Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(36)

“My God,” I said. “No wonder everyone’s suicidal here.”

Helen shrugged. She looked vulnerable, reminding me of a wounded lioness. I loved Helen best when she was vulnerable, because she was so subdued, giving me the chance to be strong for her. Afterwards, we walked over to her parents’ apartment, a two-bedroom unit that was clean and modern, with a wall of books. Her mother was home, listening to a sermon on the radio. I did not know what to expect before I met her, but I was surprised to find that she looked young, with a long, slender neck and a perm that framed her fair, elegant face. Her most intense feature was her thick black eyebrows, which were knitted into a permanent worry line. Her mother took me aside while Helen was in her room, to thank me.

    “For?”

“Being Helen’s friend,” her mother said.

“Oh,” I said faintly, “I’m lucky to be her friend.”

“I know it’s hard,” she said. “I blame myself. She took care of me before she even learned how to ride a bike.”

Helen came back out, with a book she wanted to show me. I don’t remember what it was. When I thought the time was appropriate, I made an excuse that I had to go, even though I had nowhere else to go.



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During our junior year, Erin and I paid $150 a month to live in a sagging, shingle-roofed house with aluminum siding. The matted carpeted floor was caving in. The linoleum kitchen floor was caving in. My futon frame was caving in, so every morning I woke up in a futon taco. We lived with Paul, a talented, soft-spoken African American art major, who didn’t drink or smoke, and whose only vice was that he had to be constantly making things. When he sat down to chat about his day, he had to twine a driftwood magazine rack or stitch a net out of jute at the same time. The living room became his studio: lumber, cardboard, corrugated steel, with a mange of sawdust everywhere. Erin’s room was across from mine upstairs. She could strip a cozy wainscoted room down to make it look like an East Berlin squat circa 1990. It was a monastic room with a bare bulb and a black-sheeted futon on the floor and piles of books next to the radiator. We had a plague of giant ants and Erin slammed her copy of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Outside in the Teaching Machine to kill the ants crawling out of the knothole in her room. Bam! Bam! Bam! I heard periodically throughout the day.

    The previous semester, I was in London on an Oberlin study-abroad program. That semester was the college experience I craved, since it was fun and free of drama. We had an easy schedule: We watched plays by the Royal Shakespeare Company and talked about them in class. Otherwise, I was free to wander London, delighting in banal British customs like drinking bitters in pubs, or browsing the open-air book market along the Thames where I bought a buttery-paged copy of Chekhov’s short stories, or strolling through the Columbia Road flower market spilling with delphiniums and tulips and mums. Every object was thick with culture, even the canned dal I ate for lunch.

I had a boyfriend for the first time in college. He was a pedantic and humorless jazz pianist from Utica, but he was one of two straight males in the program, and I actually felt proud for having scored him. I lived in a basement flat off the Marylebone tube stop, a block from Madame Tussauds, with three white flatmates who were wild, fun, and openly sexual. They were remarkably bold, indulging in whatever whim they had. My roommate Sonya was the most hedonistic of us but also the most disciplined. Sonya swore off sex in London—like sex was a rich chocolate she’d had too much of—which still didn’t stop her from bringing home strangers she met on the tube to do everything but fuck. Whenever we drank, my roommates stripped off their shirts and carelessly made out with each other like they were putting on a show. I was the primmest one. “Cathy has her shirt on as usual,” they said, “Come on, show us your tits.”



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—

    When I returned to Oberlin, I squirreled myself away in a carrel on the topmost floor of the library to write papers or poems. Occasionally I got trashed in sordid off-campus houses. In one house, my friends were too lazy to buy toilet paper, so they set out a sweater and a pair of scissors next to the toilet.

I was depressed to be back.

Helen was at her worst that junior year. She started using heroin and ate nothing but sour Skittles. She was especially jealous of Erin, who had a new boyfriend. Erin had a habit of diving into codependent relationships, which was why she and Helen were so intensely close, but Erin still had to have men in her life. Her new boyfriend, Jake, was especially pale and odiferous, incapable of doing anything except collecting records. Helen reminded him at every chance that he didn’t deserve Erin. She was right.

In her satiric play Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, the playwright Young Jean Lee said: “The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem. It’s like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features. Also, Asian women will date white guys who no white woman would touch.”

    Erin was attractive, talented, and smart, yet she dated a guy who was so helpless he needed Erin to assemble a turkey sandwich for him. On the surface, it appeared that Erin had the upper hand in the relationship, but men who feign helplessness—which Oberlin specialized in—can be just as manipulative as alpha males because they use their incompetence to free themselves of menial tasks that are then saddled onto women. All day long, Jake burrowed himself under the covers of Erin’s bed and Erin nurtured him as if he were tubercular. She patiently listened to him for hours while he talked about his feelings about not feeling enough. “Write about those feelings,” Erin counseled soothingly. One day, Helen barged into Erin’s room and threw a box of cookies at Jake’s head.