The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  Jessica didn’t come home that night. After the DeLux, she and Esther ditched me to go dancing at Club Café, a gay bar.

  In the morning, Joshua and I sat at the kitchen counter, eating cereal. “No shit?” he said.

  “Did you know?” I asked him.

  “I had no idea.”

  Right then, Jessica opened the back door and walked through the kitchen, bedraggled, as if she had not slept a wink. “Hey,” she mumbled, and headed upstairs.

  Joshua and I were caught midspoon, suspended in the wake of her chimera.

  “I guess we’ll need to think of something else for you,” Joshua said, and slurped up the rest of the milk in his bowl.

  10

  It started casually—dinners at Cafe Sushi and Mary Chung’s and Koreana, then beers at the Cellar, the Plough & Stars, and the People’s Republik—and at first there was just Jimmy Fung, the wig artist.

  Jimmy was ten years older than us, in his late thirties, handsome, ponytailed, and voluble, a rather flashy guy, inclined to wear clingy shirts and black leather pants. He’d been a hairstylist in Sydney and Hong Kong and had moved to the States just before the 1997 handover. He spoke with an Aussie accent, yet had three passports, including an American one. “I’m a multinational juggernaut unto myself.” Recently he had taken over a decrepit antiques store on Arrow Street in Harvard Square and had made it into an antiques store/hair salon/art gallery called Pink Whistle. “You want Asian chicks?” he said to Joshua and me. “I’ll get you Asian chicks.”

  He got Tina Nguyen, the wall cutter, to come, then Danielle Awano, a Japanese Brazilian dancer and capoeira teacher, and Marietta Liu, a Chinese Italian harmonium player. (“What’s with all these mixed-blooded Asians?” Joshua asked. “It’s like the UN had an orgy.”)

  As the group grew, incorporating a filmmaker, playwright, actress, and other artists and writers—alas, some of them male—we decided it would make more sense to congregate at someone’s house, and eventually it became a regular happening, Sunday night potlucks on Walker Street.

  All through the fall, the rice cooker was always going in the kitchen for our buffets of Sichuan peppercorn shrimp, futomaki, dim sum, japchae, and bulgogi, washed down with sake and OB beer. Jessica, who worked Sundays at Upstairs at the Pudding, would come home after her shift finished at ten and be befuddled to find the crowd ever larger and more raucous.

  But we weren’t merely partying, we weren’t playing poker or charades or singing karaoke. We were talking, hatching plans. We talked about organizing our own exhibitions and performances and showcases and reading series. We talked about starting a newsletter, a literary journal, maybe a publishing press. We talked about volunteering in Asian communities, offering workshops and fellowships and a youth arts program, becoming a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. Already we had staked out the domain “3ac.org.”

  We talked about the representations of Asians in the media, particularly in movies and on TV shows. We lamented the China dolls, the Chinese waiters, the Japanese tourists and kung fu masters and Uncle Tongs. We bemoaned the computer nerds, the dirty refugees, the gang members, the greengrocers, and the sweatshop and laundry workers. We deplored the geishas and bargirls and lotus blossoms and Suzie Wongs and dragon ladies.

  “Orientalist masturbatory fantasy figures,” Joshua said.

  “I hate that shit so much,” Annie Yoshikawa, the photographer, said.

  “The expectation that we’re either servile or hypersexual,” Trudy Lun, a theater costume designer, said.

  “Mama-sans or dirty little yum-yum girls,” Tina Nguyen said.

  “It’s the Madonna/whore complex for bamboo fetishists,” Marietta Liu said.

  “I’m so sick of white guys hitting on me all the time,” Danielle Awano said. “I’m, like, are you for real, asshole? You think someone like you could ever have a chance in hell with someone like me, just because I’m Asian? You think I have no standards?”

  We complained about Miss Saigon and The Killing Fields, Seven Years in Tibet and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, about yellowfacing, about always having white actors in the lead and relegating Asians to the backdrop, even when it was an Asian story.

  “You know the worst?” the composer Andy Kim asked. “Sixteen Candles.”

  “The Donger!” the glassblower Jay Chi-Ming Lai said, and all the men in the group groaned, recalling the character of Long Duk Dong (“The Donger”) in the teen movie, the foreign-exchange student who had embodied every possible malignant stereotype about Asian males.

  “How many of you suddenly got nicknamed the Donger after the movie came out?” the guitarist Phil Sudo asked, and they all raised their hands.

  “People would run up to me—I mean, literally people I didn’t know, people on the street—and shout their favorite Donger lines at me,” the painter Leon Lee said.

  “ ‘Donger need food!’ ” Andy said.

  “ ‘What’s happenin’, hot stuff?’ ” Leon said.

  “ ‘Oh, no more yanky my wanky,’ ” Jay said.

  Some of the women laughed, which the men did not appreciate. “It’s not funny,” Andy said.

  “It sort of is,” Tina said.

  I had seen Sixteen Candles in ninth grade, and at the time I’d thought everything about it, including the Donger, had been hilarious, unaware that I should have been offended. I knew better now. Joshua, I could tell from his silence, had never seen Sixteen Candles. He never went to comedies.

  “That goddamn movie,” Phil said, “pretty much guaranteed I’d never get laid in high school.”

  And then, as if released by the true import of the matter, it all poured out—the various indignities and assaults everyone had had to endure, the misassumptions and slurs, the stupid, annoying questions: “What’s a good place to eat in Chinatown?” “Do you know kung fu?” “How can you guys tell Asians apart?” “No, where are you really from?” One by one, we disclosed altercations. Joshua related what had happened to him on the pier in Southie, and I described the chalkboard incident at Mac.

  “And let’s not forget Vincent Chin,” Joshua said.

  In 1982, Vincent Chin, a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese American, had been beaten to death by two laid-off autoworkers in Detroit. Chin was attending his bachelor party at a strip club called the Fancy Pants Lounge—he was to be married in five days—and the autoworkers shouted insults at Chin, calling him a Jap and saying, “It’s because of you little motherfuckers we’re out of work.” There was a fight, they were all thrown out of the bar. Outside, the autoworkers cornered Chin and bludgeoned him, teeing off on his head with a baseball bat. They received only two years’ probation, and did not spend a single day in jail. Before slipping into a fatal coma, Chin had mumbled, “It’s not fair.”

  We pledged to change things with the 3AC.

  “Fuck oath we will, mates!” Jimmy Fung said.

  We would instigate a grassroots movement, Yellow Power redux, through our art. We would support one another as Asian American artists, writers, and intellectuals, as brothers and sisters. We’d celebrate our heritage in our work and foster unity, and we’d help shape our generation’s literary and artistic attitudes.

  “We’ll be the vanguard,” Trudy said.

  “We’ll provide healing,” Tina said, “a restorative for all the Asian American artists before us who were ignored and marginalized.”

  We would deform and reform the stereotypes. We’d decrypt and decorrupt and decalcify all the old codes and symbols.

  “A mass social praxis,” Joshua said. “We’ll create counternarratives to the status quo and disorient the entire concept of what it means to be Asian American.”

  We toasted our resolve with shots of soju and baijiu. “To the 3AC!”

  “We’ll be the Asian version of Bloomsbury,” Joshua said. “It’ll be our own Harlem Renaissance. We’ll be legendary.”

  All this talk, developing these plans, was exhilarating, enlivening. I felt a remarkable accord with this group, indeed
as if we were brethren and sistren, a family. With them I did not have to explain or justify myself or worry about how I was being perceived. I could just be. No one questioned my origins. No one recoiled at the sight or thought or smell of my otherness. No one needed lessons on how to use chopsticks. There was something to be said, I had to concede, for sticking to your own kind.

  Outside, the leaves turned, the foliage revising in hues of heavenly orange, citron, russet, and scarlet. Inside, the cast of members of the collective changed as well, sometimes growing larger, sometimes succumbing to attrition.

  There were, predictably, hookups, which led, predictably, to breakups. Posthaste, Jimmy Fung laid claim to Marietta Liu, the most exotic and sensual beauty in the 3AC, and then dumped her with awkward alacrity. Annie Yoshikawa started seeing Phil Sudo. Andy Kim asked out a poet new to the gatherings, Caroline Yip, who after their first date never returned to the collective. Joshua had a fling with Tina Nguyen. It lasted his usual three weeks, near the end of which Tina said to me, “What the fuck is wrong with your friend? He’s not interested in ever doing anything with me or even talking on the phone. The sex is pure routine. He just lies there. He doesn’t care about satisfying me at all. This is just a boys’ club, isn’t it? Tell the truth, you guys put this whole thing together just to get laid.”

  Jessica, when her schedule permitted, began to infiltrate the potlucks and gab sessions, though she hardly ever spoke. Her main contributions were oyster omelets and T-shirts, which she made, upon Joshua’s request, on a borrowed silkscreen machine at the Brickbottom Artists Building, one of the shirts reading 3AC in Futura Bold, another reading 6.19.82, the date of Vincent Chin’s fateful encounter.

  Inevitably, she invited Esther Xing to the house one Sunday. I watched Esther load up her plastic plate with every offering from the buffet and then take just one small bite of each item—squashing up her face, rodentlike, as she nibbled—leaving the bulk untouched. At least she didn’t pipe up much that first night, except to deliver a few antediluvian exclamations: “That’s far out.” “That’s trippy.”

  But the next week, to my dismay, after learning that there were several other fiction writers in the 3AC, she made a suggestion. “We should form a writers’ group,” she chirped. “What night is everyone free? What about Tuesdays? We could call ourselves the Tuesday Nighters.” She looked to Joshua.

  “You know, I’m pretty workshopped out at this point,” Joshua said. “But you guys can meet here if you want.”

  “What about you, Eric?” she asked.

  Everyone turned to me and waited. “I don’t know,” I said. “I might be workshopped out as well.”

  “Come on,” Esther said, “it’d be a gas.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  In the kitchen, as Jessica and I were cleaning up, she said to me, “You know, a writers’ group might be good for you.”

  “How so?” I didn’t want to have any more to do with Esther Xing than absolutely necessary. I should have been thankful, I supposed, that Jessica had enough propriety not to let Esther spend the night at the house—not yet, anyway.

  “It might jump-start something new for you,” Jessica said.

  I resented this not-so-oblique criticism that I wasn’t writing. “I don’t see you producing anything new yourself other than sketches.” I tossed out the heap of uneaten food from Esther’s plate.

  “A studio hasn’t opened up yet.” She was on the wait list to share a space at Vernon Street Studios.

  “Why don’t you just work in the basement?” I asked.

  “I can’t work in the basement. It’s depressing down there.”

  “I’ll help you clean it up.”

  “It’s not that. It’s the light. I need light, although with the hours I’m logging these days, I don’t know if it’d make a difference. When would I have the time?”

  She was now working a total of sixty-six hours a week. In addition to Upstairs at the Pudding and Gaston & Snow, she had picked up a part-time job proofreading for the New England Journal of Medicine.

  Everyone in the 3AC had day jobs: wedding photographer, waitstaff, house painter, seamstress, carpenter, temp, freelancer, the ubiquitous adjunct teacher. Yet some had more gainful avenues of income. One woman was an immigration attorney, and more than a few were working for Internet start-ups as programmers, content developers, illustrators, graphic designers, and software test analysts. They were always discussing IPOs and when they would become vested.

  Joshua frowned upon these temptations. “You need to be willing to live on the street to be an artist,” he’d say. “Getting sucked into a career is an invitation to bail. It makes it too easy to give up. It makes it almost inevitable that you will.”

  There was certainly no danger of Palaver ever becoming a career for me. The magazine had just been turned down for an NEA grant (panel conclusion: the journal didn’t publish enough women and writers of color), and our funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council had just been halved. We couldn’t afford to hire anyone to help me in the Watertown office. I was working solo in the shithole, save for a couple of itinerant interns, and it was likely that, unless a new grant came through, my hours would soon have to be cut drastically—possibly eliminated altogether.

  My immediate preoccupation, though, was taking delivery of the new issue and preparing to send it off by presorted third-class bulk mail.

  I would have to unload and wheel in about forty boxes—each weighing fifty pounds—from the delivery truck, and stack them in the office. I would then have to stamp a thousand Jiffy No. 1 mailing bags with two impressions: Palaver’s return address on the top left, the bulk-mailing permit indicia on the top right. Stuff each envelope with a copy of the issue and close the flap with three staples. Stick on the subscriber address labels and sort the envelopes into bundles according to zip code. Wrap two rubber bands around each bundle by length and girth, then cram them into No. 3 canvas sacks. Tag each sack for delivery to the proper district hub. Rent a cargo van from U-Haul and load, transport, and unload the fifty or so sacks at the post office in Harvard Square—a total of twelve hundred pounds.

  I was in the middle of bundling and sorting envelopes when Joshua made his maiden visit to the office.

  “Jesus, this place is a dump,” he said. “I had no fucking idea.”

  The storefront office was sandwiched between a T-shirt shop and a pizza parlor on Waverley Avenue. One long room, the place was furnished with castoffs and street finds and stuffed with boxes of unsold issues and masses of junk, a museum of antiquated publishing paraphernalia: broken typewriters, light boxes, T-squares, strips of old Linotype, paste-ups of covers and galleys.

  “Not a good time,” I told Joshua. He had gone to the RMV in Watertown to renew his license and had asked to stop by on the way back. Reluctantly I had given him directions, but had said he couldn’t stay long.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  I summarized the undertaking at hand.

  “Why do you have to do this?” Joshua said. “Can’t you get interns or something?”

  “It’s faster if I do it myself.”

  “Look at yourself, dude.”

  My T-shirt was wet with sweat, my jeans filthy. My forearms were scratched from lugging boxes, my hands black from the inkpad, and my fingertips bled from wayward staple prongs.

  “You are being fucking exploited, man,” Joshua said. “You’re being treated like a slave. And you know why?”

  I heaved another stack of envelopes to the sorting table. “Why?”

  “Because you’re Asian,” he said. “Paviromo assumes, since you’re Asian, that you’re meticulous and good with numbers and conscientious—read: docile—like all Asians are, so he’ll make you do all the shit work, the clerical and computer crap, but damn if he’ll ever let you touch anything that involves any aesthetic sensibilities or, God forbid, any real editing.”

  What he was saying was accurate. The only thing Paviromo allowed me to
do editorially was screen the fiction manuscripts in the slush pile. Occasionally I’d uncover a terrific story, but Paviromo never once accepted any of the submissions I passed on to him. “Can we have this conversation later?” I said to Joshua. “I’m a little busy here, if that’s not obvious enough.”

  But Joshua wouldn’t leave. He poked around the office, playing with the Pantone flip book, punching keys on the old broken Olivetti typewriter (“You know Cormac McCarthy has used the same Lettera 32 since 1963?”), cutting some scraps of Lino with an X-Acto knife.

  “If you’re bored,” I said, “you can take off. I’ll be okay by myself.”

  But then he discovered the stacks. Palaver didn’t publish book reviews, but the journal did run a list of “Books Received” in the back of every issue, in the tiniest print, a curious feature (the lists were arbitrary in what they included, not at all comprehensive) whose sole purpose was to ensure that we were sent free books and advance reader editions by publishers.

  “This is a fucking gold mine,” Joshua said. “I can’t believe you’ve been holding these out on me.”

  He began pawing through the stacks, which were heaped precariously against the wall. We didn’t have enough shelves for the books and the many literary journals with which we exchanged subscriptions, so I had crisscrossed some bungee cords to keep them from falling over. He tugged out the new William Trevor, the new Gass and Sebald and Beattie. “Can I have this?” he kept asking.

  He smuggled the books into the backseat of his Peugeot and then, for a late lunch, bought a meatball grinder (jumbo, with extra provolone and mayonnaise) at the pizza parlor next door, eating it in the office while I continued to label and sort and rubber-band. “Don’t you have to go home and work on your novel?” I asked.