Sad Peninsula (4 page)

When all the girls had received their passports, the soldiers herded them across the station platform and told them to board the waiting train. The girls were no longer making attempts at silence: they were crying, calling out for their mothers, pleading with the Japanese to let them go. Some tried to run, but soldiers chased them down and threw them gruffly back into the line that flowed into the open train carts. Meiko was squeezed through the door and pushed deep inside, nearly tripping on her
hanbok
in the swell of bodies. Soon she was pressed up against the far window. All the windows were covered by a canvas blanket tied loosely down with twine to hide the view outside. Once all the girls had squeezed in, the soldiers pulled the rattling metal door shut and locked it with an iron clunk. For a few seconds, there was an absurd silence as the girls stood stunned in the darkness. Along the cart's walls, squares of sunlight peeped around the blankets covering the windows. Soon the girls broke out with more weeping, with more calls to their mothers. “I don't want to go to Shimonoseki,” someone yelled in panic. “I'm not ready … I just wanted
information
…”

There was an abrupt jolt beneath their feet as the train began to move. The girls closest to the door began pulling at it uselessly, whimpering “No! No!” as they realized there was no way to get it open. The shift and steer of the moving train squeezed them all to the right, crushing Meiko where stood against the blanketed window. The crying grew louder, but Meiko found she could not summon the breath to join in. She moved her fingers to the edge of the blanket at her shoulder and pulled it back to reveal the moving landscape outside the window. She watched as the structures of the train station and then the city itself thinned out and faded away, replaced by a spare and rural landscape. She looked up to see the sun hover in the cold January sky. Its position above them filled Meiko with a sudden, frightening wisdom. As the train picked up speed, Meiko beseeched the sun to shift its place in the sky. When it didn't, her realization rose up like vomit and suddenly she
could
find the breath to speak, the breath to scream.

“We're moving north!” she yelled out. “Do you hear me? We're moving north! They're not taking us to Pusan. They're not taking us to Shimonoseki. Do you hear me? They're taking us north!”

But her knowledge seemed lost in the cacophony of weeping. And Meiko realized too late that this had been her mother's worst fear all along — this, a train packed with ignorant, terrified girls, and heading in the wrong direction.

I
stand at my whiteboard, glossy Basic 5 storybook in one hand, green marker in the other, uncapped and ready for business. This is me, pretending to know what I'm doing. My tiny classroom is packed — fifteen Korean students aged eight to eleven. Fourteen of them sit at their miniature desks, each one littered with storybook, homework book, grammar book, and pencil case. The fifteenth student, a troublemaker named “David,” stands facing the corner of the room, his back to the class, head arched downward in shame. This is his punishment from ten minutes ago when I caught him speaking, for the third time tonight, a quick burst of Korean to one of his buddies. The Canadian flag I've taped to my wall hangs just above his head.

“Get the ball,” I read to the class.

“Get the ball,” the class echoes.

“Now Billy has the ball,” I chant.

“Now Billy has the ball.”

“MichaelTeeee-chore!” David weeps from the corner, as if I've forgotten he's there. I look over at his slouched frame and hesitate before speaking, allowing him to stew a moment longer in my feigned authority. “Okay, David, you can sit down.” He skulks shamefaced back to his desk.

We begin working through the storybook as if it's Henry James. I get the kids to read lines aloud, correcting their pronunciation as they go, then begin to ask leading questions about what is happening in this soccer game, and they recite back exactly what I want to hear, exactly what the storybook says. I'm obligated to stay standing and write these insights on my whiteboard, lest the school's director (Ms. Kim — confirmed Asian spinster, a hostile little touch-me-not) looks through my classroom-door window, fixes me in her angry little crosshairs, and confronts me at the end of the night for Not Following the Curriculum. Time is winding down, so I get the kids to close their books so I can hand out their nightly quiz. For the next five minutes, they will hunch over the test with great purpose, filling in blanks with nouns and verbs left out of the exact sentences we've just read. I take a slow walk up the aisle to inspect the kids' progress, hoping my presence will hurry them along. Soon I have all the tests in my hand and with a few seconds to spare — which doesn't feel right. I'm forgetting something.

“MichaelTeacher, homework?” asks “Jenny,” one of the older girls. They always seem to be named Jenny.

“Oh shit,” I mutter aloud, and the kids all gasp in horror. I hustle to my whiteboard and begin frantically jotting down workbook page numbers and grammar exercises, reciting them aloud for the kids as I do. Meanwhile, the class bombards Jenny with a Korean phrase, which I'm sure if I could translate would say,
You stupid bitch, he nearly forgot!

“No Korean, please!” I shout with my back to them, still scribbling furiously. Then the bell does chime, an annoying rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and the kids burst from their chairs and pile toward the door. Some go gliding out on their Heelys— rollerskate wheels built right into the heels of their sneakers. I finish getting all the homework down and turn around. “Did you get that?” I yell. But I'm nearly alone, except for the last couple of kids squeezing into the noisy hallway, looking back over their book bags at me with a sense of vague pity.

I
am not a teacher by trade. You don't have to be to work here. Anybody with a university degree, in anything, can come to Korea and teach English in this
hagwon
system. Korean parents believe in education, as best as they understand it, and this involves sending their children to as many of these after-school academies as they can afford. Kids go to public school from 8:30 until 3:00, but after that they move through a long parade of extracurricular learning — math academy, science academy, English academy, taekwondo academy — that stretches well into the evening. ABC English Planet is one of the more reputable
hagwons
in this neighbourhood of Daechi: we boast a regimented curriculum, reading-writing-grammar-conversation, and a staff of native-speaking teachers from around the West. And I am now one of them.

How things got this far — with me falling into the chair at my desk to watch the next class of exhausted students pour in to my room — is a tale of minor tragedy, of personal failures and squandered opportunities. Many of my coworkers here are like the guy in the baseball cap from the club — in their early twenties, recent graduates with relatively useless university degrees, spilling out of planes at the mudflats of Incheon with unfathomable student debt and a misguided sense of adventure. By contrast: I am nearly thirty years old and with a fairly practical degree under my belt: journalism. Up until the spring of 2002 I had a career as a reporter for the Lifestyles section of
The
Halifax Daily News
. For a long time, I treated that background like a godsend, the one clear way out of my chaotic family situation and into a life that would prove stable, reliable. And, for a while, it was.

Of course, my ex-fiancée Cora would tell you that I was
never
a good journalist, and I would have to agree with her. I was probably two years in to the job at the
Daily News
before I realized that I lacked the one quality essential to being a good reporter: extroversion. I could research the hell out of any topic, learn all there was to know about occupational health and safety, Black History Month, municipal budgeting, Goth fashion — but to actually pick up the phone and call a stranger or go knock on someone's door filled me with a gumbo of paralysis. It was only through Cora's positive influence that I forced myself to do the sort of harassing essential to my career. She and I met at J-school and she was, even from the first semester, already a journalist's journalist. She got on with CBC Radio at the same time that I started at the paper, and she was always pressing me to get out there, get out on the streets of Halifax and “Talk to People.” It was probably her nagging that kept me from getting fired in those tough early years. So when she eventually left me for one of her radio colleagues, some French fucker named Denis (pronounced
Din-ee
, never Dennis) and transferred with him to CBC in Montreal, I had a sense that I was doomed in more ways than one.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The story of how I ended up slinging English like hamburgers in South Korea does not begin with Cora leaving me for another man, nor with the crippling introversion that eventually got me fired from the
Daily News
. No, the story starts much farther back than that.

I never knew my father. He died of a rare blood cancer when I was two and my sister Heidi was eight. What I know of him is based on the pedigree he left for me and on the photographs of him that my mother kept framed around the house, like totems to his memory. He was involved in Nova Scotia politics and worked as a speechwriter in the later years of the Robert Stanfield government. There was a photo of Dad that stood out in my childhood above all others, a picture that Mom kept on one of the crowded bookshelves in the living room. It had Stanfield in the foreground, mid-speech at a bouquet of microphones, fist raised and finger extended, and my dad in the background, arms folded loose across his chest and face full of a mirth that said
I got him to say that.
There were many who believed that, given time and proper mentoring, Dad would become Stanfield's heir apparent and lead the Nova Scotia Conservatives throughout the eighties and nineties.

It was not meant to be. The cancer that arrived in the fall of 1975 took less than six weeks to kill him, or so I was told. There were generous obituaries in the papers and letters written to our family from MLAs on both sides of the aisle. My mother stored these in a shoebox she kept under her bed, and would take them out and reread them whenever she felt her grief was fading to unacceptable levels.

My mother, as winsome and as wise as she could often be, had a weakness for the drink even as a young woman, and, faced with the unfair, inexcusable death of the man she'd been infatuated with since high school, descended into an alcoholism that Heidi and I could only watch with a kind of perplexed horror. The rattle of empty beer bottles stacked in sagging cases in the kitchen, the chime of hidden gin and rum bottles that sounded each time we opened a linen closet, became the white noise of my childhood. Mom insisted that my father was worthy of such mourning. (I even got a sense of his reputation when, sixteen years after his death, I arrived at journalism school to discover that some of the older profs had known him, and thus anticipated great things from me.) And to imply that Mom needed to let go of her sense of injustice was the highest sin you could commit against her. I cannot tell you how many friendships she ruined in a drunken rage because someone had dared to suggest that she Move on with Her Life.

The truth is, Mom was unstable even before my father died; his death was merely the green light that her deepest-held insecurities had been waiting for. I will give Mom her due: I believe she was touched by genius. She could recite entire passages of Robert Browning from memory; she knew, down to the minutest physiological detail, the difference between a gecko and a salamander; she followed Ronald Reagan's atrocities in Nicaragua with rabid condemnation. But she couldn't find a way to channel all this undigested knowledge into the stability that our family needed so badly. And when, in 1984, seventeen-year-old Heidi fled our house after a marathon screaming session with her, never to return, my mother went off the rails completely. After that, the beer bottles disappeared. After that, she drank exclusively hard liquor. She drank it every day. And she drank it straight.

And Heidi? Oh, what can I tell you about Heidi. She has remained her mother's daughter, only more so. In the last nineteen years, my big sister has left a half-dozen half-finished university degrees in her wake. She has slept on streets. She has hitchhiked across Canada. She has been a Wiccan, a vegan, a skinhead, a tattoo artist, an eco-terrorist, and through most of it, a single mother herself. As far as I know, she lives somewhere in British Columbia with her teenaged daughter, where she makes a not-very-good living selling her unimaginative folk art at farmers' markets on the weekend. I have not seen Heidi since Mom's funeral.

My mother died while I was in the middle of my journalism degree; I had not yet turned twenty-one. Funny, how hard it is to stop resenting somebody when you assume they'll always be there. Thinking of her death reminds me of a line from Nora Zeale Hurston, something about what a waste it is when our mourning outlives our grief — and I think it doubly shameful that my mom failed to outlive either of hers. When she was gone, I refused to put the label of
orphan
on myself, even though that's what I was. I think Cora's presence in my life, then my girlfriend, soon to be my fiancée, had a lot to do with that. As long as she was by my side, I knew I was not alone. It took burying my mother for me to realize what it feels like to be in love.

And for a few years there, we got on with it. Graduated with good grades, got J-jobs right away, got engaged. You could find Cora traipsing the streets of Halifax on the hunt for the perfect sound bite, her jet-black hair pulled tight against her scalp. Meanwhile, I worked at the
Daily News
offices on the outskirts of town — researching topics, crafting sentences, interviewing people by phone when I had to. The Lifestyles section suited me because I could get away without asking tough questions if I didn't want to. In the evenings, we'd reconvene in our small apartment on Shirley Street where we'd drink red wine and listen to Miles Davis, and Cora would lightly chide me about whatever risks I chose not to take that day. I believed, like a fool, that she not only tolerated my pathological shyness, but celebrated it as a part of who I was. Life was good. I felt like I had broken through a wall.

But then Denis-never-Dennis arrived in our lives and shut the whole show down. What a vertiginous feeling it is to watch the woman you love fall in love with somebody else. Denis-never-Dennis started out as just The New Guy at Work, described one night to me while we were doing the dishes. Soon Cora began referring to him as My Friend Denis. I wasn't all that suspicious at first: the fact that he was ten years her senior provided me with a false sense of security, rather than a harbinger of the Nick Hornby-esque angst that I would experience later. Then came days when she'd mention that the two of them had spent a sunny lunch hour eating French fries together from Bud the Spud on the ledge outside the public library. She'd do so in passing, a peripheral detail to whatever she was talking about — as if I wouldn't notice her subliminal subterfuge and call her on it. Then came the Friday nights where I'd come home and wait several hours alone in the apartment until Cora eventually arrived, obviously tipsy, and she'd say “Oh sorry, Denis and I just grabbed a glass of wine or two after work at the Argyle.”

Even when she started spending less and less time at home, she denied it. Even when the sex dried up, she denied it. I figure my relationship with Cora ended a full two months before I realized it. When she was ready to move out, she taped the small, pathetic engagement ring I had given her, all that I could afford, to a note left for me on the kitchen table. It read simply:
I'm sorry, Michael. I truly am. But there is something in you that lacks
.

And then sent her girlfriends over to get her stuff.

Was I enraged? Of course. Did that rage express itself through some vehicular vandalism in the CBC parking lot? Possibly. But more to the point: I was now ready to accept the labels I had been denying myself for years: orphan, rudderless, alone in the world.

In fact, with Cora gone I was free to descend into the charlatanism that I knew rested at the heart of my character. It began manifesting itself through my job, with me growing less fastidious about capturing accurate quotes from the people I interviewed.
It
sounds
close enough to what they said
, I would tell myself. Then I was making up entire quotes from interviews: they still came off like something my sources
should have said
, and I convinced myself that it was okay, that I could get away with such behaviour, because after all this was the Lifestyle section, with so little at stake.