with a sudden, frightening wisdom. As the train picked up speed, Meiko beseeched the sun to shift its place in the sky. When it didn’t, her realization rose up like vomit and suddenly she could find the breath to speak, the breath to scream.
“We’re moving north!” she yelled out. “Do you hear me? We’re moving north! They’re not taking us to Pusan. They’re not taking us to Shimonoseki. Do you hear me? They’re taking us north!”
But her knowledge seemed lost in the cacophony of weeping. And Meiko realized too late that this had been her mother’s worst fear all along — this, a train packed with ignorant, terrified girls, and heading in the wrong direction.
Chapter 4
I stand at my whiteboard, glossy Basic 5 storybook in one hand, green marker in the other, uncapped and ready for business. This is me, pretending to know what I’m doing. My tiny classroom is packed — fifteen Korean students aged eight to eleven. Fourteen of them sit at their miniature desks, each one littered with storybook, homework book, grammar book, and pencil case. The fifteenth student, a troublemaker named “David,” stands facing the corner of the room, his back to the class, head arched downward in shame. This is his punishment from ten minutes ago when I caught him speaking, for the third time tonight, a quick burst of Korean to one of his buddies. The Canadian flag I’ve taped to my wall hangs just above his head.
“Get the ball,” I read to the class.
“Get the ball,” the class echoes.
“Now Billy has the ball,” I chant.
“Now Billy has the ball.”
“MichaelTeeee-chore!” David weeps from the corner, as if I’ve forgotten he’s there. I look over at his slouched frame and hesitate before speaking, allowing him to stew a moment longer in my feigned authority. “Okay, David, you can sit down.” He skulks shamefaced back to his desk.
We begin working through the storybook as if it’s Henry James. I get the kids to read lines aloud, correcting their pronunciation as they go, then begin to ask leading questions about what is happening in this soccer game, and they recite back exactly what I want to hear, exactly what the storybook says. I’m obligated to stay standing and write these insights on my whiteboard, lest the school’s director (Ms. Kim — confirmed Asian spinster, a hostile little touch-me-not) looks through my classroom-door window, fixes me in her angry little crosshairs, and confronts me at the end of the night for Not Following the Curriculum. Time is winding down, so I get the kids to close their books so I can hand out their nightly quiz. For the next five minutes, they will hunch over the test with great purpose, filling in blanks with nouns and verbs left out of the exact sentences we’ve just read. I take a slow walk up the aisle to inspect the kids’ progress, hoping my presence will hurry them along. Soon I have all the tests in my hand and with a few seconds to spare — which doesn’t feel right. I’m forgetting something.
“MichaelTeacher, homework?” asks “Jenny,” one of the older girls. They always seem to be named Jenny.
“Oh shit,” I mutter aloud, and the kids all gasp in horror. I hustle to my whiteboard and begin frantically jotting down workbook page numbers and grammar exercises, reciting them aloud for the kids as I do. Meanwhile, the class bombards Jenny with a Korean phrase, which I’m sure if I could translate would say, You stupid bitch, he nearly forgot!
“No Korean, please!” I shout with my back to them, still scribbling furiously. Then the bell does chime, an annoying rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and the kids burst from their chairs and pile toward the door. Some go gliding out on their Heelys— rollerskate wheels built right into the heels of their sneakers. I finish getting all the homework down and turn around. “Did you get that?” I yell. But I’m nearly alone, except for the last couple of kids squeezing into the noisy hallway, looking back over their book bags at me with a sense of vague pity.
I am not a teacher by trade. You don’t have to be to work here. Anybody with a university degree, in anything, can come to Korea and teach English in this hagwon system. Korean parents believe in education, as best as they understand it, and this involves sending their children to as many of these after-school academies as they can afford. Kids go to public school from 8:30 until 3:00, but after that they move through a long parade of extracurricular learning — math academy, science academy, English academy, taekwondo academy — that stretches well into the evening. ABC English Planet is one of the more reputable hagwons in this neighbourhood of Daechi: we boast a regimented curriculum, reading-writing-grammar-conversation, and a staff of native-speaking teachers from around the West. And I am now one of them.
How things got this far — with me falling into the chair at my desk to watch the next class of exhausted students pour in to my room — is a tale of minor tragedy, of personal failures and squandered opportunities. Many of my coworkers here are like the guy in the baseball cap from the club — in their early twenties, recent graduates with relatively useless university degrees, spilling out of planes at the mudflats of Incheon with unfathomable student debt and a misguided sense of adventure. By contrast: I am nearly thirty years old and with a fairly practical degree under my belt: journalism. Up until the spring of 2002 I had a career as a reporter for the Lifestyles section of The Halifax Daily News. For a long time, I treated that background like a godsend, the one clear way out of my chaotic family situation and into a life that would prove stable, reliable. And, for a while, it was.
Of course, my ex-fiancée Cora would tell you that I was never a good journalist, and I would have to agree with her. I was probably two years in to the job at the Daily News before I realized that I lacked the one quality essential to being a good reporter: extroversion. I could research the hell out of any topic, learn all there was to know about occupational health and safety, Black History Month, municipal budgeting, Goth fashion — but to actually pick up the phone and call a stranger or go knock on someone’s door filled me with a gumbo of paralysis. It was only through Cora’s positive influence that I forced myself to do the sort of harassing essential to my career. She and I met at J-school and she was, even from the first semester, already a journalist’s journalist. She got on with CBC Radio at the same time that I started at the paper, and she was always pressing me to get out there, get out on the streets of Halifax and “Talk to People.” It was probably her nagging that kept me from getting fired in those tough early years. So when she eventually left me for one of her radio colleagues, some French fucker named Denis (pronounced Din-ee, never Dennis) and transferred with him to CBC in Montreal, I had a sense that I was doomed in more ways than one.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story of how I ended up slinging English like hamburgers in South Korea does not begin with Cora leaving me for another man, nor with the crippling introversion that eventually got me fired from the Daily News. No, the story starts much farther back than that.
I never knew my father. He died of a rare blood cancer when I was two and my sister Heidi was eight. What I know of him is based on the pedigree he left for me and on the photographs of him that my mother kept framed around the house, like totems to his memory. He was involved in Nova Scotia politics and worked as a speechwriter in the later years of the Robert Stanfield government. There was a photo of Dad that stood out in my childhood above all others, a picture that Mom kept on one of the crowded bookshelves in the living room. It had Stanfield in the foreground, mid-speech at a bouquet of microphones, fist raised and finger extended, and my dad in the background, arms folded loose across his chest and face full of a mirth that said I got him to say that. There were many who believed that, given time and proper mentoring, Dad would become Stanfield’s heir apparent and lead the Nova Scotia Conservatives throughout the eighties and nineties.
It was not meant to be. The cancer that arrived in the fall of 1975 took less than six weeks to kill him, or so I was told.
