By Moses Kim
Today is the first day of something called the Global Leadership Program. I have my sister’s old backpack in one hand, five book reports in the other (three of which I have never read), and eleven other classmates with me, all of whom look much more studious than I could ever dream of being. Oh, and don’t forget the butterflies flittering around in my stomach.
The door opens and a man, six-foot-one at the very least, walks into the room with an impish grin. His messy hair hits that perfect balance between order and chaos, while his tidy suit betrays not a single speck of dust. If you looked up “teacher” in the old Merriam-Webster, this dude would be there.
He puts his bag down next to the podium, writes his name (Mr. Catinari) on the board, and faces us. “English is a weird language!” he declares, and my eyes widen in curiosity—and fear.
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The story of the fresh Daewon student, I imagine, is always some amazing story of brutal competition, eye-gouging schedules, and rigorous preparation. Not so for me: I practically stumbled blindfolded into the doors. The first time I had heard of the news was a cold February day in 2010, where a banner flapped over the entrance of our middle school congratulating “Lee Doo-Hwan” sunbae for his acceptance and matriculation into one of the most prestigious foreign language schools in Korea. My uncle noticed the banner on a random visit, and he told my parents, who cooed happily and pressed me for my opinion.
I knew only one thing: it would be a cold day in hell before I ever cracked open a suneung book.
So began an eight-month sprint towards admission: haphazardly putting together an application, hastily preparing for the interview (which would be in Korean, how wonderful), and generally cramming every little speck of information that would boost my chances of getting in. In the end, my survival had less to do with my efforts and more to do with the sudden change in education policy. When it turned out that the only subjects Daewon would need from me were English, math, and literature, my generally mediocre grades became a non-issue, and my path was settled.
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I stare at my first quiz paper. A crimson 1/10 stares back.
If there is one punishment Mr. Catinari doles out without discrimination, it is grammar. He sets up little presentations full of cute characters like Thomas Neckchomper that conceal horrifying lessons within them. The students of Class D are just learning how ignorant they really are.
The other classes aren’t much better for my talents or self-esteem: in Literature, Mr. Han’s readings go in one ear and out the other. In Speech and Debate, I learn just how unruly my tongue is in what I retrospectively don the Moses Kim Meltdown of April 2011. I sign up for the debate team, in some vague hope of becoming more eloquent (less useless): the first question the senior captain asks me at my audition is whether I suffer from ADHD.
But I keep trying, undeterred by just how much I suck at everything. Every Tuesday, I grab dinner from the local church in a hurry, running back up our school’s hill at 5:45 sharp to study for a quiz that I will almost certainly fail. Every step from the bottom of the hill to the doors of the school is an arduous battle, a reminder of how far I have to come.
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Eventually, the hill secures a temporary win. On the last day of the first semester, I barely secure an A in Chinese, hold back a wave of nausea, and struggle towards the subway station. I make it all the way to Gunja station before I finally lose it, rushing towards the nearest wastebasket and hurling my breakfast. I still don’t remember how I got home after that, but I remember a lot of juk, a lot of vomit, and a lot of sleep.
The next day, I go to the ER for the first time in my life. The diagnosis: advanced pneumonia, vines grasping onto my lungs and squeezing them for air. The bigger defeat for me is a psychological one, the cherry on top of a semester full of disappointments, failures, the sudden realization that I am out of gas while everybody else is chugging on towards the finish line. When I return on the first day of the summer session, it feels as if something in me has changed. I quietly begin to observe the people around me. I begin to look at what Daewon does to all of us.
It’s funny to see the universal reactions of terror whenever Mr. Catinari grins like the Cheshire Cat and produces a fresh stack of graded essays or yet another grammar quiz: everybody here lives in constant fear, whether justified or not. Even those at the top live the constant nightmare of having their position usurped. If you’re good at math, then you focus on your lousy English grade. If you are good at grammar, your essays are terrible. Every friend I look up to has his own problems, his own demons to battle. And every morning, we take the trip up the hill to confront them.
Even worse, sometimes the demons are to be our own teachers. One night in November, I return from third period to find two girls in my class weeping silently while my classmates huddle around them, patting their backs, consoling them gently. Only later do I find out that my homeroom teacher had pulled them out of class for talking earlier, berating them, declaring that neither would ever go to college. One year after the fact, the incident remains etched in my brain so clearly; mostly, I remember how it felt as if all of the heat in the classroom had been sucked out, how this haven of education had suddenly become as cold and stormy as the world outside it.
Ultimately, all we have to rely on is each other, the very people our school tells us we’re competing against for entrance to the schools we want to go to. It’s a weird state between warfare and ceasefire, where we live in constant awareness of the harsh reality awaiting us in just two years but hold each other up anyway. I love my friends all the more for how helpful they are, but I hate myself for daring to think about what happens after the end, hate myself for being selfish, two-faced, and worst of all, incompetent.
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Fast forward one year to November 22, 2012, the last day of GLP. I am one year older, several centimeters taller, and ever-so-slightly more well-read. But in many ways, I’m the same person who wandered into Daewon two years ago: awkward if assertive, talkative without a lot to say. On the outside, I bounce around, as jovial as ever, but inwardly I shudder to think of what’ll happen after today. Even as I wonder what the last words of Mr. Dranginis and Mr. Kim will be, I fear that they won’t be enough to assuage this avalanche of dread.
The last five minutes of Composition II roll around, and to my surprise Mr. Dranginis is still lecturing us on this lobster article we’ve read for the last day of class. I mean sure, this is the teacher who reacts to sentimentality by threatening to throw us out of windows, but surely the last day of the year must mean something, right?
Instead, he turns the significance of the day around on us. “The reason I’m not doing anything special for the end of class,” he explains when all of our work has been finished, “is because you shouldn’t stop learning here. If something interests you, find it. Learn more about it. Don’t let your brains turn to mush.”
Later, as Literature II, the last class of the year, rolls to its finish, Mr. Kim smiles in that wearied but genuinely happy way only he can manage and asks us to write one more haiku to close out the year. One by one, we step up to the front, smearing chalk on the tips of our fingers as we write our last words and pass the pieces onto the next person in line. To me, the board, drenched in colors and words spilling over each other, feels like endstopping, a supposed conclusion that doesn’t conclude anything.
Mr. Kim’s last words are those of Nietzsche: “One does not repay a teacher well by remaining a pupil.” As we ponder those words silently, he looks over all of us and concludes, “When we meet again, let it not be as teacher and student—but as fellow students, students of life.”
There it is, the end of two years of the most rigorous program I had ever pulled myself through, one that I entered almost by accident. We’re seniors now. The best of the best. Global leaders, as Daewon said we would be. But I don’t feel like a leader at all, and I’m not ready to leave. So instead of taking the initiative to do what my teachers had told me to, in the last thirty seconds of my junior year I do what I had learned to do so well in my time here.
I look around at what everybody else is doing.
I see one of my closest friends, one of the most compassionate, humanistic people I might ever know, devastated, rubbing tears from her eyes. I see others embracing, holding hands. Others sit in absolutely stunned silence. Others are clapping quietly. I, on the other hand, don’t know how to feel, as always. All I know is that I love these people, all of them, this time with reckless abandon.
I am the last one to leave that day, and my steps echo through the hallways to remind me just how alone I am. But something I know well but have never made room for wells up in me that day: the desire to belong, to see something bigger than myself. And sure enough, on my way to the subway station, I pass Deungchon and look at the window. Ten hands wave back. No longer are we the rivals that Daewon pushes us to be, enemies conjured by my broken mind, demons that will take years for me to fight.
But the fight begins today.
That night, I step into the room and join in.
That night, I stop being afraid.
That night, I become a fellow student of life.
----
Today is the first day of something that nobody bothered to put a title on. Today, there will be no teachers, no classes, no essays—just me, forty-eight of the closest friends I will ever make, and this backpack, so burdened over time that it now threatens to tear at the seams. We face the same hill we have fought every day for the last two years of our lives, the icy wind blowing at our backs, the swirls of dust that make it difficult to see where we are sometimes, difficult to see the people around us.
As I close this chapter of my life, I open a new one—and this time, I’m not alone.
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