“So why didn’t you become a teacher?”
“I had to work to send my brothers to school. That’s how it was with everyone. All women lived like that back then.”
“Why don’t you become a teacher now?”
“Now I have to work to send you kids to school. That’s how it is with everyone. All mothers live like this these days.”
Her life choices, being Kim Jiyoung’s mother—Oh Misook was regretting them. Jiyoung felt she was a rock, small but heavy and unyielding, holding down her mother’s long skirt train. This made her sad. Her mother saw this and warmly swept back her daughter’s unkempt hair.
Kim Jiyoung attended a very large elementary school that was twenty minutes away on foot along winding alleys. Each grade had between eleven and fifteen classes, fifty students to a class. Before Jiyoung entered, the school had been forced to split the lower grades into morning and afternoon classes to accommodate everyone.
Elementary school was Jiyoung’s first social experience, as she did not attend kindergarten, and on the whole she did well. After an adjustment period, Eunyoung was put in charge of getting Jiyoung to school. Eunyoung checked the timetable each morning and packed her sister’s books, notebooks, and class announcements log, and filled her fairy princess pencil case with one eraser and four pencils that were not too sharp or too blunt. On days Jiyoung needed extra supplies, Eunyoung asked Mother for money and picked up the items at the stationery store by the school gate. Jiyoung walked to and from school without wandering off, stayed in her seat during class, and did not wet herself. She wrote down the daily announcements in her class announcements log, and sometimes got 100 percent on her dictation quizzes.
Her first obstacle in school life was the “pranks of the boy desk-mate” that many schoolgirls experienced. To Jiyoung, it felt more like harassment or violence than pranks, and there was nothing she could do about it besides run crying to Mother and Eunyoung. They weren’t much help. Eunyoung said boys were immature and that Jiyoung should just ignore him, and Mother chided Jiyoung for crying and complaining over a classmate who was just messing around because he wanted to play.
One day the desk-mate started to hit her. Sitting down, getting in line, picking up his schoolbag, he would hit her on the shoulder as if by accident. When he saw her coming down the hall he swerved to her side and knocked hard into her arm. He would borrow her eraser, pencil, or ruler and not give it back. When she told him to give it back, he’d toss it across the room, or sit on it, or swear he never took it. He even got her in trouble in class for arguing over something he borrowed. When she stopped lending him her things, he moved on to making fun of the way she dressed, the words she misspoke, and hiding her schoolbag and shoe pouch in places that would take her forever to find.
One early summer day, Jiyoung had taken off her indoor shoes during class to cool her sweaty feet when the desk-mate suddenly scooted way down in his chair and kicked one of her shoes hard. The shoe went flying down the aisle all the way to the podium at the front of the class. The children instantly burst out laughing, and the teacher turned red with indignation.
“Whose shoe is it?” the teacher shouted, banging her fists on the podium.
Jiyoung couldn’t speak up. She was scared, and although it was her shoe, she was hoping her desk-mate who kicked it would speak up first. But he must have been scared, too, as he kept his head down.
“Well? Speak up! Or should I check everyone’s shoes?”
Jiyoung jabbed the desk-mate with her elbow and whispered, “You did it.” He bowed his head even lower and said, “It’s not my shoe.” The teacher slammed the podium once again, and Jiyoung had to raise her hand. She was called out to the podium and scolded in front of the whole class. She was a cowardly liar for not answering the first time she asked whose shoe it was, and a thief who stole her classmates’ valuable class time. Jiyoung was blubbing so hard, tears and snot everywhere, she couldn’t say a word in her defense. Just then, someone said very quietly, “It wasn’t Jiyoung.” It was the girl who sat all the way at the back across the aisle.
“It’s Jiyoung’s shoe, but she didn’t kick it. I saw.”
The confused teacher asked the girl, “What do you mean? Then who did it?”
The girl seemed afraid to rat on him, but managed to quietly stare at the back of his head. The teacher and the class all looked at Jiyoung’s desk-mate, and he finally confessed to the crime. The teacher scolded the desk-mate twice as loudly and for twice as long as she scolded Jiyoung. She was also twice as red in the face.
“You’ve been picking on Jiyoung, haven’t you? You think I haven’t been watching you? When you go home tonight, you’re going to write down everything you ever did to harass her and bring it tomorrow. I know everything, so don’t you even think about leaving things out. Write with your mother, and get her to sign it!”
The desk-mate went home dejected, sighing, “Mom’s gonna kill me.” The teacher told Jiyoung to stay behind after school.
Jiyoung was nervous as she expected another telling-off, but, much to her surprise, the teacher sat down in front of her and apologized. She was sorry she reprimanded Jiyoung without getting to the bottom of it, she thought the shoe belonged to the person who kicked it, it was unwise of her to make assumptions, and that she would be more attentive in the future. Jiyoung’s heart melted at the teacher’s words of apology and her promise to keep these misunderstandings from happening again. When the teacher asked if there was anything Jiyoung wanted to say, Jiyoung replied through a fit of tears and hiccups, “Please—hic hic—assign me—hic hic—a new desk-mate. I don’t—hic hic—ever, ever want to be—hic hic—desk-mates with him—HIC HIC—ever again.”
The teacher patted Jiyoung on the back.
“You know what, Jiyoung? Let me tell you something I’ve known for a while that you haven’t noticed: he likes you.”
Jiyoung was so aghast that she stopped crying. “He hates me,” she said. “I thought you said you’ve seen how he’s been treating me.”
“Boys are like that,” the teacher laughed. “They’re meaner to the girls they like. I’ll give him a talking-to. Why don’t you take this incident as an opportunity to become better friends instead of changing desk-mates on unfriendly terms?”
He likes me? He picks on me because he likes me? Jiyoung was confused. She went over the series of incidents that she had suffered because of him, and still couldn’t make sense of what the teacher was saying. If you like someone, you’re friendlier and nicer to them. To friends, to family, to your pet dogs and cats. Even at the age of eight, this was common sense to Jiyoung. The desk-mate’s pranks made school life so difficult for her. What he’d put her through was awful enough, and now the teacher was making her out to be a bad child who misunderstood her friend.
Jiyoung shook her head. “No, miss. I really, really don’t want to.”
The next day at school, the class was assigned new desk-mates. Jiyoung’s new desk-mate was a boy who always sat at the back by himself because he was the tallest, and they did not argue once.
Starting third grade, Kim Jiyoung ate lunch at school twice a week. This was torture for Jiyoung, who was a slow eater. Jiyoung’s school was a pilot for the school meal program, the first in the area to prepare lunch on-site and serve food in the school dining hall. At lunchtime, students marched single-file to the cafeteria in the order of their roster number to eat, and they had to eat quickly so they could clear out and make room for the next class.