While the students who’d finished their lunch ran around the schoolyard like wild horses, Jiyoung shoveled rice into her mouth one big spoonful at a time. Her third-grade teacher was adamantly against them eating small portions or not finishing everything on their trays. Five minutes before their lunch period was up, the teacher would come around banging their metal food trays with a spoon to chastise the students for not eating faster and nag them to hurry up. Every time Jiyoung heard that sound, each bite she swallowed turned into a lump in her throat that refused to go down. The students pushed the remaining food into their mouths, knocking it back with water as if they were taking pills.
Jiyoung was number thirty on the roster of forty-nine. Boys were numbers one to twenty-seven, and girls were twenty-eight to forty-nine. The numbers were assigned in order of birthdays. Jiyoung’s birthday was fortunately in April, so she was the thirtieth in her class to get her food, but the girls with late birthdays were only able to sit down to lunch around the time the lower-number students were done. Naturally, the students who were routinely told off for eating slowly were mostly girls.
Then came one day when the teacher was in a horrible mood. The entire class was punished because the blackboard wasn’t wiped neatly enough from the previous day, and a surprise fingernail check forced Jiyoung to hide her hands in her desk drawer and give herself a quick trim with a pair of scissors. The ones who were invariably the last to finish their lunch were, as always, anxiously trying to eat faster, and the furious teacher banged on their food trays so hard that grains of rice bounced up to the students’ eye level on impact. A few burst into tears with their mouths stuffed with food. The slow eaters gathered around in the back of the classroom during clean-up time after lessons. They arranged a meeting by exchanging gestures, glances, and short phrases: After school today. Youngjin Market. Granny’s Tteokbokki.
The complaints came pouring out as soon as the students got together.
“She’s taking something out on us. She picked on us all day over nothing.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“How can you eat with someone standing over you forcing you to eat, eat, eat?”
“It’s not like we’re eating slowly on purpose or playing with our food. Some of us just eat slowly! It’s not our fault.”
Jiyoung felt the same way. What the teacher was doing was wrong. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly what was wrong about it, but she knew that something was unjust and frustrating. But Jiyoung had a hard time voicing her complaints because she wasn’t used to expressing her thoughts. She was just nodding at her friends’ protestations when Yuna, who’d been quiet until then, spoke up: “It’s unfair.”
“Eating in order of roster number every time,” Yuna explained calmly. “That’s what’s unfair. We should suggest that we change the order we eat.”
Suggest to the teacher? Are we even allowed to say something like that to the teacher? Jiyoung briefly wondered, but thought Yuna would be able to pull it off. Yuna did well in school, and her mother was head of the school board. During class meeting time on Friday, Yuna really did raise her hand and pitched the idea.
“I move that we change the order we eat lunch.”
Yuna kept her eyes fixed on the teacher at the podium and reasoned calmly and clearly: getting food in order of roster number means the higher-number students get their food later, and can’t help but finish their food later. Eating in ascending order every time is unfair to the higher-number students. The order should change periodically.
The teacher kept a smile plastered on her face, especially the corners of her mouth that were starting to twitch. You could cut the tension in the room with a knife. Jiyoung was so scared for Yuna that her legs were shaking.
The teacher looked back at Yuna for a moment, smiled even harder, and said, “From next week on, we’ll eat in reverse. We’ll switch every month.”
The highest-number girls cheered. The order they entered the dining hall changed, but the atmosphere in the hall did not. The teacher still couldn’t stand slow eaters, admonished them harshly enough to give them indigestion, and, of the six girls who gathered at Granny’s Tteokbokki that day, two remained in the slow-eaters group. Changing the order didn’t make that big a difference to Jiyoung since she was thirty out of forty-nine, but she somehow felt that still falling behind would mean defeat for her. So she persevered to eat faster and managed to get out of the slow-eaters group.
A small sense of accomplishment was the reward. They had stood up to a figure of absolute authority and rectified an unfair arrangement. This was a valuable experience for Yuna, Jiyoung, and the high-number girls. They developed a bit of a critical eye and confidence, but even then they didn’t see why boys came first on the roster. Number one on the roster was a boy, everything began with the boys, and that felt like the right, natural thing. Boys lined up first, boys led every procession no matter where they were headed, boys gave their presentations first, and boys had their homework checked first while the girls quietly waited their turn, bored, sometimes relieved that they weren’t going first, but never thinking this was a strange practice. Just as we never question why men’s national registry numbers begin with a “1” and women’s begin with a “2.”
Class monitors were chosen through direct elections starting from the fourth grade. Elections were held twice a year, once a semester, and all six times from grades four to six, Jiyoung’s class had a male class monitor. Most teachers handpicked about five or six smart girls to run errands for them, grade quizzes, and check homework. Teachers were in the habit of saying that girls are smarter. Students also thought that girls were smarter, more mature, and better with detailed work, but they somehow always elected boys to be class monitors. It wasn’t just Jiyoung’s class. Back then, there were definitely more boy class monitors. Not long after Jiyoung entered middle school, her mother read an article in the paper that she found astonishing.
“This says lots of girls are class monitors these days. Over 40 percent!5 When you girls grow up, maybe we’ll even have a female president!”
What this means is that less than half the class monitors in Jiyoung’s schooldays were girls, and that was actually a great increase from a much lower percentage. And girls were always Head of Class Environment and boys were always Head of Sports in every class, whether they were elected or appointed by the teacher.
When Jiyoung was in the fifth grade, her family moved to an apartment on the third floor of a brand-new building on a bustling street. Three bedrooms, one dining and living room, and one bathroom. Their living space doubled, and their level of comfort increased tenfold. It was the result of rigorous saving and careful investing of both parents’ earnings. Mother studied the interest rates and benefits of various bank investment plans and invested in workers’ asset-building savings, housing lottery savings, and fixed-deposit and installment savings accounts with special benefits. The biggest returns came from the collective private funds she organized with reliable neighbors. But when her relatives, including her sister, suggested organizing one together, she flat-out refused.
“Blood relations who live far away are the least reliable. I don’t want to lose money and get resentful.”