by Don Lee
“He has a point,” Jessica said to me.
“I’ve dealt with this shit all my life,” Joshua said. “No one has to tell me racism exists, even in a liberal enclave like this. But the kids here, these chummy Crisco Gomers, they have no fucking idea. They’d say there’s no way there’s any racism at Mac. They don’t understand it’s in the media and in every aspect of society. They don’t understand they have racist attitudes hidden within themselves. It’d be a wake-up call to them. Yeah, it might seem inconsequential, just some dumb fucking slurs, but you let this go, and then what happens when someone wants to pass out white supremacist literature on campus? Or print a Holocaust denial ad in the school paper? You do nothing, it becomes approval.”
He kept sermonizing for several more minutes, using the same rhetoric. Finally, Jessica and I looked at each other, and nodded.
“We’re all in?” Joshua asked.
“I don’t want to have to go to any forums or meetings,” I said.
“Not a problem.”
“I don’t want to give any speeches.”
“You won’t have to worry about that.”
“Okay,” I said. “Full disclosure.”
The question—so obvious, it was overlooked by everyone until the flyers were already posted on the bulletin boards—was not asked until the next afternoon, in Nordquist’s office: “Do you know of anyone who might’ve wanted to target the three of you?”
“Kathryn Newey,” Joshua said without hesitation.
As he recounted to Nordquist what had happened in the workshop, I wondered why I had not thought of her immediately. Subconsciously, I must have suspected her all along. Yet it had been more than a week since that class, and in the life of a college student, a week was an eternity, other matters promptly taking precedence: needing to finish Middlemarch and Howards End; writing two term papers, the theses for which were eluding me; trying to arrange a summer job at Dutton’s Books in Brentwood, even though it would mean driving through two hours of traffic each way on the 405; and flirting with a sophomore named Amber, who said she might be in SoCal in July. There was also another factor. If it had indeed been Kathryn Newey, her sole object of ire should have been Joshua. Maybe me in addition, as a casualty of association, and because I had not defended her in class, but why include Jessica? It didn’t make sense.
“There had to have been more than one person,” Jessica said. “The handwriting on the boards doesn’t match. And there were two different types of chalk.”
None of us—not being artists like Jessica—had noticed the disparity in the white chalk or in the hastily scribbled, childlike block letters. We examined the three chalkboards, which had been unscrewed from the doors and ferried to Nordquist’s office, and saw that Jessica was right.
The likelihood of an accomplice abruptly changed things. This was racially motivated after all, not merely a personal vendetta between Joshua and Kathryn Newey. Jessica and I were implicated in this as much as he was. We had been targeted because we were Asian.
“Tyson Wallafer,” I said to Nordquist. “Her boyfriend. He must have been in on it, too.”
Everything proved anticlimactic. All the fuss I had dreaded, the protests and rallies, never materialized, because Kathryn Newey, once confronted, confessed. She had followed a progressive—a series of parties that moved from one off-campus house to another—and had gotten wasted on beer pong. It was the first time she had imbibed so much alcohol, she said. In the middle of the night, getting up to use the toilet on the third floor of Dupre, she had gone up the stairs and written GOOK PIG on Joshua’s door in a foolish, drunken moment of spontaneity.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Joshua said. Yes, he had, but then I wondered why he hadn’t accused her from the start. Why had he waited until the incident was made public?
Kathryn Newey would not, however, own up to writing the slurs on the other two chalkboards, and neither would Tyson Wallafer. He vehemently denied any complicity. He said he had passed out once he and Kathryn returned to Dupre from the progressive, and didn’t realize anything was amiss until the flyers were put up. His own brother back home in St. Cloud was a KAD, a Korean adoptee (before then, I had not heard of the acronym, nor did I know that Minnesota had one of the largest populations of KADs of any state). He would never, ever consider doing such a horrible thing to another Asian American, he told Nordquist, and then he had cried.
Nordquist negotiated a settlement. Kathryn Newey agreed to apologize to Joshua in person, write a statement admitting she had been drinking and had put the slur on his board, and submit a signed apology to him and to the entire community for publication in the Mac Weekly. She would be suspended for one semester and, to be considered for readmission, would have to enroll in a racial sensitivity course, attend AA meetings, and receive treatment from a therapist.
In the agreement were also stipulations that the school would amend its student handbook, adding penalties and procedures for hate incidents, and create a racial harassment committee. There were also pledges that, sometime in the future, Mac would institute diversity awareness workshops for all incoming freshmen, establish a multiculturalism center, and make an ethnic studies course a core requirement.
In exchange, we all consented, with our signatures, that we wished to resolve the matter without litigation or any further proceedings.
It was important, what we did, I feel now. We made the right decision, and a lot of good came out of it—a perforation in the parchment. The following year, despite my apprehensions, I joined Joshua and Jessica on the twenty-seven-member racial harassment committee, and I participated in a few forums.
Kathryn Newey never returned to Mac. She transferred to Winona State University, I heard. I don’t know what became of her, how much the incident altered the course of her life, although it must have. Winona State was not Macalester. The notation of a suspension on her academic record must have made it difficult for her to get into a better school, or to go on for a graduate degree, if that had been her plan. She was, I’m sure, bitter and depressed. She might have spent the rest of her days working on her family’s Christmas tree farm in Duluth, ruing the unfairness of her fate. Or maybe she wasn’t much affected at all, and, wherever she is, she’s fulfilled, Mac a distant and negligible memory.
In retrospect, I think we killed a promising literary career in the making—maybe not as a serious fiction writer, but possibly as a commercial novelist. She had had incipient talent as a storyteller, certainly more than I did at that juncture. I could have stood up for her during workshop and precluded all the ensuing events, but I did not. Sometimes I feel guilty about it. Just as often, I acquit myself. She was not, after all, altogether innocent. Maybe she was a racist. Maybe her story was, at its roots, patronizing and exploitative.
No evidence was ever found to connect her, Tyson Wallafer, or anyone else to the other slurs. Of course, then, after a while I began to speculate that Joshua had fabricated them. Perhaps he had heard Kathryn Newey bumping against his door that night and, after discovering what she had written, had shuffled down the hall, found a piece of chalk, and inscribed the epithets on our chalkboards. It was, given the lack of alternatives, the likeliest explanation. Maybe his intentions were even noble, albeit manipulative and perverse: to incite our ethnic pride and stir our ideological passions. Joshua would refute any suggestion of chicanery to his grave. But I always thought, and still do, that it would have been very much like him, doing something like that, in order to bind us together.
8
The 3AC did not become a formal organization until 1998. After Macalester, we scattered to different parts of the country, all for our graduate degrees. Joshua received a scholarship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he became Frank Conroy’s darling. Afterward, he landed another coveted sinecure, the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, then was given a Jones Lectureship, a cushy teaching gig that allowed him to stay in Palo Alto.
He didn’t get published in The New Yorker or The Atlant
ic, but his stories started to appear with regularity in literary journals. He was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and one of his pieces was reprinted in an anthology of Asian American writers. Things were going well for Joshua, it seemed, but then he went off the rails.
Both his parents, in their late seventies, died in quick succession in 1997. During the funerals, Joshua wept inconsolably—genuine anguish that was heartrending for me to witness. “I didn’t deserve them,” he sobbed to me. “I took them for granted because they weren’t my real parents, because they weren’t Asian.”
On several occasions, I had seen him together with the Meers, both of them bespectacled and spindly. They had been extraordinarily kind people, but Joshua’s relationship to them—and, I have to say, theirs to him—had seemed to be one of gentle indifference.
Be that as it may, their deaths precipitated several perplexing, contradictory episodes in Joshua’s life.
First, he took a temporary leave from his Jones Lectureship and went to Korea, spending weeks in search of his birth parents. At the orphanage in Pusan, he learned of a rumor that he had actually been born on Cheju-do, and he took a ferry to the island, hoping he might be able to uncover more, but the trip was to no avail. With no further leads, he migrated north, up the peninsula. He had an amorphous idea that he might repatriate and stay in Seoul, yet he felt uncomfortable in the city, and in the country as a whole. By bureaucrats and policemen, by clerks in hotels and stores, by waitresses in restaurants, by bus and taxi drivers, he was chastised for not being able to speak Korean well enough, for not being a real Korean, for being too American—all of the things he used to berate me for. He felt denigrated for having Meer as his last name, for being an adoptee, someone who was unwanted, illegitimate, abandoned, who had no lineage or family history he could claim as his own. He felt baekjeong to them, an outcaste, the lowest class, contemptible and polluted, untouchable, unspeakable. He didn’t belong in Korea.
Returning to Palo Alto, he legally changed his name from Meer to Yoon. He started a KAD support group in the Bay Area, helped organize a Korean heritage festival, became a Big Brother to a Korean teenager, joined a Korean dragon boat team, taught ESL to Korean immigrants, and, briefly, unbelievably, became born-again and attended a Korean Baptist church.
Then, abruptly, he withdrew from all these activities, denouncing them as preposterous and futile. He began siding with the burgeoning anti-TRA (transracial adoption) movement, arguing that white families who adopted Asian children were selfish and ultimately cruel, that snatching Asian babies from their homelands was a vestigial, devious form of imperialism, colonization by kidnapping, nullifying the adoptees’ ability to ever identify with any ethnicity, an effacement equivalent to genocide.
“Asian babies should grow up in Asian households,” he told me. “Otherwise, they don’t stand a chance.”
Then, just as swiftly, he rescinded this stance, deciding that the Meers had been decent and compassionate and should be honored for their altruism. He gave up his Jones Lectureship and, bankrolled by his inheritance, moved to Paris for five months.
Jessica had a tough time of it as well. Her parents might have found it acceptable for her to date Loki, but not what she chose to do next. She applied to all seven Ivy League medical schools and, unexpectedly, got into two: Harvard and Penn. She had only cursorily prepared for the MCATs, intending to do poorly on them and rid her family of this Ivy League fixation once and for all, and perhaps as a consequence—no pressure, no panic attacks—she aced the test. But she decided to turn down Harvard and Penn and attend the one other school to which she had secretly applied, the Rhode Island School of Design, to get her MFA in studio art.
Her parents disowned her. She took out loans to pay for her tuition to RISD. When she graduated, she moved to the Lower East Side in Manhattan, but floundered trying to make a name for herself as an artist while working two different jobs as a waitress and a third as an after-hours proofreader at a law firm. Enervated and losing hope, she at last found rescue through a one-year fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. It meant living in a tiny, makeshift, barely insulated studio from October through April, seasons that were gloomy and desolate on the tip of Cape Cod, and the stipend was paltry, but Jessica leapt at the opportunity for a respite.
I went to Boston, of all places, for my MFA. Unlike Joshua, I was rejected by Iowa, and UVA, and Michigan, and every other top creative writing program in the country. Walden College, a former secretarial school in the Back Bay, was small and third-rate. It didn’t have a single famous author on the faculty, and it didn’t offer me a scholarship, but I went, anyway, because they were the only ones willing to take me. “Why an MFA instead of an MBA?” my mother asked me, as if it were only a matter of changing a consonant. But I had prepared her and my father over the years, tamping down expectations of my going to law school or having any comparable professional ambitions. I was going to be a writer. Nothing they said or did could stop me. I think back now, and wonder what might have happened if I had not met Joshua. As a freshman, I had not even known a master’s of fine arts in creative writing existed.
As mediocre as Walden was, it had one redeeming attribute, an affiliation with a literary journal called Palaver, where I signed on as an intern my first semester. It was edited by my principal workshop teacher, Evan Paviromo, a British-Italian scholar, bon vivant, and wastrel. He was a charismatic, towering presence at six-foot-five, beefy verging on portly, with thick brown hair he kept long and swept back, always elegant in his blue Savile Row suits, bow tie, and matching hankie. He had no money of his own and relied on his wife’s income to fund his indulgences, including the magazine (he told me he’d come to the U.S. from London “looking for a rich widow with a bad cough”). A raconteur extraordinaire, he unfurled story after story to anyone who would listen. Stories about producing art-house films, hanging out with movie stars and politicians, spending weekends at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, and running guns and drugs for Central American dictators under the aegis of the CIA. I had a hard time believing any of it, and came to suspect that Paviromo was a con artist, questioning the authenticity of his credentials and even his Oxbridge accent.
There was no question, however, about Palaver’s reputation, which was outsized compared to its meager resources, its office a rented shithole in Watertown. Palaver had a history of discovering young writers, their stories and poems regularly plucked for prize annuals. Agents and book editors kept close tabs on the journal, scouting for new talent. A publication in Palaver had the potential to launch a career, and Evan Paviromo kept promising to launch mine.
As Joshua had predicted, with discipline I had gotten better as a writer, and in such a lackluster MFA program, I was treated with almost Joshuaesque regard. In general, Paviromo was admiring of my fiction, although I can’t say he was of much value to me as a mentor—lackadaisical and distracted and not terribly interested in his students’ work. Joshua still served that role for me, reading all my short stories and critiquing them exhaustively during late-night phone calls from Iowa City. “Paviromo said what?” he’d ask. “That asshole doesn’t know shit. Where the fuck does he come off? He’s not even a writer.” Then Joshua would break down my stories, pointing out each blunder in the structure and prose, nitpicking about words like “desultory,” “recalcitrant,” and “askance.” The ritual was withering, excruciating, but it helped, and by the time I finished my master’s thesis, a mélange of various projects that included a screenplay and a long story called “The Unrequited,” Joshua said about the latter, “Now you’re fucking cooking. This is the best thing you’ve ever done, by far. Honestly, unequivocally, all bullshit aside, you know I wouldn’t say this unless I meant it, it’s brilliant. You’ve made a huge fucking leap.” Paviromo agreed, telling me, “You know, I believe this is eminently publishable. In fact, I might want to publish it myself in Palaver,” and for years he kept stringing me along with that pledge.
Joshua trie
d to circumvent matters, submitting “The Unrequited” for me to journals in which he’d previously appeared, telling the editors they’d be blind to pass up such a gem, yet they always did, saying the story had come close but wasn’t quite right for them. Every week I’d send out photocopies of “The Unrequited,” wait eight months to a year for a response, and each time, I’d get the copies back in their self-addressed, stamped envelopes with the same apologetic rejections. I could not, for the life of me, get anything into print.
After I graduated, I was hired as an adjunct instructor at Walden, mostly assigned freshman comp and the occasional Intro to Creative Writing class. Paviromo also took me on as the office manager of Palaver, a quarter-time, minimum-wage job. I had loan payments, no health insurance, and a mounting balance on my credit card. I was making $17,000 a year.
I lived in a basement studio apartment on Marlborough Street, and the bay windows—covered with iron bars—faced the rat-infested back alleyway and were right next to the rear door, which tenants kicked open at all hours to lob their garbage into the trash cans. I was miserable there. I was miserable in Boston.
It was an old, crumbling, restive city. People were brusque and rude. No one ever said “Excuse me” or “Thank you” or held a door for you. And, yes, as Joshua had warned, it was a racist town. I didn’t have my eyelids duct-taped open, but a lot of the sinister, corrosive, subtle shit that had happened to him, I experienced, too. Everywhere I went, I found myself to be the only nonwhite person in the room. I got so tired of the where-are-you-from, what-are-you inquiries, I began to answer, “I’m a third-generation Korean American, born and raised in Mission Viejo, California,” hoping specificity would curtail stupidity, and still I got: “Hey, you speak pretty good English.” The assumption was always that I was an MIT student. That I studied engineering. That I was a foreigner fresh off the boat. That I was an overachiever, a model minority, a wimp.
