A Vaguely Good Day, Even Though ... Well, You Know

In order to get to my 9 am midterm on time, I scrambled up the stairs of the train station this morning just as a train came in. I rushed toward the nearest door, saw that it was jammed with people, and headed toward the next nearest door, on the threshold of which I slipped and fell on the rain-slicked floor in a spectacular, Olympic-worthy skid that widened the eyes and dropped the mouths of everyone just inside the train door. I landed on my butt and my right elbow, and a second later, after the pain message reached my brain, I winced, rolled over, and hobbled into the doorway. I muttered under my breath, "Well, even so, I got in."

So beginneth the day. The day that followed the day that I knew I'd have. But this day, though nothing particularly good happened, was just fine. She was yar, as Tracy Lord says admiringly in The Philadelphia Story.

The test was eh. I did fine on the video exam we took on Friday, so I'll score a couple points lower on the one I took today (writing is my poorest subject -- I can never keep the grammar rules straight). My friend Gyung-li, who hopes to go to college here (she's from Beijing), found out that she passed the Korean language proficiency test required for entry, so that was happy. She called her dad in Beijing and said that he was so happy for her, he cried on the phone. (If she hadn't had passed, she would have felt this past year to have been a waste, not to mention the prospect of preparing yet another year just to apply to schools.)

I had lunch with just about everyone in my class, except the Korean-Hungarian teenager and the Russian woman. (The Russian woman looks a LOT of Masha (aka Bond Girl), my junior year roommate. Same huge brown eyes, impossibly long eyelashes, delicate facial structure, brown-blond hair, slender, long-limbed frame. Weird. Or maybe not? There is no physical look that says "American," but in other countries, I guess there might be a quintessential "look."Interesting.) "Everyone" comprises: Father Peter, the Kenyan priest; Wanloc, the Cambodian pastor-in-training; Yoko, the Japanese-language teacher; Aki, another Japanese woman; Hatsumi, another Japanese woman; Mayu, a cuter-than-should-be-allowed Japanese woman sporting two tattoos and the slowest speech speed in the so-called free world; Hank, the Taiwanese man who actually really wanted to go to Brazil; Sister Maria, the Chinese nun; and Lewis, the New Zealand sheep shearer. Quite a crew. Oh, and me.

After lunch, I got a message from Maiko, my Japanese friend, who works full-time at a Korean office. She was going to see the doctor, and asked me to come with her (though very obliquely -- she never really quite asked, just mentioned where she was going). She's been suffering from some kind of nasty intestinal thing, and has been eating gruel, essentially, for a week. I sat with her for 20 minutes or so as she received a saline drip, and listened to her.

She's been having a rough time of it lately. Her office sounds like the office from hell -- people are quitting left and right. She was yelled at this Saturday because she comes in at 8:45 am during the week and the boss wanted her to come in at 8:30 (though he never told her this). Her boss also tells her stuff like, "Why bother having a language exchange partner? Your Korean is so bad, it's not going to help." The few remaining staff have told her she should quit, and after 9 months of working in unhappy conditions, for very little money, she realized the bad outweighed the good, and resolved to quit at the end of the month. Thank goodness.

Maiko's going to come and stay with me and my dad for a few days, while she recovers from this bug, and I'm psyched -- I've always loved sleepovers, and it's nice to feel like I can do something for someone.

Maybe that's why today was yar -- I felt useful.

After Maiko went back to work (I know!), I found a couple classmates studying for the test tomorrow, and went through grammar forms with them until 6:45 pm, when I left for taekwondo. (I'm not taking this test thing too seriously. Curious.)

Taekwondo was fun, as it usually is, meaning that I was drenched with sweat and totally relaxed by the end of the hour. Jin-lo, the 16-year-old taekwondo master, teased me about my bright red nails again: "Nuna [older sister], you've got to stop catching and eating mice." This is what people say if you've got bright red nails or lips, as an alternative to, "Why the hell are your nails/lips so freaking red?" I told him, "But they're so tasty..."

Two new students came to class today, and the director, as he likes to do, pointed me out to them after class, saying that I traveled quite a long way to come to class (45 minutes or so). He also mentioned that I graduated Yale and was accepted at Harvard Law.

I felt a bit of dread when he said that, because no one there knew that until then. Sure enough, in the changing room, Bonnie, whom I've mentioned here before as the 16-year-old who hates me for some reason, suddenly took great interest in me.

"Did you go to law school or something? Where? Oh wow, Harvard? You must be so smart! Where'd you go to college? Yale? Oh my god, you must be so smart. Is everyone there really smart? I wanted to be a lawyer once. Now I think maybe a military lawyer. Did you do lots of extracurriculars in high school? What did you do? We have to do extracurriculars at my school too [she goes to an international school]."

Confucianism places much, much emphasis on education (scholars are the most highly regarded people in society), and Korea is the most Confucian of all Asian countries. So it makes sense. I just don't like it. My Japanese friends don't react this way, all oohing and ahhing over where I went to school. It doesn't suddenly make me someone worthy of speaking to.

After Bonnie left the room, one of the college students asked me in Korean what the deal was, and I explained the situation. Since she's majoring in law, I asked if she was planning to become a lawyer. She shook her head. "In Korea, you don't automatically become a lawyer if you graduate with a law degree," she said.

"Then what do you do after you major in law?" I asked.

"Work for the government, or maybe the police."

"Do you want to work for the police?"

She smiled. "It's a secret."

"Oh! Okay." I absorbed this. "But are you really going to be a police officer?"

"It's a secret," she said again, still smiling.

"Okay," I said, smiling back. "So IF you were going to be a police officer -- is that very tough?"

"Yes, the competition for any government job is pretty extreme."

I nodded. The difficulty of finding a job in Korea is a topic we've talked about in class -- young people with no experience (i.e., recent graduates) have a very hard time getting employment. As such, the retirement age is dipping lower and lower because the youngsters want a chance to step into the positions the geezers -- nowadays, people in their 40s! -- occupy. No wonder everyone wants to move abroad. No wonder there are so many visa violations on the part of Koreans.

Anyhoo. I said my goodbyes, promising to keep her secret (though I'm not sure she understood me, to tell the truth) and left the studio for the street, where my dad was waiting in the car to pick me up. I told him about the director and Yale and Bonnie, and about Maiko on the way home. Which seems sweeter to me because of this day. My, she was yar.