Glen Choi
Glen Choi: Beginning, Middle & Zen, A Memoir
An excerpt from Beginning, Middle & Zen, a memoir by Glen Choi
Chapter 4
Fiery Baptism
“That’s awesome! @#$%&@#$%&@#$%& … This semester’s going to be fun! @#$%&@#$%&@#$%& ... Oh my! @#$%&@#$%&@#$%& ...”
Oh my was right. Other than picking up the odd interjection, I was drowning in a sea of Korean chatter of more than 30 freshmen and women. Twenty percent of what I was hearing was Korean; the rest was Greek to me. Was it Shakespeare who wrote that life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
I muted the noise and stared out the bus window. It was still half-coated with morning frost.
How did I get here, again?
It seemed like only yesterday I was back in Sweet Home Toronto, a student at Northern Secondary, where the hallways filled with the music of the English language and multiple colorful streaks of white, black and yellow skin. Encasing the hallways were the classrooms where I shared, with some, my dreams about studying the ways of the mystical Far East.
Fast forward 10 months and poof! I was now on a chartered bus bustling with English majors from Seoul National University, heading to a mountain retreat center east of Seoul for Orientation, or Frosh Week as it was known in Canada. Surrounding me were people with straight jet-black hair and black eyes. Period. I was living an episode of Star Trek, in an alternate universe amongst a race of people who were clones … of me. Fiction had become reality and my old reality like fiction.
Eyes on the prize, I quickly reminded myself, steadying my gaze through the window.
I had a Master Plan. I would study in the English department at SNU for the first two years, as a sort of language buffer zone before switching over to Oriental philosophy. Indeed, what I was hearing on the bus only confirmed my earlier suspicions: the six months of level-5 and -6 language classes I recently passed would not be enough to understand Korean-language lectures, let alone read Buddhist tomes.
We arrived at the retreat center a couple of hours later, that is, our bus and an endless parade of other chartered buses carrying about 600 frosh from the different departments in the College of Humanities. Koreans put the “C” in collectively when they party, I thought. In his most recent handwritten letter to me, Barth had mentioned that Frosh Week at the University of Toronto only involved a hundred or so frosh from his college unit. (He added that he hoped I would come to my senses and return to Toronto immediately!)
The air was refreshing and February crisp when I got off the bus. I inhaled deeply, and the cold air tickled my nose hairs. Ah, nice. A tall red-brick building stood above several lodge-type structures strewn along a strip of flat land. In the backdrop were rolling mountains that, from afar, looked as if they were covered in green mold. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw such vast and open space, if ever.
We grabbed our bags from the bus and scurried to our designated lodge, weaving our way through the throngs of students and the scene of anarchy that lay before us. We followed the lead of a few sophomore students from our department. The sophomores didn’t have a name. Well, they did, but I couldn’t remember them because I had to address them as sunbae, or “senior classmate.” It reminded me of my older sister, whom I had to address as Nuna, or “older sister,” rather than by her first name, Heesun. (Much to the chagrin of my mom, I started to call my older sister “Nunes” in high school as a nickname because the extra syllable was annoying.) Koreans believed older individuals had more life experiences and were therefore wiser and more knowledgeable than the younger folk. They played the role of invaluable mentor to the next generation. So treating such individuals as equals by, for example, calling them by their first name was considered disrespectful.
Once inside, we dropped our bags in the corners and were instructed to sit on the floor in a circle. The air in the room was dull and chilly, so I kept my jacket on. I sat down where I was, cross-legged, although my tight jeans did their best to resist. I lowered my gaze and waited in silence, pressing the tips of my crossed fingers hard against my knuckles. I looked up and around the room, doing my best to avoid my classmates’ eyes while I did so. About half of my department was women. I squirmed and swayed my upper body and re-crossed my legs. I then spread them forward, bent my knees and wrapped my arms around them. My legs weren’t used to sitting cross-legged for an extended length of time.
The trio of sunbaes, who remained standing, spoke up. They introduced themselves one by one. I forgot their names just as soon as the next person started speaking. Korean names didn’t register in my head the way English ones did, in part because Korean nomenclature started with the surname, which threw me off. I was “Choi Glen” here, not “Glen Choi,” and my identity was literally reversed in my new world.
My classmates woo-hooed and clapped after their intros.
“Now,” one of the male sunbaes said, “we’d like each of you to stand up, one by one, and introduce yourselves.”
I felt a sharp pain in the pit of my stomach. I had never given a speech in front of native Koreans before, let alone in their own language. Come to think of it, I had rarely done this in English.
The introductions started at one end of the circle. Luckily, I was sitting in the middle of the pack, which gave me the much-needed time to formulate in my head how to say what I wanted to say.
The first person got up to speak. It was game on, and my heart started pounding. Korean verbs, nouns, articles, connectors, conjugations: these were all jumbled and floating around in my brain, and I had to quickly catch them, bring them down, arrange them in order and then rehearse in my head at least once before I opened my mouth. I felt like a rookie stand-up comedian about to test his material in front of a live audience.
Shoot. The first two people who spoke didn’t just say hi and state their names for the record. I was hoping they would because that, then, would be the general expectation of me. They said hi, my name is so-and-so, and – I couldn’t believe it – touched on their motivations for studying English. They then ended with some obligatory rhetoric: “I look forward to getting to know all of you better during Orientation.”
I should do the same, I told myself. You don’t want to be seen as the aloof, non-conformist type, Glen.
The English version of my spiel was done in my head in 30 seconds:
“Hi, my name is Glen Choi, and I’m from Canada. I want to study Oriental philosophy later on, but I chose English literature for now because my Korean language skills still need work. I look forward to getting to know all of you better during Orientation.”
Perfect. I immediately went to work on translating this into Korean.
Shit. How do you say “for now” again? I thought. My brain felt constipated. I pushed and pushed until the word popped out.
Right, “imshi.”
And “still need work”? I think “bujok hada”?
I had to get English syntax out of my head. No, I told myself, it was no longer subject-verb-object, but subject-object-verb. My brain felt murky as I made the switch, as if I was swimming upstream through a polluted river.
As my turn to speak inched ever closer, the mental chatter devolved into a frenzied pitch.
Deep breath.
What if I blank?
Shush!
How many more people ’til my turn?
My turn had arrived. The world unfolded before me in a dreamy slo-mo sequence. The time it took me to pick myself up off the floor, stand up, give my shirt a quick tug and clear my throat seemed like minutes rather than seconds. Once I opened my mouth, my brain made a sharp right turn onto a highway and picked up speed. I completed my speech in what seemed like a few seconds, when it was probably closer to a minute in reality.
As I sat back down to a round of obligatory applause, the stiffness in my neck, arms and legs began to loosen. The ordeal was over, and my anxiety dissolved into a quiet sigh. I could now sit back, relax and enjoy the rest of the show. But my mind made a sharp U-ey. It wanted to conduct a post-mortem analysis of my spiel: was the grammar perfect? Did I say anything awkward? Did I embarrass myself …?
“Sarang haeyo.”
Out of the corner of my ear did I hear this. It was said in the soft gooey lilt of a mother fawning over her 2-month-old baby. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Neither I nor any of my friends from Northern – female or male – ever talked like that to each other. This was an attempt at cuteness, obviously, but it was overkill, cringeworthy, beyond normal, at least for the situation. Yet I heard only a round of warm chuckles and impassioned applause from the audience afterward. I looked up to my left to see a blushing female classmate sitting back down.
Wait a minute, I thought – something else is funny here. Sarang haeyo just means “to love,” the verb only. Did I miss something? Love whom? And who loves whom?
Once the introductions were complete and our group dispersed, I meandered my way over to Lee Hae-il, a tall and lanky classmate to whom I gravitated on the bus ride over. He spoke in soft and inviting monotones. I asked him what our classmate meant by sarang haeyo.
“You don’t know the meaning of ‘Sarang hae?’” he said, somewhat surprised.
“I do,” I said. “But … she loves somebody … ?”
He chuckled. “She loves all of us, her classmates,” he said as he pushed his thick black-rimmed glasses up his nose.
“But I didn’t hear ‘I’ and ‘all of you.’”
“You don’t need it, because it’s implied.”
“Oh … right …”
It did sound familiar. Did I learn this in Korean class? I remembered something about shortcuts like this. The “I” was often omitted in sentences. “Went to school,” Koreans would say, rather than “I went to school.” I figured this was because the “I” was obvious in these utterances and therefore redundant.
Afterwards, our group made our way to the larger main building to have lunch in the cafeteria. For some reason, what my female classmate said earlier stuck in my head like a bug in my ear. I thought about her remark in between spoonfuls of steamed rice and seasoned vegetables. I thought about it when we walked back to our lodge and unpacked.
“Love” – not “I love you.”
I was certainly not in love with her; I only met her today. No, it wasn’t that … Her remark felt breezy and naked. I liked the focus on the verb, the act, on continuous movement, on flow.
Yes, yes!
“I” and “you” were these big, bulky and immobile walls that only served to ground the action, the movement, to a halt. They dammed up flowing water on either side. And when river water stops moving, it suffocates and stagnates. Removing the dams “I” and “you” released “love” from its imprisonment, and it was allowed to breathe and flow again.
Aha! I liked it because it felt freeing!
Either that or I was being melodramatic. They were, after all, just words. How could mere words set me free? Whatever the case, the mental chatter stopped after this little insight, and I won back my peace of mind.
The sun was sparkling the next morning. A chilly breeze dulled the air and frosted the morning dew that glistened atop the picnic tables. Several of my classmates and I hopped around on our left leg along the gravel-strewn paths nearby. I eyeballed my opponents from our rival French department, hunched over and primed to knock down whoever came my way, my folded and jutting right knee my weapon.
Bam! Yes! I just felled one of their guys.
I might have been small, but they didn’t know who they were up against. Well, a tough Canadian boy who used to play hockey, that’s who. Moments later, I made eye contact with a guy from the opposing team who made a beeline for me. He stopped in front of me, then leaped to slam his knee down on my thigh, and I slipped, leaving me with gravel imprints on the palm of my right hand. I was eliminated from the game.
I wasn’t given much time to lick my wounds. Our group returned to the lodge to play another game. We sat on the floor in a circle and slowly started clapping our hands and slapping our laps in rhythm, then quickened the pace, until the rhythm escalated into a heart-pounding tribal beat.
Slap, clap, slap, clap –
“Choi, Glen,” a male classmate from the far end of the circle shouted. Me, already?
I had to call out another classmate’s name without breaking rhythm.
“Lee … uhh …”
I was eliminated. I sat hunched over as I watched the rest of the game play itself out.
The tribal beat continued, only this time we had to calculate numbers on the spot.
Slap, clap –
“1 and 2 …”
“3 and 4 …”
“7 and 8 …”
“15 and 16 …”
Me: “17 and 18 …”
“Aaayyy!” my classmates said in unison, giving voice to their mental finger-wagging.
After lunch, our department moved to one of the smaller rooms inside the main building, where we broke off into cells of five to 10 people. We again sat on the floor in circles. I preferred this room over our lodge because it was sheeted with jangpan-ji, a thick malleable layer of moon-yellow oiled paper that molded to my jutting ankle bones. It was also warm because it was ondol, the radiant underfloor heating typical of traditional Korean homes. The floor of our lodge was cement-hard, a lacquered white, and cold.
My cell-group mates proceeded to rattle off sentences in machine-gun succession. They also threw out one subject matter after another like someone madly rummaging through a chest of old clothes. Uh-oh. I felt like I was back on the bus that first day coming over.
What I was hearing didn’t sound like the Korean I learned in language class. This new Korean seemed much softer around the edges, less clearly enunciated and full of grammatical shortcuts. I imagined a ragbag of slang, idioms and cultural references that I never learned were thrown in for good measure. Welcome to the world of “real Korean,” I said in my head with a wry smile.
I played the role of Silent Bob the whole time, nodding my head every now and then in feigned agreement. But I yearned to contribute to the discussion so I could feel part of the gang. That’s it; I’m going to say something no matter what, I told myself.
I bore down and hyper-focused. First order of business: grasp the current topic of discussion.
Okay. My classmates are talking about forming study groups in the upcoming semester.
Aha. This was an easy one as far as what I should say. I would express my interest in joining and offer my help in any way as a native English speaker. This was ingenious. I would be seen as someone who offered value to the group, and they would, in return, embrace me. I tuned out the others as I jumbled together a couple of Korean sentences in my head.
Okay, sentences done.
They probably weren’t grammatically pristine, but they’d have to do. So long as I got my message across.
When I was ready to speak, I pointed my index finger skyward, furrowed my eyebrows and pursed my lips. One by one, my classmates peripherally caught sight of this amidst the current ongoing discussion. When the person speaking began winding down her talk and her last word dropped off into an ellipsis, they all turned to face me with a look of great anticipation. I hardly ever spoke, and they genuinely wanted to hear from me.
“I think study groups are a good idea. I would like to help. Maybe I can help with English words that you don’t know.”
I did it.
I immediately felt better about myself and my standing in the group because I contributed something of value to them.
Or what I thought was something of value.
My comment was followed by a moment of awkward silence. The rest of the group turned their gazes up or downward, to the right or left, any way to avoid eye contact with me.
“Thank you, Glen,” my female sunbae said, finally breaking the silence. “That sounds like a wonderful idea … That’s right; we were talking about that a little while ago.”
She then slowly turned to face the rest of the group. “So as we were saying …”
Back at the lodge, the beer and soju (rice liquor) started flowing in the evening, and the subsequent parlor games soon transformed into the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange – animated bodies and boisterous voices clamoring for attention from every direction.
Sigh.
Alas, there was never any alone-time, no time to breathe, no rest for the weary, and by “weary” I meant only me. My classmates clapped, bantered, laughed, sang, jeered and cheered more loudly in the wee hours than in the early afternoon. They were quiet bespectacled bookworms by day, frat boys and girls by night.
I could only behold the spectacle as I chewed on ripped strands of roasted squid and downed a paper cup filled with Korean lager. Until this week, I never enjoyed the bitterness of beer or the lighter-fluidness of soju, but peer pressure and the onslaught of the stress from having to express myself in a foreign language fixed that in a matter of days.
I’m witnessing the tsunami of several years of pent-up energies, I observed. I saw this coming when I stayed at my uncle’s house for a month after I first arrived in Seoul. My high school-aged cousins went to school by 8 a.m. and typically returned home at 10 p.m., after all the homework, individual tutoring and music lessons (usually piano). This was a typical school day for all high school students in Korea, a routine that ran for three straight years. The competition to get into one of only a handful of elite universities in the capital city of Seoul was fierce and cutthroat.
My parents also demanded academic excellence and that my sisters learn the piano and I the violin (and later some guitar). But we sometimes played sports after school, were usually home before supper, and got to watch our favorite TV shows in the evening. We actually had a life. There was no comparison.
I received some particularly grim news on the third night. The Frosh Week organizing committee announced that each department would be required to perform a skit on stage in front of the rest of the hundreds of Humanities students in two days, at the end of Orientation.
After dinner, our department gathered again in the smaller room to decide on a premise for our skit, which, from what I could make out, was a story about a husband, his wife and their children. As I sat there in the meeting, it dawned on me that I had nothing to worry about. My classmates would never be so cruel as to ask a foreign student who couldn’t speak the language to play any substantial role in the skit. I’d probably be asked to play an extra in the background, some pedestrian passerby in a busy street scene.
Several minutes later, the mile-a-minute chatter died down, and all 30-plus eyeballs turned to me. I was a deer in headlights. The world, once again, unfolded before me in slow motion. One of my sunbaes turned to me one small jerking motion at a time, and the words that came out of his mouth plodded forth, slurred, obnoxiously loud, like a drunk person speaking through a megaphone:
“YYYOOOUUU … L E A D a c t o r.”
My heart dropped, and my face grew pale.
What?
Are you all out of your collective gourds?
Let me get this straight: it’s not enough that I’m torturing myself trying to formulate one meager sentence in Korean?
We need to amp up the suffering by forcing me to say multiple sentences on multiple topics throughout multiple scenes in front of 600 of my peers – is that the idea?
That’s what I wanted to say, if I had the guts to. But I was still feeling fragile and on the cusp of unravelling like a delicately wrapped sushi roll because the stressors weren’t letting up. I felt compelled to say something, even if I had no time to think about how I was going to say it and thereby butcher the Korean language (not to mention my pride) in the process.
I tried to stay as calm and composed as possible under the circumstances.
“Uhh …” I said in a trembling voice, “since I can’t speak Korean very well, I don’t think …”
My sunbae quickly raised his long gangly right arm as if to object, then gently placed his bony fingers on my shoulder and leaned over.
“No, no. You don’t have to say anything.”
“Really? But how … ?”
“You just need to act with your body.”
I discovered there would be no dialogue on anyone’s part because the lead and supporting cast would be pantomiming the whole time. Meanwhile, those without a role would be singing a chorus in the background.
A number of my classmates chimed in at once to tell me they thought I would make a great lead actor. What am I going to do, say no? I didn’t want to develop a reputation as being lame and a party-pooper, especially since I was already on the fringes of the mainstream. I relented and agreed to play the lead. I wasn’t entirely off the hook, though. I would have to listen for cues from the skit’s narrator to follow the plot and know when to pantomime what. The thought of this alone made my heart sink because I didn’t want to screw up in front of hundreds of people.
I discovered the lead role I would be playing was the wife. Yep, it just kept getting better and better. My classmates wanted the “right” man to play it for comedic effect and, apparently, out of all the men in our department, they thought I looked the most effeminate.
For our first rehearsal the next afternoon, I was asked to wrap and tie a white towel around my head, wear the red lipstick graciously provided by one of my female classmates, and slip on a plump plaid dress to wear over my jeans. As my classmates stole grinning glances at me, I detected a peculiar pattern. The constant “public speaking,” the group games, and now this skit in front of hundreds of people. This couldn’t have been a coincidence. I was my unlucky classmate on our first day of school at Glenview, my junior high school, who was dragged down the grassy hill of the schoolyard on his butt by the older 8th grade kids. He had to walk around school all day with grass burn on his spanking new back-to-school black leather pants. Of course, this wasn’t as blatant and childish as that. And it wasn’t just one person, that is, me. We were all being constantly poked, prodded and ribbed by our sunbae, although my classmates appeared to handle it better than I did, probably because they spoke the language fluently.
I then felt an odd emotion. It was the spark of excitement. My heart seemed to relish the experience. I did my best to ignore it – my ego was telling me a different story. But it was too strong to deny. I had always felt trapped inside the cavity of my own skull, reserved, as though I wasn’t meant to stand out. Every time I stood up to address my classmates and risk embarrassment, I kicked at the steely bars and put a good dent in them. With each kick, I was creating more wiggle room to break free from some of my most intense fears, from inhibition. I felt vulnerable, yes, but alive.
I also felt a special bond with my classmates in such moments. My risk was paid in kind. “I’ll risk my ego if you risk yours,” was our tacit agreement. Even if it was somewhat easier for them, we were in this together. We were being vulnerable together, even if I felt more so. Could this be the reason we were all being subject to such torture? These “naked” moments might coax us to lower our guards, to chip away at the stone walls with which we protected our individual egos, and to open ourselves up to each other and the world. That, in turn, would build trust between us and strengthen our bonds. Koreans had a word for this – jung. It was one of the first cultural concepts I learned in language school. There is no single equivalent bon mot for it in English. Jung is like the word “affection,” only stronger and deeper. It refers to the family-like love and trust you develop with non-family members, such as friends, colleagues, co-workers, through the many shared good times and bad, in much the same way a person grows to love someone “like a brother or sister.”
Was the end purpose of all this, then, simply one big exercise in building group trust and solidarity? If it was, I just couldn’t understand why it was so important to do so to the extent that we did for an academic department. For sports teams or the military, yes, because the competition is unforgiving and winning is everything. But for an academic department within the university, let alone the university itself? There was no championship or battle to be won in the end, as far as I could tell.
Lights out. I slumped to the floor, zipped up my black sleeping bag and laid my head on my folded T-shirt for a pillow. The deafening sounds of drunken merriment from the evening had died down. My ears, however, were still ringing. My classmates and sunbaes nestled into their sleeping bags, which littered the floor. Almost immediately, I heard snoring coming from the far corner. I laid there and looked up into the utter blackness of the air. Without so much as a silent minute to hear myself think during the day, bedtime was the one window through which I could escape to a warmer climate.
My mind drifted to the good times I had living in Toronto. I missed my room, my bed, my pillow, spending long lazy days at home on Sundays and playing shinny hockey with Barth or my cousins John and Peter at Eglinton Park. I missed the homemade banquet burger at Burger Shack. I reminisced about my past crushes and the experiences of requited and unrequited love – dating back to Joanne and Jessica in elementary school. I also missed speaking English with Nunes at our Homestay room in Seoul, even though I had only been away from her for a few days. Thank god, I thought, that finishing up her biology degree in Seoul was just the “adventure” Nunes was seeking in her life at the time. It was reassuring to know that my big sis – who was taller than me and tomboy tough – had my back over here. Even though it was only February, I couldn’t wait for next Christmas when I would go home to visit Toronto.
I then questioned my decision to study in Korea in earnest for the first time. It looked like I had badly miscalculated.
Why didn’t you think this through more, Glen?
You could’ve been breezing through life in Canada right now.
You might look the part, but you’re more Canadian than you think.
Just as soon as I started to feel sorry for myself, however, another voice bullied its way to the forefront of my head, leaving broken shards of china in its wake. It was the voice of my father.
So what?
Why you so afraid of ko-nuh!?
I snapped out of my self-pitying and to attention. I transformed into a different person. It was me in Mr. Lee’s judo class. It was me for the following two years playing hockey where, with thinking changed, the game mutated from art form to war zone, opposing players from teens decked out in colorful team outfits to the cloned stormtroopers of the Galactic Empire: their helmets glinted an unfeeling metal, their pupils were black and beady and their expressions steely and cemented. They were dark and sinister alien beings, and they had to be destroyed. Come game time, my focus turned laser-like, and I became hyper-present, my sole mission to seek and destroy. I had done the same just now. The growing mental chatter and voices of self-pity cowered in the wake of my hyper-present focus and soon dissipated. I also soon fell fast asleep.
Skit day arrived. In the hours before show time, the pressure and anxiety continued to mount. The idea that 600 pairs of eyeballs would be fixed on me and my every move during the performance grew closer to becoming reality. I was able to live a relatively safe and low-profile life in Canada for the past 18 years, but I had been living on borrowed time. This time there was nowhere to hide from the spotlight.
My classmates and I rose from our seats in the auditorium and marched together in procession backstage. We were due up next. I heard the thunderous applause of the audience followed by the muffled words of the MC, and my heart started pounding. The current skit was over, and the moment of truth had arrived. We ascended the stairs and took our places on stage.
The curtains drew to the sides, and the stage lights blinded my eyes. In that moment, I felt a heightened sense of awareness and concentration. Out of nowhere, perhaps desperate for a spark of inspiration to live up to the demands of my 600 peers in the audience, my mind latched onto the image of Las Vegas showgirls I had seen on TV over the years. I immediately changed my hitherto straight and stiff stance and bent my right leg out to the side, tilted my head up to the sky and put one hand behind my head.
Roars of laughter.
They like it! Go with it, Glen.
And so I did. I ran with it. Then one hiccup. At the midway point, my “husband” leapfrogged over me after I bent over, as per the rehearsals. Unlike in the rehearsals, he accidentally knocked the towel off my head as he leapt. I didn’t flinch. I dropped to my knees, crawled forward and plopped the still-intact wig back on as though nothing had happened. More laughter.
At the closing ceremony that evening, I was called to the stage by the MC – I had won the Most Popular Actor award. For my efforts, I received a roll of flipchart paper. When I returned to my seat, I was greeted with a round of “congratulations!” and high-fives from my classmates and sunbaes. The rush of adrenaline coursed through my veins unabated as the awards continued.
And continued.
And continued some more.
By this time, only the embers of the adrenaline remained, and I began to intermittently glance up at the clock. I suspected the judging committee wanted to ensure no department went home empty handed so that no one felt left out. When the ceremony ended and people rose from their seats, I looked down at the flipchart paper I was cradling in my arms. It had lost some of the white luster that I saw when I first went up to receive it.
We returned to our lodges to freshen up for dinner. My hands were still trembling from the buzz I got from performing. The pressure – the rush of adrenaline – the heightened awareness – the unleashing of creative energy – the ability to think and act on my feet – the roar of laughter and applause from the audience: this was all intoxicating stuff.
I lined up in the communal cafeteria with my steel food tray in hand. The kitchen staff plopped various foods into the appropriate tray compartments as I moved along the serving counter. I walked over to our department table.
“Glen, hwa-ee-ting!” one of my female classmates said to me as I sat down next to her. I remembered learning that word, probably on the bus ride over. Hwa-ee-ting was the Korean phoneticized version of the English word “fighting,” which somehow evolved in the Korean language to mean something like “good job!” (among other meanings, depending on the circumstances).
“Thanks,” I said.
I looked across the table from me to see a couple of my male classmates nod their heads my way, with a smile. I blushed and smiled back. The attention was embarrassing and unwanted. Okay, not entirely. It did feel good to be popular, for once.
Our table turned quiet. Everybody was hungry and busy chowing down. I picked up my metal chopsticks and transferred bits of food from this and that tray compartment into my mouth. I stared straight ahead as I munched on a mix of moisty white rice, kimchi and bulgogi –thin slices of grilled beef marinated in sesame oil and soy sauce, among other spices. My mind returned to the events that had just transpired. I realized that pressure and stress could actually be beneficial. It not only made me feel alive, it pushed me to rise to the occasion and perform, the reward for which was hundreds of people approving and applauding.
Related Links: