“I’m taking it out—and I swear this is not a justification to keep it in—but I think it’s a problem how Asians are so private about their own traumas, you know, which is why no one ever thinks we suffer any injustices. They think we’re just these—robots.”

    “My need for privacy is not an Asian thing—it’s an artist thing.”

“How is it an artist thing?”

“All artists are private about their lives. They do it to protect their careers.”

“That’s a huge generalization.”

“And your comment about Asians isn’t? What I’m saying is true, especially if you’re a female artist of color. If you reveal anything, they collapse your art with your life—and I don’t want my autobiography hijacking my art. Maybe back then, my loss was a deep part of me but I have worked really hard to separate my work and my identity from that loss, and I will not be knocked back down.”

“You understand that I’m not using your real name.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Erin said.

“I guess it’s a good thing I’m not friends with Helen anymore.”

“That’s something to think about. What if you were? What would she think? Where’s the care in the essay? Why is it necessary to take from other people’s lives?”

“Erin, you haven’t read the essay. There’s plenty of care. And it’s unrealistic for me as a writer not to take from other people’s lives. I’m not some friendless orphan. My life overlaps with the lives of others so I have no choice but to take from others, which is why writers are full of care, but also—if they’re at all truthful—a bit cruel.”

“As I said, our friendship’s on the line.”

“I’m taking it out!”

* * *

—

    In my freshman year, I thought I was too good for intro studio classes, so I talked my way into an intermediate drawing class with a small, owlish Greek professor, Athena Tacha, by showing her the slide sheet of my high school portfolio. I was proud of my portfolio, which was from my AP Studio Art class in high school. She held my slide sheet up to the light. When I told her I scored a 5, she put the sheet back down.

“Technically, you are advanced. But you have far to go aesthetically,” Athena said in her high-pitched Greek accent. Then she unpeeled a course registration number sticker for me to give to the registrar, but instead of handing it to me, she stuck it firmly over the slide of my pastel Gauguin-inspired self-portrait.

During crits, my classmates, who were all surly juniors and seniors, duct-taped up their drawings of badly drawn figures, the papers smeared with fingerprints since no one bothered using fixative. One senior always drew her pit bull, which she brought to class. Although I was shy and never spoke during crit, I was judgmental. I thought their drawings were lazy and unskilled. I didn’t know why my drawings were consistently dismissed. I tried but could not conquer this deskilled ugly aesthetic and continued producing obliviously feminine works. Once, Athena asked us to draw an internal organ. I drew a soft rendering of ovaries, and realizing it was too pretty, I cut out xeroxed eggs and glued them onto the picture. During crit, everyone was silent. Athena looked at my drawing and said, “Pretty colors. But why is it obscured by these eggs? It is quite silly, no?” A junior, whose hair was once blond but now the color of an old penny, snorted.

    For the first time, I was confronted with the subjective vicissitudes of artmaking. One of my favorite movies later was Spellbound, a documentary made in 2002 about the national spelling bee, where many of the contestants were immigrant or working-class children who became finalists because of grit and effort. It was so poignant, so full of hope! When a South Asian boy was stumped over the word Darjeeling, I laughed with tears in my eyes. The irony of it all! If there was any documentary that promoted America as a meritocracy, it was that film. I believed talent but also old-fashioned sweat was proportional to the artwork’s success, not knowing that no matter how hard I worked, I could not make it good. Someone else had to decide it was good, and what they decided was good had little to do with the artwork itself but the conjoining forces of staging, timing, luck, and how I comported myself as an artist. Eventually, I learned to look aloof and bored. My cords grew dirtier and I stopped washing my hair. Out of apathy more than true technique, I freed my line, allowing it to travel all over the cheap newsprint page, and Athena finally approved of my drawings.

* * *

—

In a campus that fetishized ugliness, Helen thought beauty was the highest compliment. She was firmly in the camp of Kant and Keats. Beauty did not mask nor was it a handmaiden to some higher philosophical truth. Beauty was self-evident, the highest criterion of value due to its capacity to suspend thought and freeze time, which is what she craved, a suspension of time from her existence.

    Helen was inspired by the obsessiveness of Ann Hamilton, an artist who was all the rage in the nineties. Hamilton nailed thousands of copper tags to the floor or wove rivulets of horse hair donated from slaughterhouses into an eight-thousand-square-foot carpet so that the gallery floor looked like a feral ocean. “Allusive to the fairy tale’s impossible tasks,” the scholar and poet Susan Stewart said of Hamilton’s installations, which were almost obscene in their extravagance. Of course, Hamilton had an army of helpers, whereas Helen had only herself.