The English Academy - Part Three
Email correspondence with a friend,
the week of getting fired.
“Dear Z,
Well, I'm not the best person to ask, because I typically don't handle failure well. Usually I beat myself into the dirt until I feel punished enough. But I have failed badly before and the times when I have overcome it, it went something like this.
I did everything I could to right the wrong. I realized that my failure had already happened and I could only control what I did after that point. Moved forward and continued to try my hardest.
Every action we take has consequences.
Whatever the failing, you are worthwhile. Whatever the consequences, you are loved by some pretty imperfect fellow humans, as well. Well, maybe your consequence is losing the affection or respect of others, but you must accept that. Admitting the failure is not always enough for some people, but you can only take responsibility and try to move forward. Remember… these words are coming from a person who fails at failing well.
I hope things are okay, or at least going to be okay.
I believe in you!
B”
I put my phone down and stared at the mess of papers around me.
I was in the middle of creating new workbooks for my class, but what had felt like an immensely important task just a few minutes ago became suddenly pointless.
I glanced at the clock on the wall. Six thirty pm. If I hurried, I could eat dinner, go home to pick up my books and make it to Chinese class by seven fifteen. I glanced at the half-finished workbooks fanned out in a semi-circle around me. At first, I felt a pang of guilt but then… I realized I didn’t care at all.
This was the strange thing about working at the Academy. Everything was extremely crucial. Whatever the task was, it had to be done immediately, and it didn’t matter if it clashed with your personal schedule or abilities. Over the past nine months, I had grown so accustomed to Hattie’s increasingly difficult demands that I was no longer sensitive to what was realistic or not. The familiar jolt of urgency took over my body and I’d put down whatever I was doing to ensure that everything got finished right away. It was an absurdly inefficient way to get work done but that was how things went at The Academy. It was also why teachers burned out so fast. If they had to care so much about things that never rewarded them. After a while, they just stopped caring.
If I hadn’t been so stubborn, so unsure in my own worth, or so driven to fit into the Korean work culture, maybe I would have seen this sooner. But as it were, it took getting fired for me to see that all of my effort had been worthless.
Hattie didn’t want hard-working, clever, nice teachers. She wanted a team of mindless servants who answered to her every whim, unable to leave, unable to speak up for themselves. She wanted Monicas.
Though Hattie said I could work for one more week, I knew that meant nothing more than cleaning out my desk and quietly sinking away to make room for the new, bright-eyed, hopeful recruit to come and take my place. No doubt, the new teacher would see me teaching my final class, blank and soulless, and judge me; just the way I had with the teacher before me.
It’s a cruel thing about the education system in Korea. English academies like my own are not the only places that mistreat their teachers. The normal public schools are full of horror stories about bullying, unfair practices and little protection for the teachers who pour their love of learning and children into their classrooms. Sometimes the teachers leave their jobs, their hearts and spirits broken by the system. Sometimes they leave this world entirely, unable to bear the pressure of Korea’s society. Though I only got a taste, it was enough to leave a bitterness for many years to come.
I turned off the light in the teacher’s lounge and closed the door behind me. The only light in the Academy was the one above the reception desk, a single neon light that cast the room in an unpleasantly harsh glare. It’s amazing how different a place can look to you once your feelings have changed. When I first arrived here, The Academy had been so cheerful and sweet. Now, as I looked around, I wanted to tear down the crayon drawings of indistinguishable animals and smiling suns. False, childish representations of happiness that didn’t really exist here.
‘tap tap tap’
I whirled around at the sound of a light knocking on the front glass door. To my surprise, it was Sunny. She peered through the glass, dressed in a long, pink overcoat and layered with a Burberry scarf.
I opened the door but she didn’t come inside.
“You are still here?” She asked in her heavily accented English.
I nodded. She looked at me intently, unlike her usual, bubbly self. She spoke to me in a low voice, as though she were afraid of being overheard, and said, “come have dinner?”
Maybe it was the fact that somebody seemed to care about me. Maybe it was because I was still dazed by the way things were ending at the Academy. Maybe I was just hungry. But I nodded mutely, gathered my things and let Sunny usher me out of the school.
As I look back through the years, I’ve noticed that somehow I’ve always had an almost miraculous encounter with an unnie just when I needed one.
Sunny became like an older sister to me. After I was fired by Hattie, the school unceremoniously took back my dingy, half-basement apartment, but Sunny immediately gave me a room at her own older sister’s apartment who lived nearby. She insisted I come to her house for dinner, where I’d eat home-cooked meals with her husband and kids. She took me grocery shopping, driving me to the nicer mart, and helped me carry things back to her sister’s apartment. For the next few months, she completely took me under her wing. The Sunny whom I had met at the Academy had been full of bright smiles and energy. The real Sunny was full of wisdom and depth.
We spent many late nights talking in her living room over tea, long after her husband had gone to sleep. She kept working at the Academy for a while after I was fired and kept me updated on all of the gossip. The new teacher who took my place got pregnant by another teacher and they ended up getting married. Freya quit not long after she wasn’t given the position of head teacher at the new school Hattie opened. I ran into Evie on the street once and she apologized for never standing up for me.
“Rita just didn’t like you, for some reason,” she said, looking embarrassed. “I never knew why.”
Speaking of Rita, she quit around the same time Freya did. Sunny told me gleefully that Rita had been keeping a list over the years of any thing she felt was a personal slight Hattie had made against her. On the day that she quit, she went to Hattie’s house and banged on the door until Hattie opened it. The way Sunny explained it, her eyes wide and expressive as she dramatized the story, Rita had given her final notice and Hattie had avoided her for the remainder of her time at the Academy. Frustrated by Hattie’s inconsiderate and cowardly behavior, Rita went directly to Hattie’s house and demanded to see her.
“‘I’ve worked here like a slave for five years!’” Sunny said, putting on Rita’s gruff voice. “‘and you can’t even look me in the eye and tell me thank you'. Then she pulled out her list and read every single bad thing Hattie had done - to her face!” Sunny cackled. “Hattie was mortified. But she’s too scared of Rita that she stood there and listened to the whole thing!”
I had to admit it. I couldn’t like Rita, but I definitely admired her for that.
By the time Sunny quit working at the Academy, I had moved to my rooftop room in Seoul. We celebrated over the phone and later over 떡볶이 and 칠성. It was a new start for her and I was glad.
“I’m sorry to leave Hattie like that,” Sunny mused, stabbing one rice noodle with the toothpick, “she’ll never be able to run The Academy without me but she needs to learn. She can’t treat people the way she does. I tried to help her, to show God’s grace, but if someone will not change by love, then they will have to change by suffering.”
She winked at me, her eyes dusted with glittery eye-shadow. It was an image at odds with her ominous statement. But Sunny was right.
“In the end, people like Hattie won’t be surrounded by true friends. She lost you, our kind Becky,” Sunny grasped my hand warmly over the table, “and now, she lost me. And I’m the best!”
"You are the best,” I said sincerely.
“그럼!” Sunny replied, “I know. One day, Hattie will wake up and realize she doesn’t have anybody left. She will be all alone.”
Sunny paused then added with a wry smile, “well, she’ll have Monica. You’ll always have Monica.”
