Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(40)

I rushed to her studio. She wasn’t there. I asked Jessica if Helen was crashing at their pad. Yes, she was camping out in their apartment that always smelled of freshly baked brownies. Had she said anything about my poems? “I don’t think so?” Jessica said. I combed the library, searched the Feve coffee shop, scoured the ’Sco, where she might be found playing pool, poked into the woodshop, went back to her studio. Finally, one day, I saw Helen, across Wilder Bowl lawn, wearing her blue leather jacket, smoking her Marlboro menthols, laughing and flirting with a redheaded girl named Ashley. I hurriedly walked up to Helen and said, “Hi.”

    “Hey, you,” she said warmly. “I was looking for you.”

“You know where we live,” I said petulantly.

She said, “Let’s go sit somewhere.” It was an unnaturally warm day, so we sat down on Wilder Bowl lawn, right in front of Oberlin’s concrete spaceship of a library. With tears sparkling in her eyes, she talked about my poems, using all the words that I thought I was too intellectual to use in class, but when she said them, they sounded authentic and profound. She’d never been so moved before. I’d captured something so essential in my poems. I’d captured that soul. In my poems, I was dancing. It inspired her to make art. She read my poems all in one night and then had to read them again and savor each word.

I felt happy. I felt flooded with relief. This is all that matters in writing, I thought, to move someone like this. To move Helen. I was real again. We were real. I was here sitting on the grass with Helen.



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Then all of Helen’s artwork disappeared during winter break, two months before her senior thesis show. “Disappeared” as in got thrown away. A clerical error. The administration thought she had graduated early and gave the order to clear out her studio. Her drawings, collages, and paintings that she was preparing for her show, her documentation of her installations, all her art supplies—every trace of her artmaking was gone. As if she’d never made work in college. As if she’d never existed. The studio was scoured, repainted white.

    As a response, Helen shaved off all her hair.

When I heard that Helen drank a bottle of whiskey and shaved off all her hair, I thought, This is it. She’s going to kill herself. But of course I underestimated Helen. Stronger than her will to die was her will to endure, especially when she thought she was being tested. This was the most Korean trait about her, her intense desire to die and survive at the same time, drives that didn’t cancel each other out but stood in confluence, which made her hell to be around, lashing out at Erin and me, saying how this was God’s design telling her she shouldn’t be an artist. But she was going to prove everyone wrong, “including you,” she yelled, jabbing her finger at me when I innocently came by her studio and offered to help. In a way, Helen was right. Because not only did I underestimate her, maybe I wanted her to fail. Maybe when I heard that all of her art disappeared, I thought only of myself, and how she’d take this out on me, and what a fucking burden it was to be her friend. Helen always accused me of feeling this way, and though I denied it, she was right: I did harbor those thoughts. I felt buried by our friendship, and maybe, just maybe, if she did kill herself, it wouldn’t be so bad. I would feel unburied. I would feel free.

She proved me wrong. She did what she knows how to do best. She worked her ass off. She didn’t sleep and was theatrical about her exhaustion, staggering around, drinking a six-pack every night, spending the early hours in the woodshop, building canvas frames until she pulled off the impossible: she produced a year’s worth of paintings in a month. She used this as a test to completely reinvent her style. Helen was obsessed with the artist Eva Hesse at the time and, inspired by Hesse, she made abstract sculptural paintings, using oil, resin, and plaster to restructure the framed canvas into pliant bodily surfaces. She made paintings with skinlike protuberances the size of tennis balls; another painting was impastoed with rivulets of plaster with a metal rebar jutting out of it. Yet another painting had pearled strands of canvas draped across an exposed stretcher. Helen painted the gallery floor a bright orange, which synergized the space and brought all the paintings together. All of my misgivings vanished when I saw the show. The students and faculty were all blown away by the exhibit. At the time I thought, I will never know a genius like Helen again.

    But putting together a brilliant painting show in a month wasn’t enough for Helen. In addition, she assembled an installation in her studio, which she was debuting the following weekend. Erin told me that Helen actually wrote her own poems for the installation. I was intrigued and decided I’d see it before the show. I walked up the stairs to her studio and greeted her and her friend Jessica, who was helping her fix the lights. The walls were covered with neat layered rows of white paper. As I drew closer, I noticed that Helen had typewritten two or three lines of poetry on each page. In the corner, a small electric fan whirred, rustling the pages so they sounded like dried leaves. As I read each line, I heard influences of other poets from collections I’d lent her: Emily Dickinson, H.D., Osip Mandelstam, Paul Celan. Many lines alluded to death. As I panicked and thought, Is this some kind of elaborate suicide note? I began to read lines I knew, lines that were my own. It was a whole row of poems stolen directly from my chapbook.

    I wanted to push her off the balcony of the studio.