Yok – I Swear

The first and last Korean swear word I learned was “shibal.” I was fifteen, my parents and I were watching a movie in the living room, and the main actor said it three times in a row as he teetered over the open window he was about to jump out of. I asked my parents what it meant.

“You don’t need to know because a young lady would never say such a thing,” my mother said while passing a plate of sliced pears to my younger sister, Soyeon.

“It’s like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ combined,” my father answered. Soyeon and I burst into laughter as our mother shot him a disapproving look.

“Shibal, shibal, SHIBAL!” we hooted. I grasped my sister’s hand and we twirled around the living room, almost knocking the pears off the coffee table as we giggled.

“Girls!” our mother yelled.

There was something about a swear word being in another language that made it seem harmless, for some reason. We didn’t know what it truly meant or what context to use it in, so we made it a filler word to explain any surge of emotion, especially since we would never dare to say “shit” or “fuck” in real life. Phrases like oh shibal, I forgot my wallet, or hey, I aced that test! Shibal! became natural whenever my sister and I talked to each other. We said it whenever and wherever we could, so long as we kept the word from our mother’s sharp ears.

I relished the way my tongue had to curl upward to pronounce the -al. We Americanized it, we said shibarrr and rolled the r’s like a trill. It became a long-standing joke—I told Soyeon that we would open a tutoring center once we finished college and name it C Bar, to get a rise out of the proper church ahjummas who gossiped about our grades. Saying shibal was stress-relieving and harmless fun. But it also became a dangerous thing, because we were slowly forgetting what it meant.

I learned this lesson the hard way, during my grandmother’s 80^th birthday celebration dinner. Our mother and aunts spent the whole day cooking a huge feast at the rented community room in the senior center. Soyeon and I joined our cousins outside by the pool and played cards. We paused when my mother waved us over to show us what would be waiting if we were good: a huge stand of mujigae dduk. She had stained each layer of the rice cake a different color and cut it in a way where every slice looked like a chunk of a pastel rainbow. I breathed in the lemon zest she sprinkled on top and smiled, knowing that she did this for me and my love of citrus. My mother was especially happy that week because I had gotten offers to interview with Brown and Oxford the day before we made the trip down to my grandparents’ house in Santa Maria. She was glowing throughout the family reunion and made sure to mention my accomplishments to my grandmother whenever she could.

When the evening came, we all changed into our best clothes and came back to the reception hall to applaud my grandmother for her grand entrance. She looked regal wearing a new, pale pink hanbok. We took pictures, listened to a lot of speeches, and then we were in line for the food. The rainbow rice cake was waiting for us at the end of the buffet table.

I was the last to sit down. I went over to my grandmother’s table to bow and thank her for the meal, and she patted my hand.

“My smartest granddaughter!” she announced to the room.

When I turned around to join the rest of my cousins sitting at the kids’ table, the button strap of my new sandals snapped off. I missed a step and then fell, hard, onto the ground with my whole body. The tteokbokki, japchae, and chicken drumsticks that were piled high on my plate rolled onto the floor. My clothes, arms, and the ends of my hair were smeared with sauce.

“Shibal,” I said under my breath as I ducked down with napkins to pick up my mess. I hadn’t noticed that the chatter in the room had come to a halt.

The smack delivered by the back of my grandmother’s hand came almost immediately after, and stung so badly from her jade rings that my cheekbones throbbed. I lifted my fingers to my face and looked up at her.

“Moon Sohee,” she said in a hard voice. “You should be ashamed of having such a foul mouth.” She lifted her skirt and made her way to my mother, who was hovering worriedly from her spot serving at the food table. She thrust a finger in my mother’s face.

“Are you proud, raising your daughter like this?” my grandmother spat. She stormed out of the hall.

Stunned, I looked towards Soyeon who was sitting at the table. When we made eye contact, she lowered her head in shame.

***

“Ah shibal, I hate this,” one of my middle school students said. I stiffened and turned around from where I was writing on the board.

“What did you just say?” I asked. The student, a tall boy named Michael, tilted his head and grinned.

“I said a bad word, Teacher,” he said. “You know what it means? You want more? Shang, gaesekki, nappeun nyun!” The other students were now laughing along with him.

The other six English teachers called Michael “Dirty Mike” because of the way he ran his mouth. When I first got my class roster, they looked relieved that I had gotten Dirty Mike and his posse. They gave me sympathetic smiles without bothering to share their tips on how to keep his behavior and daily insults at bay. I realized it was probably because none of them knew how.

On the first day of class, Michael raised his hand and asked me if I had any cigarettes in my purse, because he was craving a smoke. The students sitting near him giggled nervously and gave him admiring looks. I told him no, absolutely not.

“You look like you smoke,” he retorted. “The plainer the teacher looks, the more bad things they do.” Stung, I stood still for what seemed like an eternity. I didn’t know how to recover quickly enough to start our lesson.

There were plenty more where that came from in the days that followed. Every time I came into the classroom, I had to brace myself for the blows: “Teacher’s face is bloated today! What did you eat? She’s a pig, oink oink!” or “Ugh, Teacher’s class is haek no jaem (nuclear bomb unfun),” or “Tell us, do you have boyfriend?” to which some of the braver students in Michael’s friend group would shout in support: “Who would want to date THAT?!?!”

“Michael, come talk to me outside,” I said now in the calmest voice I could manage.

I walked out of the classroom and slammed the door behind me. It felt good, even if I knew the vice-principal would come to warn me to watch my behavior in front of the students. I didn’t care. It wasn’t just the insults—I was tired of my students ignoring me during my lessons, the way they yawned and sighed openly, how they put their feet up on their desks and ate snacks while gossiping with each other. I was nothing but a joke to them.

“What are you going to do, Teacher?” Michael asked me in the empty hallway. He was a foot taller than me. I wanted to slap the half-smile off his face.

“I’m going to e-mail your mother about how you said ‘shibal’ to your teacher,” I said. I winced a little saying the word, but the way I pronounced it made Michael look at me closely, the hints of his previous smirk now gone.

When I made my first introduction as their new English teacher two weeks ago, the students were confused. I caught snippets of their whispers in Korean: But she looks like one of us…She said she’s an American? Be quiet, she could be mixed! The vice-principal asked me to pretend like I didn’t understand what they were saying.

“They cannot know you are a kyopo, Moon Teacher,” she had said to me on my first day of work. “In this academy, we put the students’ education over ourselves. Do you understand?”

I closed my eyes. “I’m also going to tell her how you come to your English classes late, and you smoke with some of the kids during your dinner break.”

Michael chuckled under his breath. He wasn’t nearly as scared as I wanted him to be.

“Or I can call your father.” These kids had to be afraid of at least one parent.

That did the trick. Michael’s face paled in a way I hadn’t seen before.

“No,” he whispered.

When we came back into the classroom, his friends turned to him to see how he won against the teacher this time, but he ignored them and true to his word, stayed quiet for the rest of class. My heart pounded fast from the excitement of my victory.

Once the class ended at ten p.m., the students shuffled out. Michael gave me a long, sideways look as he followed them, but it didn’t make me wither like his glances normally did. I hurried down the steps of the Gubeundari subway station to beat my coworkers in catching the 10:15 train.

I stopped by the GS convenience store outside of my apartment before going up to my officetel. I usually reached for the Budweiser cans in the back of the fridge, picked up a bag of Fritos (my least favorite chips), and a pack of Ferrero Rochers. Everything American, pathetic reminders of home. Today I chose a Korean beer, a lemon KGB, and Poca chips over the Fritos, something a little different to celebrate.

When I went inside the lobby of the apartment complex, the security guard who sat behind the front desk waved.

“You…late night eating?” he asked. It was his goal to exclaim something in English to me each day before I reached the elevator.

I kicked off my shoes in the entryway, pulled off my slacks, and headed straight for the couch. I normally drank the beer and polished the bag of Fritos while re-watching episodes of The Simpsons, but tonight I pushed back the curtains covering my windows and looked down at my neighborhood below me. All of Cheonho seemed lit up, the crowds bustling through the sidewalks looking like tiny Lego people. If I cupped my hand against the glass and squinted farther off in the distance, I could see the Lotte Tower on one side, the Han River to the other, even the faint cityscape of Gangnam’s skyscrapers behind the expressway. It was beautiful, and strangely calming. There was a lot to see: the food tents on the sidewalks, the drunk businessmen stumbling out of restaurants, the colored lights of karaoke bars reflecting on the surfaces of other apartment complexes. I drank in the view for a long time, savoring the sweet taste of lemon and the quietness that came from this moment of being so-so happy.

***

“Ahnyeong-haseyeo, Moon Songsaengnim!” the class chorused in Korean when I walked into my classroom the following evening. I froze and locked eyes with Michael, who stared back evenly.

“English!” I said, but they all exchanged smug glances.

Throughout my lesson titled “Effects of Globalization,” the students interrupted me several times and pointed to the rabbit-shaped Korea on the world map.

“Stop pretending. This is your home too,” they said.

I would never win.

***

The VP came into my classroom and told my students that they were no longer allowed to speak Korean or spread rumors that I was Korean-American. She shook her finger at Dirty Mike and warned that she would now watch our CCTV footage to make sure that our classroom was an English-only environment. She glared at me before she left.

The good part about all of this was that my students didn’t act up as much as they used to. There were less exasperated sighs when I passed out vocabulary tests or in-class assignments. There were no more insults—they stayed quiet and scribbled furiously in their notebooks instead. I was satisfied with this. I couldn’t care less if they were writing curses about me in the margins, as long as they didn’t say them to my face. A person can only take so much before crumbling, and I came dangerously close in the past weeks, going on Asiana Airlines’ website every so often to check the prices of tickets back home. A person shouldn’t have to stand in front of a classroom and pray for a day that would go by without their self-esteem hitting the floor.

***

“Teacher, it is true? You speaking Korean?”

I was grading essays at my desk. A middle school girl I hadn’t seen before stood before me. Her lips were cherry red from the tint she put on in class like the rest of my female students did, and her hair was cut short in a bob with see-through bangs. She had smeared her monolids with dark brown eyeshadow to give the illusion of having bigger eyes. She wore knee-high black stockings and the bow of her school uniform blouse was crinkled like it was hastily tied. She was probably a member of Michael’s friend group that I likened to thugs.

“No, I can’t,” I made a big show of flipping through my papers.

“Emily?” Jeremy entered my room. The girl gave me one last backward glance before lowering her head and walking out.

“Did you ask her to come see you?” Jeremy frowned. “Our break time ended over half an hour ago.” He didn’t even wait for me to answer before leaving.

Frustrated, I opened a new browser and typed in Asiana’s website. I didn’t care if the VP saw this later if she browsed through my internet history. ICN-SFO, $835, for next Monday. I entered my Asiana rewards member info and saved the ticket in my cart without hitting the “purchase” option. I told myself I could do that later at home, when in reality, I ended up falling asleep on my couch while watching The Simpsons, the salt from a bag of chips burning the corners of my lips when I woke up.

***

“SHIBAL!” I heard a girl say in one of the stalls of the girls’ bathroom. I paused, letting the water from the faucet run into the sink without reaching for soap. I was already in a bad mood, but hearing the word sent an angry zap! down my spine. An unwelcome reminder.

“Aish. Shibal.” the girl muttered. I heard what sounded like the crumpling of paper.

I dried my hands with a paper towel and looked at myself in the mirror. I should have just left then. But I stared at my expression, the way the lines of my mouth curved downward in an almost permanent frown. A girl who was plain to look at, who had a bloated face, who was unfun, and unloved, an accumulation of everything my students had said about me. Someone who didn’t have the right to pretend that she could make a life for herself here.

I wasn’t going to stay still and let the student get away using such a word. Shibal? Who made it so that young students said that kind of word freely, without realizing what it could mean? I crossed my arms and stood by the doorway. The girl came out of the stall to the sink. It was Emily, her bangs a little stringy with grease, her eye makeup smudged.

“You need to watch your mouth,” I said. Emily didn’t respond. She turned to the door and I blocked her by sticking out my arm.

“You will never, say that again,” I warned.

“Not about you, Teacher,” Emily answered quietly. She pushed past me.

“You don’t go around saying ‘shibal!’” I called out after her. The word rolled so naturally off my tongue. The memories tugged—I saw a flash of flesh, jade, the red mark on my cheekbone.

Emily turned around, her eyes wide.

But suddenly, without any warning it all, it was me who was walking away from the bathroom, ignoring Emily’s “Teacher?” from behind me. I ran into the empty teachers’ lounge to catch my breath.

“Your grandmother will forgive you once you make her proud,” my mother had told me after the night of my grandmother’s birthday. It was all she could think about and remind me of. I had ruined my family’s image overnight, and was left to prove myself through my efforts.

But in the next month I would completely bomb my interview with Brown and receive my rejection letter shortly after. Oxford put me on a short waiting list, and my mother told me to wait for the acceptance letter that would come. I didn’t accept any other offers from other schools because my mother insisted that I had to get into a prestigious one. A school with a name that any Korean elder would respect. She had told me it was worth the risk, and she was so sure everything would work out in my favor. In July, Oxford sent a thin letter encouraging me to apply the following year, which meant by the time I graduated, I had nowhere to go.

Shibal knocked me off the highest point I had ever reached in my life, and ever since then I’d never reached past mediocre. My mother became quiet, more sensitive, and yelled at Soyeon to study harder to make up for her musheekan unni. Her ignorant older sister. How is any of this my fault? I wanted to scream at her. But even now, I was left to teach English at a small, private academy in Cheonho, a result of my rejections from the bigger schools in Gangnam.

I wiped my nose on my sleeve. I had moved to Seoul because I wanted to come to terms with what went wrong. I wanted to be happy here so that when I came home someday, I would try again and explain to my grandmother and mother that I was genuinely sorry, and would move my way back up. I realized now that that kind of thinking was dreams only, nothing more.

***

That night during the thirty minute dinner break, the students ran out and left me alone to scroll through ticket prices once more on Asiana’s website. I heard two, polite knocks and saw Emily standing by the whiteboard, a carton of coffee milk in her hand. I was embarrassed at my failed attempt to scold her in the bathroom, but still didn’t understand why she kept coming back to me. I motioned for her to close the door and I pulled a chair up next to my desk.

“What is it you want?” I asked her, figuring it was better for the both of us that she just say it. She offered me the coffee milk with two hands and then looked down at her skirt.

“Ssaem…dowa…juseyo,” she said softly. Teacher, please help me.

“My mother,” she continued. “My essay tests…baekjum majaya dwaeyo.” I need to score only 100’s. She put her face in her hands. Alarmed, I reached for the box of Kleenex on my desk and pulled out a few tissues. I put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a reassuring pat, the way I used to do with Soyeon whenever she was upset.

“Juhreul…ddaelyuh…” She hits me otherwise. My hand stopped mid-pat.

“Emily,” I said quickly. “I think you need to go downstairs and talk to a Korean teacher. I can’t—I don’t think—” She shook her head.

“Not them,” she said. “Giving me answer book. Please.”

She was referring to the master textbook that we teachers used to grade their vocab, assessment, and writing prompts. Mine was propped open on my desk.

“Emily, no,” I said. “That’s not fair to the other students.” She lowered her head again.

My heart was racing—why was she telling me this? What was I supposed to say? My mind flitted back to when I heard Emily cursing in the bathroom, the sound of crumpling paper. I knew I had to ping Jeremy on the teachers’ chatroom the moment she left. She was his student, and he was going to have to find a way to help her.

“Moon Teacher.” Emily rolled down one of her black knee-high socks. I had no idea what she was doing, until she slowly turned her calf and I saw the indigo bruises on the back of her leg. I gasped.

“Answers, Teacher,” she whispered. “Need 100 tests.”

I knelt down and looked at her leg. Some of the spots of her calf were yellowing—old marks. Thankfully, it didn’t look like any of the bruises had broken the skin; there were no signs of scarring. My mind raced with thoughts of what her mother used to hit her with, a ruler? A curtain rod?

I reached for my bag and dumped out the two, hard-boiled eggs I had packed for dinner out of my Tupperware. I handed them to Emily, motioning for her to rub them on her calves. My grandmother had done the same to me when I was younger, and prone to getting bruises from the sharp furniture in her house.

“Moon Teacher, you are true Korean,” Emily smiled. She rolled her sock back up to her knee. She was still eyeing the answer book that was on my desk.

“Emily, listen to me carefully,” I told her. “Does Jeremy Teacher know about this too?”

Emily frowned and shook her head. She must have come to me because she didn’t know how to explain her situation using only English with Jeremy.

“From now on, every dinner break, can you come to me?” I asked. “Maybe I can help you study? But it needs to be done the right way.”

She looked at me quizzically. “English my worst subject.”

“I will help you,” I said. “I promise.” I held out my pinky to her, and Emily’s forehead relaxed as she reached for my hand.

“Thank you, Teacher,” she said.

***

I decided to walk home to clear my head, instead of taking the train. The night air outside of the academy smelled sweet, like wafts of warm, cinnamon hoddeok and roasted walnuts. Street food vendors stationed their carts by the subway entrance, hoping to catch the students who had just been released from their cram schools for a quick snack before they went home. A group of teenagers brushed past me, the character keychains dangling off their backpacks nearly hitting me in the face. They were all wearing different colored school uniforms that had their nametags pinned on the right side of their blazers. The girls were wearing white socks that went up mid-ankle. I thought about the long, black socks Emily wore and what they covered.

Emily’s family had to have money, there was no way she could come to our academy otherwise. If Emily’s mother looked anything like the other mothers I saw downstairs in the lobby from time to time, she would wear a simple but expensive outfit, like a sweater and long skirt, complete with a big purse and short heels. She wouldn’t have a hair out of place, and her voice would be soft but sharp, the kind that warned Korean teachers to do their best when it came to looking after her daughter. I tried to imagine one of these mothers hitting the back of Emily’s legs hard enough to leave bruises, and shuddered.

The right thing to do was to tell the Korean staff about Emily and her situation. Parents hitting their children to study harder wasn’t anything new or unheard of, I knew. But the splotches on Emily’s calves were wrong. She was only in middle school, what if it continued until high school? If this was how she was punished for getting 70-80’s on her tests, what would the mother do if Emily were to seriously fail an exam?

I stopped by the twenty-four hour stationary store a few blocks from my street. I filled my basket with flashcards, notebooks, and different colored pens. There was a rack of stuffed-animal keychains by the register, holding the same kind of dolls the group of students from before had hanging off their backpacks. I turned the rack around a few times until I saw Lisa Simpson’s small, yellow face, complete with her signature pearl necklace. I put it with the rest of my things on the counter.

I went to the pharmacy next door and asked in Korean for cooling patches to put on sore muscles, the large band-aid kind. When I stopped by the GS, I grabbed chocolate and other crackers. I was determined in my resolve: I was going to help Emily no matter what.

“Deep thinking?” the security guard called to me when I had finally entered the lobby of my apartment complex.

***

I sat on the bench by the Korean staffs’ desks, waiting for the VP to call me into her office. I felt extremely guilty: once the Korean teachers talked to Emily after this, she would know I had told them everything. I wondered how Emily’s mother would react if they called her, terrified at the idea that I was making things worse and she would hit Emily even more for confiding in me. I shifted on the bench and picked at the skin on my thumb. The VP called my name, and I stepped inside her office.

“This is about Emily, the student in Jeremy’s class,” I began. The VP nodded. I decided to get straight to the point: “Emily’s mother beats her at home whenever she gets bad test scores. She has marks all over her legs. I’m worried about her.”

I watched as she took off her glasses and wiped them on her shirt before putting them back on.

“We know,” she said. “She’s told all of us before.” I stood up from my seat.

“What? What did you do?” I demanded. The VP sighed.

“Moon Teacher, it is impossible for us to contact Emily’s mother and ask her if she hits her daughter. Who are we to stick our noses in their private, family matters? Think about the consequences of asking such a thing. Emily’s mother would just move her to a different English academy. We would lose Emily as a student.”

No, I wanted to say. It’s you losing money you care about, not Emily. The VP studied the expression on my face.

“No other school in Korea is any different,” she said.

“So that’s it then? Conversation over?” I asked.

“If that’s all you wanted to see me about, please go back upstairs,” She pointed to the door. “You have night classes to prepare for.” I paused when I reached the doorway.

“On my first day here, you told me this academy was supposed to put these students above ourselves.” I let the door slam a little harder than necessary on my way out.

***

Emily came to my room right on the dot during the dinner break. She waited for the other students to file out before she came in.

“Hi Teacher!” she said brightly. I forced myself to smile and held up the paper bag that contained my purchases from the previous night.

She rummaged through them and pulled out the laminated piece of paper I had made in the teachers’ lounge. “What is this?”

I had listed in Korean a few study tactics I thought would help Emily improve her English. I used Daum Dictionary to check my spelling.

Make flash cards and study them on the bus ride to and from the academy.

Read and practice through Moon Teacher’s practice tests.

Talk to Jeremy and Moon Teachers during breaks, only in English, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

It went on and on. Somewhere in there, she was bound to find a method that would stick to her. After my meeting with the VP, I considered intercepting Jeremy’s class folder that we put at the bottom of our doors once we filled in the students’ scores, and changing Emily’s grades myself. But if I were to get caught or fired for it, what would that mean for her? Emily didn’t just need the right answers, she needed to learn how to use effective study approaches for all of her subjects. But I couldn’t help being worried, so at the bottom of the page was my phone number, where I had written: “Ask Moon! 24/7.”

“Let me know whenever you have questions,” I told her. I couldn’t say what I really meant: let me know whenever you need help. Not that I knew what that entailed, but I wanted to give her the option just in case.

Emily beamed. She put her new supplies inside of her backpack, and then shyly wrapped her arms around me for a hug.

***

“Moon Teacher, why you not eating with Jeremy Teacher and other teachers?” Emily asked me one evening. I lowered the flash cards we were using to go through that week’s vocabulary words.

The other six English teachers liked to sit in a big circle in the teachers’ lounge during mealtimes and talk about their weekends out or upcoming trips. I only stepped in to grab my lunchbox from the refrigerator, and then ate alone in my room until Emily came, which Emily had now apparently noticed.

“I guess…our personalities are different,” I said. Some of the girls brought white wine in water bottles and passed them around. The guys went to the balcony on the fire escape to smoke. I didn’t see where I belonged in either of those options.

“Babo-deul,” Emily said. They’re stupid. She smiled at me. “You are nice, Teacher.”

“Let’s focus,” I said, and held the flashcards out again. It was strange how sharp my students were with their observations of me. I wondered if this was unique to Korean students and the culture they grew up in, or if it was really that I was so readable. The kind, concerned remarks from a nicer student like Emily were just as unnerving as the cutting insults from kids like Dirty Mike.

Michael hadn’t been coming to classes for the past couple of days. A month ago, I would’ve thanked the gods for relieving my burden of having him in the classroom, but ever since I started tutoring Emily, I found myself thinking about him often. I had overheard Albert, one of Michael’s closest minions, tell the rest of the class that Michael had been suspended from school for yelling at his homeroom teacher and kicking the teacher’s desk for good measure. Some of the students tsk-ed in sad disapproval.

“One of these days he was bound to get in trouble,” Albert sighed.

I thought about the way Michael had treated me at the beginning of the term. The hurtful words he had hurled so easily at me, the way he enjoyed watching the shifts in my facial expression. Maybe his homeroom teacher was a woman too, and she got so sick of being degraded by a thirteen year-old that she made sure he would get a mark on his record for it. Why did he have to prod his teachers so much? Why was he so quick to point out the flaws of adults who were only trying to help him?

“Is this right?” Emily asked me, interrupting my thoughts. She was holding up her workbook, pointing to the answers she had written. There were two spelling mistakes, but for Emily, this was already a huge improvement.

“Almost,” I said, and we turned to her book once more.

***

I heard the commotion on the second floor before I went downstairs to see what was actually happening. The Korean staff were having one-on-one meetings with the students’ parents for the next two weeks, a protocol they did every term. Students had to be present with their parent and listen to the Korean teachers list off their grades and comments their English teachers had mentioned. A man was yelling at the Korean staff and pointing to his son, the glass door of the conference room he was supposed to be in was wide open. He was loud enough that any of our students that were soon to trickle in would be able to hear.

“Let’s see what his teacher here says,” the father was saying. “If it happened at school, it should happen here too, and so he’ll get double the punishment, won’t you son?”

Michael was easily six inches taller than his father, but he still cowed from his father’s presence. Gone were his confident smirks and his sharp tongue, so quick to come back with the perfect retorts. I realized I was relieved to see him back at the academy, even under these kinds of circumstances.

Michael looked at me, his gaze pleading, mouthing words I couldn’t quite read. His eyes flitted to his father’s torso and then back at me. He did it again—this time I saw the father’s belt buckle, and immediately understood. I put my attendance folder on the Korean staffs’ desk and went over to put my arm around his shoulder. Michael flinched from the touch, but didn’t move away.

“Sir, Michael treats me with such respect,” I said in Korean. Michael’s father glared at me.

“Who are you?” he asked me. “A Korean teacher?”

“Michael’s English teacher, but I can speak a little Korean,” I answered. “Michael is a hardworking student.”

Michael’s father heaved, deep breaths. He squinted at me.

“A kyopo? What school did you graduate from?” he asked. The only thing Korean elders cared about. Branded their children with.

“Oxford,” I said without a moment’s hesitation. “I was accepted into Brown too.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence that followed. Michael’s father seemed to be scanning me, up and down, but at last, he let out a loud, exasperated chuckle.

“Please look after my son and teach him well, even if he causes trouble,” he said. “He got punished at school, but if he does well at this academy, I would be less worried.” I could feel Michael’s shoulders relax, and I let go of him immediately. Michael’s father went back into the conference room and Michael followed him in. I went back upstairs to my classroom and waited for Michael to come back.

“Teacher, is all of this true?” Michael asked me in disbelief when he came in.

“Michael, you’re late,” I shot back. “Don’t you have a vocabulary test to study for?”

***

Emily stopped by before going into her meeting with her mother downstairs to show me the grade on her most recent test. 100—Great job, Emily! Jeremy had written at the top, with a smiley face. I gave her two thumbs-up.

“You earned it,” I said. She had taken a keen liking to the flashcard method, and tried to make a game out of it, memorizing the words and their definitions as fast as she could. It had clearly paid off.

A yellow chat bubble popped up on my screen after she had left.

Thanks for helping Emily, Jeremy said. VP told me. You helped her a lot.

My fingers paused above my keys, unsure of how to respond. I hadn’t done anything. It was Emily’s own efforts, her desire to try and make up for her grades, despite what her mother had done and might still continue to do to her. I thought I had seen a bit of myself in Emily at first. But unlike me, she jumped at the opportunity to change things around, especially because she was unafraid and persistent when it came to asking for help. She wanted to show her mother she could change.

I hurried down the stairs and burst into the lobby, hoping to catch Emily and her mother before their conference room meeting began.

“Hello omoni, I am Emily’s teacher,” I said out of breath, and offered my hand to the woman who was (indeed) wearing a sweater, long skirt, and sensible heels. Emily’s mother took my hand and shook it tentatively. The VP was holding the door to the conference room for her and the mother turned to go inside.

“Wait!” I called out. Emily poked her head out the door from hearing my voice. “Emily can you translate for me?”

I wasn’t going to pull a stunt like what I did with Michael’s father. This time, I wanted Emily to be the one to say the words. I wanted her to believe them for herself too. I looked at her mother squarely in the eyes.

“Emily is the best student I’ve ever had,” I said, enunciating each word. “She is smart, respectful, and once I go back to America, I will tell everyone that a perfect student like her exists and studies hard to make her mother proud.”

Emily’s eyes shone as she relayed the words back to her mother. Emily’s mother looked down at Emily, then back to me, then back to her daughter again. She stroked the top of Emily’s head once, gently. She gave me a curt bow and went back inside of the room.

I gestured for Emily to join her. Emily pointed to her school blazer, and right above her nametag, I could see the faint, yellow zigzag of Lisa Simpson’s head poking above the pocket.

***

The view from my apartment was really the best thing about the place. I had strung some Christmas lights I had gotten at the stationary store at the base of the window, and then rearranged my furniture so that I could press my bed right against it. I liked to turn the lights off and people-watch, with a bottle of lemon KGB in one hand and my elbow propped on the windowsill with the other. It was becoming my favorite way to decompress after a long day at work.

Earlier in the afternoon, Jeremy had called me into his classroom before our quarterly faculty meeting began. He had class rosters in his hands.

“We have to decide next term’s classes,” he said. “And Dirty Mike says he refuses to come to the academy unless you’re his teacher.”

“Give him to me,” I had answered. “I can handle him.”

Cheonho blinked softly below me now as I opened the latch of the window to listen to the lull of the noises in the neighborhood.

___________

Tammy Heejae Lee is a Korean-American writer from Northern California. She earned her BA in English and creative writing at UC Davis and an MFA in fiction at the University of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Split Lip Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and PANK. She is currently at work on her first novel.