Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(32)

    I can’t recall how Helen came into my and Erin’s lives, only that as soon we met her, it was as if we’d known one another forever. Over the years, she began to resemble Erin, with her black wardrobe, chunky shoes, and glasses with aggressive black frames, until senior year when Helen came into her own glamorously butch look. Because her father had a career that required him to work overseas, she lived in six different countries before arriving at the Oberlin conservatory to train as a classical violinist. Then, burnt out from the pressure of performance, she transferred to the college to study religion and fine arts. She threw herself into every discipline with passion before abandoning it completely. She did this with friends and lovers, and with countries she’d lived in. Helen spoke five languages and had an ear for accents as well. After living in London, her family moved to Baltimore and Helen switched to an American accent within a week.

Nothing stuck to her. Only God and art stuck. That, and her body, which she tried to starve down to nothing. She stopped taking her lithium because it made her gain weight. One Easter week, on a cold, bright, and glittering day, she drove her father’s powder-blue Lincoln around campus, pelting friends she loved with pink marshmallow Peeps and those she detested with her lithium pills.



* * *



—

The greatest gift my parents granted me was making it possible for me to choose my education and career, which I can’t say for the kids I knew in Koreatown who felt bound to lift their parents out of debt and grueling seven-day workweeks. The wealthier Korean parents had no such excuse, ruthlessly managing the careers and marriages of their children, and as a result ruining their children’s lives, all because they wanted bragging rights. I was lucky because my father too wanted to be a poet, which he never revealed to me until I began taking a poetry class at Oberlin.

    My father’s business did so well that by the time I was a teenager, we lived in a house with a pool in a white suburban neighborhood. From my window, I used to watch sparrows swoop down to sip a teardrop of chlorinated water before swooping back up. The move did not erase the unhappiness in our family but threw it into sharp relief because of our isolation. To unpack the source of my adolescent unhappiness would be to write about my mother, which I have struggled with in this book: How deep can I dig into myself without talking about my mother? Does an Asian American narrative always have to return to the mother? When I met the poet Hoa Nguyen, the first question she asked me was, “Tell me about your mother.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s an icebreaker.”

“You have an Asian mother,” she said. “She has to be interesting.”

I must defer, at least for now. I’d rather write about my friendship with Asian women first. My mother would take over, breaching the walls of these essays, until it is only her. I have some scores to settle first—with this country, with how we have been scripted. I will only say that my mother was broken then, though I don’t know how. When illness is unnamed, the blame for it is displaced onto the child, the way I used to feel at fault just for sitting there in the passenger seat when my mother, without warning, jerked the car into the other lane, nearly crashing into another car while threatening she was going to kill us both.

    Back then, my mind was a dial tone. I hid from my mother and hid from the horrible rich kids in the high school I attended. I hid in art, and if I wasn’t in the art studio at school, I willed myself invisible on the school bus that was hotboxed with the cruelty of a bully who daily reminded my friends and me that we were ugly as dogs. No matter our income, my family could not cough up the thorn embedded in our chests. That stain of violence followed us everywhere. I thought I could escape it by moving to Ohio, but it followed me there too.



* * *



—

Erin, Helen, and I used to go to J. R. Valentine’s, a freestanding diner that always advertised a fried perch special on Tuesdays. The diner had an alpine green roof and a parking lot that collected more brown humps of snow than cars. We were invariably the only college students there, because it was a few miles outside of campus. We stayed for hours as we asked for endless refills of bad coffee or ordered odd dishes off the menu. I wish I’d had a stenographer who followed me so I had transcripts of these quotidian moments that as a whole were more life-changing than losing your virginity or having your heart broken. Freud said, in his correspondence with Josef Breuer, that “creativity was most powerfully released in heated male colloquy.” The foundation of our friendship was a heated colloquy that became absorbed into our art and poetry. When I made art alone, it was a fantasy, but shared with Erin and Helen, art became a mission.

    Helen made you think like the world would end without your art. But while she lavished you with praise, it wasn’t just flattery. She was also learning from you until she surpassed you. Helen was curious about poetry, so I lent her my phonebook-sized twentieth-century poetry anthology, thinking she’d boredly flip through it, and then I was annoyed when I found the book in her room with every other page dog-eared and underlined. Another time, I took her to the gym and showed her how to use the treadmill. While I jogged lightly for two miles, Helen cranked her treadmill up and sprinted as if she were running for her life. “Take it easy! You’re going to be sore,” I said when I was done, but Helen, drenched in sweat, wheezed on for another ten miles.