Read Online The Collective by Don Lee - Free Book Online

strenuous pursuit of her, but she was plainly delighted by the memory.
    My father, Andrew, came, strictly speaking, from peasant stock, and it had apparently taken a herculean effort to convince my mother and her family that he was worthy of her. My grandfather had been among the first wave of Korean immigrants, recruited as laborers for sugar plantations in Hawaii. Later, he became the manager of a small Brussels sprouts farm in Rosarita Bay, California. My father was the last of three children to be born, but the first to go to college, at UCLA. He met my mother at a social in Koreatown, and thereafter, almost daily, drove the twenty-five miles between campus and Monterey Park on the pretext of mailing a letter or needing stamps, claiming he was, just by chance, in the neighborhood, in order to see my mother at the post office where she worked.
    “You sure mail a lot of letters,” she once said. She invariably weighed each envelope and checked the zip code (which, perplexingly, always needed to be corrected) before stamping the postmark, stalling their time together.
    “I like writing letters.”
    “Pen pals?”
    “They’re friends. People I met in my travels.”
    “You’ve been to Kalamazoo, Michigan? Weeki Wachee, Florida? Eros, Louisiana?”
    He blushed red. He hadn’t intended the double entendre of the last address. He had never been to any of these places, had never journeyed outside of California. He picked the cities randomly from a road atlas and fabricated the names of the recipients and the street addresses. All the envelopes contained blank sheets of paper and were, in due course, returned to sender. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a beautiful country, if you have the time to explore it properly.”
    “Lucky man,” she told him.
    I’m thankful that, during that first Christmas home from Macalester, I began to thaw toward my mother and initiate a long-overdue détente, although my behavior could hardly have been called angelic. I could still be unforgivably judgmental, condescending, and pissy, and for that, I blamed Didi.
    Joshua, in addition to his lists, had given me a calling card number and code, ostensibly to report my impressions of the recommended books and records to him. The number, he told me, was a covert account that was charged to the FBI, which I never verified yet which terrified me for years, thinking I might be arrested retroactively for interstate fraud. However, that December and January I used it with impunity to phone Didi every day, and what distressed me, each time I called, was that she was not as miserable as I was.
    “Doesn’t everyone seem like a stranger to you?” I asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, nothing’s really changed, but we’ve changed. Don’t you see the hypocrisy and futility of everything all of a sudden? Like, it was there all along, but now that we’ve been away, now that our eyes have been opened vis-ŕ-vis what we’ve been studying and discussing, it’s blatantly obvious just how sad and empty everything is, the bourgeois vapidity of everything that surrounds us.” I was cribbing a few of Joshua’s expressions. “Like, the people who used to be our friends—I mean, I get so bored talking to them. They’re going to end up just like their parents—our parents. Do they ever think about anything other than money? There’s this inertial deadness that’s pulling everyone down. I mean, they should all just shoot themselves right now and get it over with. Why even bother? Doesn’t it seem like that to you?”
    “Not really.”
    “It’s like Pynchon says: entropy reigns supreme.”
    “What?”
    “It’s the heat-death of culture.”
    “Eric,” Didi said, “have you been smoking dope?”
    I wished I did have some dope. Didi seemed so happy. Each phone call, there was a bustle of jocularity, gaiety, in the background, people talking and cackling—a party every minute, it seemed. Didi was always distracted, continually interrupted. “What’s going on there?” I’d ask.
    “Oh, it’s just my