It was regressive and petty and uneducated to care about beauty, but she did. God help her, it was closely tied to her self-esteem and probably had been since about fourth grade.
Here was Eden, arriving like a prophecy, knocking with one knuckle on the open office door. Alex motioned her in. Eden’s eyes had that jet-lagged glaze common to all the foreign students. Every year Alex assumed it would wear off by October, but it never did. She’d mentioned it once to Leonard, and of course he’d had a theory. “You know why, right? They stay up all night texting their friends back home. Refuse to adjust to American time.”
Eden sat on the edge of the chair, red backpack on her lap. It almost reached her chin — a canvas shield. “Eden, I just want to touch base with you.” No response. “You’ve been getting solid A’s on your papers, but I need you to understand that twenty percent of your final grade is class participation.”
“Okay.” She said it through her hair, barely audible. If it hadn’t been a cultural issue, Alex would have worried about depression.
“Do you feel you are participating?”
She shrugged.
“Hello? Do you?” Which was harsh. She was mad at Malcolm, not this poor girl.
Eden shrugged again. “What else could I do?” It was the most words Alex had ever heard her string together, and she was pleased to note that the English was okay. When she’d been a TA, another TA actually told her to compare foreign students’ spoken English with their written English, to make sure they weren’t plagiarizing. The implication being that they were more likely than native speakers to do so. Alex had never seen this borne out.
“There’s nothing else you can do,” she said to Eden. “You need to talk.”
“Okay.”
“Look, I understand that back in Korea you weren’t supposed to talk in class, but you’re at an American university now, and part of an American education is the exchange of ideas. Not just writing about literature, but engaging. Out loud.” She always had trouble ending conversations with students, especially ones who wouldn’t look her in the eye. “Is that something you think you can do?”
Eden shrugged and nodded, but she seemed upset, staring at the bookshelf behind Alex. She looked, for once, like she wanted to say something. But she didn’t; she just stood up and left.
Alex did take Malcolm someplace nice: Silver Plum, a twenty-minute drive from home. She overdressed, in a sheer green blouse and a silk skirt, knowing he wouldn’t say anything about it at all. It was like she was daring him not to.
He was exhausted. He wore khakis and a wrinkled blue polo shirt, and he was overdue for a haircut, curls everywhere. He ordered a scotch and gulped it down. He didn’t want to talk about his dissertation, or Chicago, or work. She didn’t even try to bring up the plans for the wedding in May, which he’d probably have talked about, but the thought was starting to make her sick. Specifically: the fact that either, after months of preparations, he’d see her in her dress and say nothing at all, or he’d say something nice and she’d suspect it was out of duty.
“I finally met Jansen’s wife,” he said. Jansen was his adviser, and apparently something of a god in the world of sociolinguistics.
“Yeah? What’s she like?”
“Beautiful. She’s just this gorgeous, sixty-whatever woman with enormous black eyes.”
“Huh.”
“I mean, they’re like pools of blackness.”
“Huh.”
“Not what I expected, you know? I thought she’d be some little mousy person. And she’s just this amazing, exuberant, stunning woman.”
Winded from the effort of that much conversation, he returned to his lasagna.
Alex caught her reflection in the window to the street, and for the love of God she looked like a circus clown, all frizz and eyes and jawbone. It was a wonder he could look at her at all. But people had found her beautiful, they really had, and one of the reasons she’d even landed on her specialty (vain creature that she was) was that Donna Edwards, her college professor for Nineteenth Century British Poetry, saw her that first day of the term and said, “You — you’re a ringer for Jane Morris!” The next day, she brought in a book with Rossetti’s Proserpine and proved it to everyone.
She wanted to grab Malcolm by the collar with one hand and say, “People would have painted me. If I’d lived in the right century, they would have paid me just to sit there!” But with the other hand she wanted to scratch out her face with a marker or a knife, obliterate every trace of ugliness, of gawky eighth grader, of hope.
Some feminist.
That Friday it wasn’t even Leonard who called her in, but Miriam Kohn, the dean of faculty. Alex was offered a glass of water, asked to take a seat on the soft leather couch. She wanted to compare the experience to being called to the principal’s office, but that had never happened to her.
“So we received a letter from a student named Eden Su,” Miriam said. She had nothing on her desk, nothing at all except her picture frames and her closed computer, and she rested her hands in her lap. “It was a request to drop your class.”
“I think I know what this is about,” Alex said. It had been one of about ten scenarios she’d rehearsed since receiving Miriam’s e-mail, and she felt her best strategy was to turn this into a friendly debate about how hard to push foreign students, and whether the class participation component was out of order.
“I’m not sure you do. Tell me what you know about Miss Su.”
“She does seem borderline depressed to me, although I question whether that’s cultural, just a matter of reserve. She’s not an English major.” Miriam was staring at her, so she kept talking. “I believe she’s a sophomore. Very good writer.”
“Yes, her writing is excellent. Tell me something: You mentioned a cultural issue. What did you mean by that?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it an issue. She’s just very quiet, and I’m sure that’s what the letter is about, that I asked her to speak more in class. I did acknowledge that in her previous schooling she likely hadn’t been asked to speak much. I hope that didn’t upset her.”
Miriam opened a desk drawer and pulled out a paper. It wasn’t folded — so it was a Xerox of the letter, and who knew how many copies were out there, and why. Miriam glanced through it. “In this exchange, did you refer to her schooling in Korea?”
“Right.” And then her stomach turned to a wave of acid. Miriam had asked it so casually, but no, this was the whole point. “Oh God, is she not—”
“No, she’s not. She’s from Minnesota, fifth-generation American. And her ethnic background is Chinese.”
Alex stared stupidly forward. Could she really have mistaken a whispered Minnesotan accent for a Korean one? She started to explain that Eden never spoke, that she looked so jet-lagged, but she stopped herself. It might only make things worse. She put her hand to her mouth to show that she was properly horrified, that she felt terrible on behalf of the girl. When really all she felt was horrified for herself.
Miriam looked at the letter again. “The issue, you understand, is the presumption that a student who looks Asian must be foreign-born. She’s quite angry, and it seems she’s involved the Minority Student Council. She says her father is upset, but we haven’t heard from him yet.”
“Can I ask why Leonard isn’t handling this, on a departmental level?”
“He felt uncomfortable with the situation.” He probably didn’t even understand what the issue was. She’d heard the man use the word oriental on multiple occasions.