilian workers who serviced the American soldiers on Yongsan Eighth Army base. His third novel, And I Will Be Here , was about a drug-addicted Korean American female poet in a wheelchair who was stalking her Cambridge neighbor. The critical reception was less glowing, often dwelling on how unlikable or unsympathetic his characters were (the first line of And I Will Be Here was: “Just so you know, I am a hateful person”), and neither book sold well. They weren’t crossing over. With all the screeds on racism, readers felt they were being preached to. He wasn’t connecting, even, with Asian Americans. The younger generation, he was baffled to discover, wasn’t interested in the subject of race.

To me, each book was more profound and lyrical than the last. All three were beautifully bleak, quietly heartrending. They deserved better. (For years, whenever I went into a bookstore, I would locate the spines of his latest novel, rearrange the shelf, and turn the copies of his book ninety degrees so the cover would face out. I still do that now, though more and more, I cannot find any of his books in stores.)

Obsessively Joshua checked the sales rankings for his novels online. He tortured himself by reading book industry blogs and Publishers Weekly , fulminating whenever he learned about a large advance that was being given to a pretty young white writer. He railed and brooded whenever a contemporary received a rhapsodic review or prize, especially when it pertained to one writer—“our nemesis,” he called her — Esther Xing, who was offered, after her story appeared in the Discoveries issue, a two-book deal from Knopf for a story collection and a novel. The latter, which had all white main characters, became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a first for an East Asian American writer.

The person from the 3AC who had the most success was Tina Nguyen, with her wall cuts. Annie Yoshikawa was also able to make a living from her large-format photographs, although she never reached the stature of Dijkstra or Lockhart. Leon Lee and Cindy Wong did fairly well, exhibiting their paintings regularly and teaching in an art school — a joint appointment they shared as a married couple until they divorced. Phil Sudo started an improvisational jazz band, Avant Garbage, then wrote a book called Zen Guitar and traveled around the country, giving motivational speeches about incorporating Zen philosophy into music, art, everyday life, and business. He died of stomach cancer at the age of thirty-five.