When it was hot in
My Korean was never very good, but after a few months I reached a plateau where I was able to marginally communicate, but not really much more than that. It’s a pretty tough language, and I was never able to simply pick it up from my neighbors or students. I was never able to find a tutor in my town, and I knew commuting two hours into
“Sorry, very busy. So sorry. Very, very busy,” they would tell me whenever I asked about setting up lessons with them, then walk away.
The foreigners I knew in my town were no help either. “Just have your students teach you! That’s what I do and it works great!” they would often tell me, which was clearly a lie since most of them could barely even count. Besides, my students were all in middle school. They couldn’t be trusted to do anything right.
I bought a couple of books and CDs in an attempt to teach myself, but whenever I tried out the phrases and words I thought I had learned people would just look at me funny and confused, clearly unable to understand anything I had just said. I had a few Korean friends, but they just wanted to practice their English when we were together. They kept telling me that trying to learn Korean as an American was a lost cause. It seemed they were right.
So, instead, I would go to the old man with no teeth. I figured that if I was buying something from him he would be happy to help me out. Maybe we could be pals.
“Hello. How are you?” I asked, always trying my best to be polite. At one point I had asked him what his name was, but he said it quickly and since he didn’t have any teeth it was kind of hard to understand him anyway. I was too embarrassed to ever ask him again. He never asked me for my name. I’d randomly picked the laziest and most unenthusiastic tutor around.
“Good.”
“How much?” I would ask the old man with no teeth, holding up my drink, even though I knew he sold everything for 500 won, which was about fifty cents.
“500 won.”
“Really?” I asked. He nodded in return. “White man American price?”
“No! Same price for everybody!” he yelled at me, waving his hand to indicate the entire town, the everybody who was his customer. I’d never seen anybody else buy anything from him. I don’t think he really liked me very much, but at least I was a regular.
“How’s my granddaughter in school?” he would ask me every couple of weeks. His granddaughter—her name was Eun Mi—was in one of my classes, and we both knew it. I was always hoping that he would give me a drink for free, you know, to kind of grease the wheels a little bit, but he must have known that I was pretty unimportant. It wasn’t even worth bribing me with a soda.
“Your granddaughter. Eun Mi. Big problem. Bad English. More study. Go hagwon. Maybe,” I told him in a poor attempt to string together a narrative in this unworkable language. Everything I told him was completely true and I think he understood me. He nodded slowly in agreement.
Eun Mi was a terrible student, a bratty child who the entire faculty openly despised. She ranks as one of my least favorite people I have ever met. That’s quite a claim since she was only thirteen and still in middle school.
She was constantly acting up in my class and was impossible to control. All the teachers in my school had the same problem. Everything in the Korean repertoire of discipline—extra homework, bizarre tasks, stress positions, meetings with teachers and parents, making her clean the entire school, yellings, beatings—had proven ineffective. I was hamstringed myself. My lessons with her grandfather were not making as much progress as I would have liked, and she clearly was not in a race toward fluency in English. It’s not like I could sit down and have a talk with her—you know, as two people—and tell her to stop being such an asshole all the time or I would make her curse her own mother for allowing her to be born before killing her and throwing her body into the river where I went jogging, which I was on the verge of doing. Oftentimes the other teachers would just appease her enough to shut her up so that they could teach the rest of their class. In
I’d finally had enough of her one day after we couldn’t get anything accomplished. She was constantly getting up to walk around, mocking my voice in her shrill, mid-pubescent shrieking. The entire class ate it up—they thought everything Eun Mi did was hilarious, and that was equally as infuriating to me. I hated being constantly ridiculed by this irritating, spoiled child, and she got away with it in all her classes. I decided to make the whole class stay late, knowing that doing so would make all of them late to gym class, which they had immediately after mine.
The gym teacher—Mr. Kim—would sometimes give me beers to drink in the middle of the day, but he was also the school disciplinarian who had no problem striking a 13-year-old girl on the back of the head with a wooden stick hard enough to make her cry uncontrollably. He had probably made tens of thousands of kids cry over the course of his career. He was a stern, humorless man who clearly hated working at this school. The faculty loved him.
Mr. Kim once showed me a picture of himself from his military days—scowl, cigarette, crew cut, muscular build, sniper rifle in hand defending the DMZ from Communists. He’d gotten a little fatter over the years, but the scowl and crew cut still remained. Sometimes I’d catch him out back, catching a smoke break in between classes.
“Hey, look at that,” I said, pointing to the picture. “Tough guy.”
“Yeah, me,” he said, still standing at attention after all of these years. “Tough guy.”
I think that was the only English he knew. He’d probably heard Rambo say it on TV or something. Not that we were friends, or even really friendly with each other, but there were only eight men in my entire school. We had to stick together. We were his new regiment.
I asked him how old he was in the photo he showed me.
“Twenty,” he said. “Younger than you,” which, I think, was his back-handed way of telling me that I was a pussy. And I am, at least compared to him.
Anyway, the bell rang at the end of my class and all of my students started to run for the door. I told them to sit down, that nobody could leave until everyone finished their assignments.
The entire class looked to the student with the best English to talk and try to reason with me.
“We have exercise class now.”
“I don’t care.”
“We cannot be late! Teacher Kim will be angry!”
“Good. I want him to be angry at all of you.”
That’s probably the only time I’ve ever seen genuine fear in the eyes of a small child.
“Why?” she asked me.
“Because of her,” I said pointing to Eun Mi which, admittedly, was a low blow and probably not very professional. But, I didn’t care anymore. I’d had enough of her. She was the worst thing about this entire job, a job that consisted of dealing with a thousand Korean middle school girls bundled into barely manageable herds of forty.
“All? Everyone? Finish?”
“Yes. Everyone,” I waved my hand across the room just like the old man with no teeth did.
Everyone started working quickly on their assignment, something stupid like a postcard or a worksheet about the four seasons. Eun Mi was the only one who decided to call my bluff, refusing to do anything until the very last minute. At the urging of her 39 screaming classmates she finally scribbled something down and handed it in.
They all ended up being about ten minutes late to gym class and, damn, Mr. Kim was pissed. Completely livid. I saw a few of the students pointing up to my classroom, probably trying to convince Mr. Kim that I had kept them late, but Mr. Kim wasn’t the type of guy to risk being taken for a ride by a bunch of his students. They had disrespected him by coming late to his class, the reasons why were irrelevant. I’m sure the fact that they were trying to blame another teacher just made him even angrier. He didn’t care. He’d never given a student a reprieve before, and I knew he wasn’t going to start now; that would make him lose his edge. I’m sure if he still had his sniper rifle he would have given them a one minute head start and then started firing.
I had a free period after their class, so I stood at my window watching them do wind sprints outside in the middle of summer for well over an hour, forcing all of them to miss lunch. I lived in a very poor, rice paddy of a town where the school lunch was the only substantial meal a lot of my students received all day. Mr. Kim was tireless though, and I’ve never heard so much yelling come out of such a small person. Despite all the cigarettes Mr. Kim still had a healthy pair of lungs. The slow girls were encouraged to run faster with a punch to the face or a strike with a ruler. Mr. Kim was able to keep yelling at full strength for the entire time. Unfortunately, Eun Mi, in addition to be loud and annoying, was also chubby and out of shape. She did not manage to keep up very well, even with the near-constant beating she received. After the sprints Mr. Kim made them do several sets of pushups, and after school everyone had to come back and crawl twenty laps on their hands and knees around the courtyard. The other 960 students in our school took this as an opportunity to point and laugh at them as they were leaving. All of them were crying by the time I left school to go home, and they probably still had at least another hour of crawling through the dirt left to go. Mr. Kim, cold and efficient as usual, had done his job well.
After that my worst class suddenly became one of my best classes. Imagine that. They did all their work, participated more, and soon they were talking in complete sentences. Garbled, nearly incomprehensible sentences with no regard for even the basic rules of English grammar, yes, but at least there was a verb and a subject. They were starting to say things that were actually on topic, instead of continually asking me how old I was or if I had a girlfriend. Progress was being made. They were getting it, sort of. Sure, they would get lazy sometimes, but I would just remind them that I could always have a word with “my good friend, Mr. Kim,” about their lack of motivation.
Eun Mi was still one of my worst students, and she would sulk in the corner, everybody refusing to talk to her. Her outbursts were never met with laughter, as they used to be, and eventually she stopped making them. When I went to lunch I would look in their homeroom and see her eating lunch by herself, whereas before she would be standing on a desk telling jokes to everyone, the math teacher in the corner rubbing her temples. I don’t think Eun Mi had any friends anymore, partly because of me, but I could never bring myself to feel bad about it.
After a couple of weeks Eun Mi started to participate and do her work, I’m guessing out of boredom. She put in a decent amount of effort, but she was too far behind to ever really catch up—her teachers over the years had been placating her so long that she hardly even knew the alphabet—but I would pretend that I didn’t hate her and try to help her out as best I could. Sometimes she would even stay a little late, but, of course, always leave in time to make it to gym class.
A few months later when I told the class that I wouldn’t be renewing my contract and that I would be leaving
“I don’t understand,” I told her in both Korean and English.
“Ok! Bye-bye! Thank you!” she screamed really loud, waving with both of her hands in typical Korean fashion. It was her catchphrase from her days of misbehavior, something she used to scream at least 20 times per class, but now it wasn’t nearly as aggravating.
Oh, Eun Mi. I really do wish I could give you a better grade….93 out of 100,000.
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