Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(33)
She never slept. What did she do all night when everyone was asleep? She couldn’t sleep in her own bed and regularly crashed with friends. One night, a friend woke up in the middle of the night and was freaked out to find Helen in her room, sitting in a chair, smoking her menthols in the dark.
When Helen was happy, she was both childlike and maternal. In the mornings, she’d jump into bed with me and say in a childlike voice, “Let’s go to breakfast.” Sometimes she’d also sniff my blanket, yank it away, roll it up, and throw it in the washer. Still groggy, I’d always succumb to going to breakfast with her. Eventually, I noticed that she did this more with Erin. Wake her up. Enjoin her to come out and experience the day.
* * *
—
By her sophomore year, Erin was the star of the art department. Her sculptures and installations were always the most imaginative and original. Helen was still new to art and she imitated everything that Erin did at first. She used soil in her installation after Erin used soil, made artist books after Erin made artist books—but Erin never minded, finding it flattering.
Eventually, they both became indomitable forces in the art department. They were a blitzkrieg during art crit, tearing down their classmates’ ugly sculptures with daunting acumen. Famous guest artists were not immune. One guest photographer presented loving photographs of his nude pregnant wife, and Erin and Helen dressed the photographer down for objectifying the female subject as a biologically determined object. The professors adored them. My classmates feared them. But they also resented them. Without caring that it was racially insensitive, everyone passive-aggressively mixed up Erin for Helen or Helen for Erin. They had a nickname: the Twins.
I once taught a poetry workshop with three female Persian students enrolled in the class. When I called out one of their names during attendance the first day, the student responded in a voice that was both embarrassed and defiant, “Yeah, hi, I’m the other Persian.” Half the class was white but none of the other white kids felt self-conscious about the fact that there were so many of them. But I knew how she felt. I always know when there are too many people like me, because the restaurant is no longer cool, the school no longer well rounded. A space is overrun when there are too many Asians, and “too many” can be as few as three. With Erin and Helen, I could feel my selfhood being slurred into them, but Erin and Helen didn’t care. They dressed to be aggressively present. They wore big clomping shoes. They wanted to be intimidating.
Erin and Helen were an invasion in the art department, previously dominated by white boys in ironic death metal bands who silkscreened posters for off-campus parties and moved to Chicago for the music scene. Art was a pose, an underachieving lifestyle. Erin and Helen, on the other hand, were unapologetically ambitious. Art had to have a stake.
Erin was influenced by land artists like Robert Smithson and yet her style was all her own in its brooding minimalism. She made earthworks, forming perfect miniature dirt cubes, marking each one with a dissection pin, and arranging them in patterns on the gallery floor. Another time, Erin dragged an old chair into the arboretum, sat on the chair, and spent the night digging a hole into the soil with her shoes. At the time, I made fun of her for that piece (That’s it? A hole?), but in retrospect, I can imagine its beauty during a morning walk along the marsh, seeing, in the white fog, the golden elms surrounding a lone abandoned chair and a barely perceptible depression.
* * *
—
During the year between the summer I met Erin in art camp and when I saw her again at Oberlin, she experienced a family tragedy that she is still private about to this day. I had mentioned what happened to her in this book until its final edit, when Erin intervened while we were having dinner on the Lower East Side. I was telling her about a dream I had where Helen was in my life again. I was so happy to see Helen until it dawned on me that I had to tell her that I’d been writing about her.
“By the way, you’re not writing about my family, are you?” Erin asked.
“I mention what happened,” I said. “One sentence, that’s all.”
“Off limits. We discussed it.”
“You said I could mention it but not to go into detail!”
“That’s an optimistic interpretation.”
“It was a core part of your artwork in college. I don’t see how I could not talk about it at all, since I write about your artwork.”
“Let me tell you something. When I was in Shanghai this summer, there were so many rules. Every time I asked permission to gain access to a site or equipment, the people in charge would say no. They didn’t even know what the rules were but they didn’t want to get in trouble, so it was easier to say no to everything. I had no idea how anyone got anything done until an artist told me that China is a culture of forgiveness and not permission. You break the rule and then ask for forgiveness later.”
“Are you saying that I can write about it and ask for forgiveness later?”
“No, what I’m saying is that we’re not in China. You can’t ask for forgiveness. I won’t forgive you. Our friendship is on the line here.”
“Okay. I’ll take it out.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s just—”
“What?”