Teacher

Chapter 1: Netflix and Chill

“Teacher,” Sumin said, suddenly. “What is ‘Netflix and chill’?” She looked across the desk at me with an expression of open curiosity.

Caught off guard, I hesitated trying to figure out how to answer this. My gut instinct is to always be honest but I also know that in the classroom there are certain boundaries, even if this was a private lesson and not in an actual classroom. We were sitting in her apartment’s study room with a piano against one wall, bookshelves filled with books along another wall, and her desk with me on one side, and her on the other. Sumin was framed by the large window behind her looking out over a landscape of other high rise apartment buildings. The textbook was open before her and her scratch paper next to it. I had been guiding her through some exercises with de***********ive adjectives when, mid-exercise, she sprung the question on me.

“Well…,” I began slowly. “You know in Korean people say ’would you like to go eat ramen together’?” I said this part in Korean.

Sumin grinned. “I know that.” Good. Bullet dodged. Suggesting to your Korean date to go eat ramen together was essentially do you want to come up and get your freak on.

“It’s like that but in American English. I don’t know if they use it in Australia or England, but we use it in the US. for the same reason. It’s kind of a joke now, I think.”

She pressed on with a little too much interest in her expression. “Did you say to girl before?”

“Eat ramen or the watch Netflix?” I said, cautiously.

”Either one is okay.”

“English, please.” She repeated the correct phrase in English back to me and waited, her expression expectant.

Sumin was a very intelligent young woman. She was not yet out of high school and she excelled in most of her subjects. (She said social studies bored her to tears.) She was planning to go to the US to attend university after she graduated in a couple of years and a lot of our conversations had centered around American culture and what to expect. High school can be brutal in South Korea but Sumin managed to keep in high spirits and genuinely seemed to enjoy learning new things. She was bright and inquisitive.

In addition, she was an exceptionally cute girl. It wasn’t all natural as most young Korean women and many of the men go under the knife for plastic surgery. Image is king in South Korea. And even though she was still in high school, that didn’t stop her or many other students from having a little work done. Many got it as a birthday present, or as a reward for good test grades. Her wide, expressive eyes had been worked on, and her nose was just a little too perfect to have been natural. But she didn’t look too far off from what you might see in a kpop video. Her long black hair cascaded down her shoulders and her perfectly smooth cheeks and slim jawline accentuated a full mouth. She often had on makeup for our classes since she usually met up with friends after we finished, and today was no exception. Her lashes were long around her brown eyes so dark they were almost black, her lips a deep crimson. Most schools in Korean didn’t allow the girls to wear makeup so they tended to go all out on the weekends when they were able to get away from the classroom.

I enjoyed our classes together and we often had good conversations. This was the first time anything remotely sexual had come up beyond some questions about dating American boys in university. It’s not like I’m in the habit of probing about the sex lives of my students, after all. Usually our conversations centered around Korean cultural issues, news topics, or school drama when they weren’t about cultural differences between our two countries.

“Um…” I paused. “No, I don’t think so. I used to joke about it with my ex-girlfriend but we were already dating before I learned about eating ramen.”

She seemed a little disappointed but then asked “Is it okay? Can girl say to boy?”

“In the US, sure. As we talked about before, relationships are a little more relaxed,” I informed her. “Women are a little more free to express themselves. Do girls say that to boys in Korea?”

“I think no,” she replied, her normally smiling mouth tilting down into a small frown. “Girl say to boy then maybe people say girl is bad

“Bad,” I corrected.

“Bad,” she repeated, this time in English. Then she pushed on. “If girl say to you, you think girl is bad?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I responded. “I think girls can do that just like boys can.”

Sumin nodded her approval, her glistening black hair catching the fluorescent lights that are used in every Korean apartment. “Me too, me too!” I arched my eyebrow in a very teacherly fashion at her regression back into her native Korean. “Me, too!” she quickly corrected, with a little smile.

“Where did you learn that?”

“I hear that. In Youtube video they talk that.”

“Ah. Did they explain what it meant?”

She nodded, grinning mischievously. “Little.”

“A little,” I corrected, pretending not to notice the wicked glint in her eye.

“A little. But I a little don’t understand.”

“Do you understand now?” I asked her.

“Yes” she piped back.

“Anyway, back to the lesson,” I said, pointedly. I wanted to steer the conversation into safer territory. “Find the adjective in this sentence and then make your own sentence with it.” Was it just my imagination or did her eyes linger just a little too long on mine before going back to the problem?

The rest of the lesson went on without any such riske´ topics and before we knew it, the hour was finished. I assigned her some light homework to help better familiarize her with de***********ive adjectives and we said our goodbyes.

In the elevator down to the ground floor of the high rise apartment where she lived I replayed the conversation in my head. With Youtube being what it was and students exposed to language and ideas from all over the world, it was probably nothing but honest curiosity. I was just imagining the longer looks she seemed to be giving me or the fact that her shirt seemed tighter today.

I put my headphones in and tried to put it out of my mind. Hers was my last class for the day and I had the rest of Saturday to myself. I wanted to go home and relax. I didn’t want to be thinking about nubile high school girls asking about Netflix and Chilling. And I most certainly didn’t want to be thinking about what she looked like under that t-shirt that was only coincidentally tighter than normal.

Chapter 2: The Message

I’d been teaching in Korea for about six years at that point. I came to the country on a whim, not having anything big going on at home, and figured I could put my Master’s degree to some good use. Free housing, easy access to other Asian countries for travel, decent food, and a relatively low-stress environment. My main job was at an after-school education facility called a hagwon, or what we’d call an academy in English. Kids of all ages go to academies for all sorts of different classes to try and give them an edge when it comes to their school testing. (Or for fancy babysitting if the mother wants to get them out of the house for a few hours so she can meet her friends at a coffee shop and bitch about their husbands and mother-in-laws.) They even have Lego academies where kids go and play with Legos.

The pay isn’t stellar at most academies so a lot of teachers like myself supplement our incomes with classes on the side, which are usually referred to as private lessons, or just privates. Technically they’re illegal under the rules of my work visa but immigration doesn’t check up on teachers and as long as no one reports me then I’m fine. It’s a nice way to pad my income and save money. Most months, I can live off the income from my privates and barely touch my salary. Not a bad life. So what was initially just a let’s-see-what-it’s-like scenario quickly became a multi-year deal. I didn’t have any plans for returning to life back in the US and was content to bank cash, take a vacation once in a while, and enjoy the tail-end of my twenties. And the women were easy on the eyes as well.

Sumin was a relatively new student that I’d picked up through a referral, which is how I got most of my extra work. I couldn’t advertise because of the law, so new students came when a mom recommended me to another mom, and I’d get a call. Sumin was an only child living with her mother, who was divorced. But of course Koreans never talk about that, her father was just “away” working in another city. Code for divorce. Her mom ran her own moderately successful hair salon and wanted her daughter to attend university in the US so they sought me out to improve her communication skills and as a bit of a cultural education. Korean schools focus heavily on English grammar education but not so much on the speaking part, especially once they hit high school, so that’s where I come in.

Sumin was my last class on Saturdays and we finished up at around five o’clock. She lived in one of the large, multi-building apartment complexes that grow up from the urban Korean landscape like weeds. Towering edifices of concrete and rebar built to the gods of efficiency and mediocrity, many with absurd portmanteau names that blend Korean and English into something unholy and wrong to native English speakers, all in an attempt to sound high class.

Names like Luxtige, a merger of Luxury and Prestige. Or Ricenz, which is the name of an apartment along a river. It’s the bastard offspring of river, center, and zenith. Why? Because fuck English, that’s why. But it’s trendy here.

My accommodations were much more humble. I lived in a decent enough place, two bedrooms, in what Koreans call a villa. But if you’re thinking of some beautiful home in the Italian countryside, you’ve got the wrong idea. It’s in a bland brick building, five floors and no elevator. Calling it a villa almost seems like an insult or some sick joke. I live on the third floor. It’s nothing to get excited about but the kitchen was big enough for an oven, a luxury for many westerners here, and the neighborhood was quiet. And did I mention it was free? Paid for by my academy.

Most days it’s just a regular job, a regular place to live. Except most conversations sail over my head and I never turn on my TV because I can’t stand most Korean TV shows, even if I can understand them. My Korean ability is intermediate, at best. I can have halting conversations and my grammar is passable some of the time.

At about ten o’clock that evening, with dinner consumed and with some deep relaxation setting in, my phone buzzed. It was a Kakao notification. Kakao is a messenger service that almost all Koreans start using from birth. It was from Sumin. I don’t normally give my number to students but for older ones who take more complex classes, I will sometimes make an exception. Sumin was one of those. Normally the chat was reserved to double checking lessons or canceling and rescheduling.

Sumin: Teacher what are you doing? k k k k

(Koreans use a letter in their language that corresponds to an English K sound. It has the same meaning as ‘lol’ or ‘hahaha’.)

Me: Hey. I’m at home watching youtube. Did you have trouble with the homework?

Sumin: No I finish already. But now I’m very boring so I am watching a movie.

Me: Is your mom home?

Sumin: No she is eating dinner with coworkers. Maybe she will be home late.

Me: Oh, okay.

Sumin: Teacher…

Sumin: I’m watching Netflix k k k k

And then she sent a photo. In it I could see her television, a huge 72-inch OLED beast of a tv mounted to her living room wall. She was laying on the recliner section of her couch and she had included her legs in the photo. Her very bare legs, which were very visible up to her upper thighs. Thighs that looked very long thanks to the camera angle and lithe. Oh my.

I was so caught up in those legs that it took me a moment to notice what was frozen on the television. It was the sex scene of some movie. It was out of focus since she had focused the camera on her legs, but in it a woman looked to be in the middle of raising herself up over a man she was clearly riding. She was topless and fully on display.

Me: I don’t think you’re old enough to watch that movie.

Sumin: k k k k k k k k k (blushing emoji)

Sumin: Teacher, this movie very sexy.

I let that hang for a minute. This was really happening. The conversation from earlier came back to my mind. Her tight t-shirt came back to my mind. And her legs came back to my mind. So smooth and…

Sumin: will you say to my mom??? ㅠㅠ (scared face)

I thought about that for a moment. I wasn’t a prude and it was none of my business what she watched on TV.