Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(35)

For her final project in her sophomore sculpture class, Helen soldered copper pipes and wove yards and yards of the finest white filament between the pipes. She wove for days and nights and didn’t sleep at all.

Her sculptures were always white, luminous, and pure, playing with the way your perceptions of beauty depended on where you stood, how close you looked. During crit, everyone loved her finished installation. The sculptures looked like rows of white gurneys, but up close, the detailing of the white threadwork was intricate, as if tiny spiders had threaded each filament. She was exhausted after it was done. Now get some sleep, we urged her. Helen said she would. She returned to her dorm room and swallowed a bottle of pills.



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After Helen returned from the hospital, we all became closer, bound by a pact to keep her alive, but this responsibility fell especially hard on Erin. She became Helen’s confidante, collaborator, and sister. But Erin was also the most fatalistic about Helen. After that first incident, Helen threatened to kill herself so many times that Erin and I acted like she had a terminal disease. Once, when I told Erin that Helen had to return to the hospital, Erin was silent before saying, “She’s going to die anyway.”

    This threat drove a wedge between Helen and me. I was afraid to upset her, say the wrong thing. My personality shrank until I became this weak sidekick, like the watery-eyed Steve Buscemi in The Big Lebowski. Helen, on the other hand, became magnified in her volatility. She flew into rages that did not belong in college. The doctors kept changing their diagnosis: bipolar, borderline. Whatever it was, I was mad at the school for letting her back in, because now it was up to Erin and me to take care of her. I was selfish, cowardly. When Helen became paranoid, as she often did, and accused me of wanting to abandon our friendship, I wanted to yell: You’re right! You’re a fucking lunatic and I want you out of my life! But instead, I murmured how much I loved her and how her friendship was a blessing to me.

And I did love her. One of our first late-night conversations was about our mothers. Helen’s own mother had been in and out of mental institutions for most of Helen’s youth, and Helen had shuttled not only from country to country, but from relative to relative. Helen was probably bipolar but that doesn’t completely capture her affliction. Her temperament was distinctly familial to me. She could be me, if I could unzip my skin and release all my fury. If Erin brought out the intellect in me (and my petty envy), Helen brought out what was raw in me. But I also don’t trust my memories of her. Because I can’t recall the minutia of everyday life back then, I am prone to villainize or romanticize her. I am prone to turn her into an idea. She had a picture of herself, at age five, sitting on a bench between four life-sized animatronic Pink Panthers who are dancing. She is caught off-balance, as if the panthers jolted into motion only after she sat on the bench. She looks both scared and furious. This picture captures her. What am I doing here? What is this life? Get me off now.

    After Helen tried to kill herself, her roommate kept her distance, which was a bad idea because if Helen sensed that you were pulling away from her, you were her sworn enemy. One evening, while Erin and I were downstairs waiting for her, we heard them arguing. As her roommate left their room, she muttered, “Fuck you, Helen.” Then from upstairs, we heard Helen thunder, “No, fuck you!” in a decibel that shook the house. Helen charged out of her room and shoved her roommate down the last three remaining steps. My heart was skipping in my throat. I knew that anger. How had I managed to find it in Ohio?



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I saw Helen in Seoul the summer after she downed the pills. I met her outside a subway station. Helen was a good five inches taller than the Korean women around her and looked the way she did at Oberlin, which meant that she stood out in Seoul. Her hair was shorn to a boy cut and she wore her black glasses and a tank top that exposed her bra straps. She was smoking even though there was an unwritten law at the time that women were not allowed to smoke in public. I hugged her, then tried to tuck her strap under her tank top. I was ashamed of myself for feeling ashamed of how she looked. Henpecked by my relatives, I made efforts to look feminine. “Look at you, Miss Korea.” Helen whistled.

    We turned in to an alleyway of karaoke bars, locksmith stalls, and roadside carts selling fried squid to retreat into a basement café. We ordered tea and cake, although only I ate the cake, which was spongy and tasteless. Helen ate nothing. She took off her glasses and I saw the familiar dark circles under her eyes. Helen had returned to Seoul the summer after sophomore year to recover at her parents’ home. I happened to be there too, visiting family.

Her parents, she told me, had found her a psychologist in Seoul. He was her father’s age. They chose him for her, she said, because he was a Western-style analyst. She visited him three times a week. Like a cartoon Freudian analyst, he said nothing. While she talked, he did not respond nor ask questions, only scratched on his clipboard with his pen. It went on like this for weeks until Helen demanded he say something. The analyst, much to her surprise, obliged. He lectured her for a full forty minutes as if he were unbottling his thoughts from the last sessions. Helen, according to the analyst, was an unrepentant narcissist. This was mainly the fault of her parents, who neglected to give her disciplinary boundaries because she was an only child and they lived in so many different countries. As a result, Helen was spoiled and selfish, her suicide attempt a sad stunt for attention that had caused her mother great suffering.