Ramblings

I was very rarely busy at my school in Korea. Lesson planning took only a couple of hours per week, and in my downtime at school I was usually at a loss for things to do. I would write emails and read and maybe try to memorize a couple of words in Korean, but that was about it. Sometimes I would look at stuff on the Internet, but most of the time I would just lean back in my chair and look up at the ceiling and daydream. I’ve always been a dreamer. After a few minutes my dreams would always turn to worries, and then the worries would morph into the same question: What am I doing in this country again? I still hadn’t found an answer.

Britney was one of my favorite students, and she was always coming into my classroom and asking me questions. She had chosen her own English name, ostensibly because of the somewhat mentally unstable American pop star.

“In English, how do you say…” and then she made a fart sound with her mouth. Her Korean faux fart sound was weak and flat, not strong and boisterous like an American fart. For a country whose entire population eats pickled cabbage at every opportunity—and so enthusiastically—I thought the impersonation would be a bit stronger, a bit more pungent. It’s times like this that I’m proud of my Americanism.

“You mean from your butt?” I knew what she was talking about, but I had to make sure. Foreign onomatopoeia is bizarre. One time I was teaching a lesson about animals and I made the mooing sound of a cow. This is how embarrassing my life was during this period, a period when I was reduced to making animal sounds in front of a bunch of kids who probably thought I was crazy. I’m glad that the only people who saw me teach were, for the most part, not paying attention.

One of my students told me, and I’m paraphrasing here, “That’s not what a cow sounds like.”

I asked the whole class to tell me what a cow sounds like, and the response was frightening, like hearing 40 cats being strangled. True, I’ve never heard a cat be strangled, but I was once in a friend’s car when he started the engine when a cat was, unknowingly, sleeping up underneath the manifold. I imagine the sounds are somewhat similar.

Britney laughed and put her hand over her mouth, like all Asian girls do. I still found this mildly annoying. Her friends didn’t understand, but Britney quickly translated and they all laughed, hands over their mouths.

“Yes,” she said. “From your butt.”

“It’s called a fart,” I told her.

“A part?”

“No, a fart. Say it with an F.”

“Fart,” she got it. She said it a couple of more times—“fart, fart, fart”—and that’s all it would take for her to remember it forever. She really was a bright kid. All of her friends tried to say it, but their pronunciation was off and, besides, they had probably already forgotten what it meant anyway.

“Why do you ask?”

“Eun Mi made a fart in class last period. It was very loud. Everybody laughed at her.”

Eun Mi was another student in the school, but she was also my nemesis—which is sad and somewhat pathetic for me to say, to actually admit I actually had a thirteen-year-old nemesis whose life I wanted to destroy—and I hadn’t broken her spirit yet. That would happen in a couple of weeks.

“You can just say she farted,” I told Britney. “It’s a noun and a verb.” She was one of my few students who understood the distinction.

“Eun Mi farted today. She is probably farting right now. She will fart again tomorrow. I think she farts very often.”

“Did it stink?” I didn’t really want to know what Eun Mi’s fart smelled like, but I always thought it was good to try to keep the conversation going with my students, especially if they were in the mood to practice.

“Stink?”

“Did it smell bad?”

“Oh yes!” She made face as she remembered it. “It was very terrible. Like bad kimchi.”

Britney told me a story about a type of kimchi her mother makes. Britney was always telling me stories about her huge, crazy, Korean family, and especially about her crazy mother. Her whole family seemed to be completely insane.

“But I won’t eat it because it tastes like a fart in a bowl. Sometimes I tell my mother that I can’t eat it because you can’t eat a fart with chopsticks.”

I thought this kid was hilarious. I don’t know if she was intentionally trying to be funny, but she must have realized by now that I thought all of these things she said were absolutely ridiculous, and I love things that are ridiculous. I guess that’s what I was doing in this country. Exploring the ridiculous.

Britney spent a lot of time complaining to me about Eun Mi and Hadrian, or, I should say, we spent a lot of time commiserating. Our student-teacher relationship was a little odd because Eun Mi was Hadrian’s favorite student, but she was actually my student—the same way Britney was my favorite student but she was actually Hadrian’s. If I could have I would have gladly traded Eun Mi for Britney—a sort of middle school prisoner exchange—and I think my life would have been much easier. I think Britney felt the same way. One time she even told me after one of his classes, “I don’t think Hadrian speaks English very well,” which I thought was poignant, sad, and accurate all at the same time.

Eun Mi and Britney hated each other, and in a way they were complete opposites. Britney was smart and popular and everybody loved her. Although it sounds kind of lame, she won first place in a poetry contest sponsored by the school, and I was under the impression that it was a pretty big deal. Eun Mi was lazy and difficult to deal with, the worst possible student in the entire school, and worse, a complete and total asshole. And, apparently, she had terrible gas. Even though I hated Eun Mi, I could almost understand why she despised Britney so much. She was an ass-kisser.

Britney, who was only fourteen, had also managed to bypass the awkwardness of adolescence that most of us have to suffer through, and she was still adorable in the way little girls are. In a few years she would probably be undeniably attractive—which I’m sure infuriated Eun Mi, whose face was brutal, like a troll.

Of course, like a lot of middle schoolers all around the world, Britney wasn’t very happy most of the time, and she would often complain to me that she wished she didn’t live in Korea anymore. Korean students, even those in middle school, often go to afterschool instruction until as late as midnight, and then come home and study more. To me it seems unnecessary. Britney told me once that she felt like a slave.

“You can always leave,” I suggested, and, even though it ran contrary to how she felt and I wasn’t even sure if it was true, I added, “It’s a free country.”

“I’m only fourteen!” She brought up a good point that I hadn’t even considered. She just seemed a lot older. She really was a lot smarter than me. It was pretty humbling.

The only thing Britney and Eun Mi had in common was that neither one of them was very athletic, but even in that regard they were opposed. Britney could write poetry and was approaching fluency in four languages—she was also excelling at Mandarin and Japanese, in addition to English and her native Korean—but she was delicate; I doubt she could have lifted more than ten pounds over her head. Eun Mi was just an oaf, plain and simple, and very uncoordinated. She was constantly falling out of her chair. Sometimes I wondered if she had an inner ear problem.

There was one girl in my classes, Sang Hee, who was the undeniable queen jock of the school. She was kind of androgynous—when I first saw her I honestly thought she was a boy from the high school next door—and she wore her gym uniform every day, all day, a habit that I thought was very strange. She had bad teeth and this really goofy laugh that was very deep and manly, like Santa Claus. But, she was nice and never disruptive, so I never had a problem with her, though I’m pretty sure her soccer ball probably could have learned English faster than she could.

On Sunday afternoons I would often go to this dirt field near my apartment and play soccer with a guy I had met at the corner store—he insisted I call him Dragon—and his friends who were all physical education students at the local university. I’ve never been good at soccer, but it was a way to get some exercise, learn some curse words in Korean, and drink beer with the locals.

Anyway, Sang Hee showed up one afternoon unexpectedly and worked us all over, scoring three goals in a row against a crew of guys eight years older than her who were all majoring in soccer. Naturally when something like that happens—I think Sang Hee was somebody’s sister—the Neanderthal in all us men wakes up and thinks he’s being emasculated, that his balls are being cut out from underneath him.

Sang Hee was very strong and didn’t mind getting pushed around a little bit—I’m sure she liked playing up to the competition—but one guy, Jin, took it a little too personally and slide tackled Sang Hee with a maneuver that was clearly illegal, and then said something to her when she was on the ground that Dragon refused to translate for me. Jin was probably trying to get inside her head, but Sang Hee wasn’t fazed by things like that. She just got up, didn’t even brush the dirt of her shirt, and eventually stole the ball back. When the time was right she planted her foot and kicked the ball as hard as she could, striking Jin in the face and splitting his lip open. I remember there was a brief mist of blood in the air, like when someone gets shot in the movies.

Sang Hee went up to Jin when he was lying on the ground. “Sorry about that,” she told him, “but next time, if you don’t want to get hurt, then it would be a good idea not to put your face between the goal and one of my shots.” After that Jin didn’t slide tackle as much.

I didn’t score any goals that day….0 out of 100,000.