Mr. Lee wore gold rimmed, Soviet-issue glasses, a rice farmer's tan, and plastic shin guards to protect himself from snakebite while hiking. He was deathly scared of snakes. Mr. Lee's otherwise-impassive face featured the squint of Clint Eastwood, reincarnated as a middle-aged Korean. He knew more about English grammar than me -- no mean feat -- and when he wrote on the blackboard, his script was like something you'd expect to see chiseled onto a monument somewhere. His face was a taciturn mask. When he spoke -- he didn't do so more than was absolutely necessary -- his voice was akin to the low growling of the Huskies many Koreans chain to their houses. Smiles seemed to split his face, as though his flesh were unaccustomed to the expression -- and when he did smile it was usually out of defiance or despair rather than joy.
It was Mr. Lee's misfortune to be transferred from a girls' foreign language middle school to a boys' vocational high school. He hated his students, and they hated him right back. Much of this was the students fault -- since most of the senior class at Hapdeok Jaychil are of the slouch-and-drool variety, and thus notoriously contemptuous of the notion that they need to learn English. To be fair, though, some of the responsibility also rests with Mr. Lee, who I think had recently had two sad realizations -- the first being that he was suddently 55, and the second that students in 2010 suck just as much as they did 30 years ago. As a result, when I saw him he was almost perpetually hung over from the previous evening's soju. He also chain-smoked on school property, even though this was strictly forbidden. Skirmishes between him and the students were a daily occurrence. Once a huge senior smarted off and Mr. Lee picked the kid up by his shirt front and shoved him to the floor. He then sent me back to the teachers' office, obviously intent on getting medieval on his senior pals. Say what you want about what I should have done -- in retrospect, I will agree with all of it. At that moment, though, being the new kid on the very foreign block, I was glad to go.
My first clue that there was some tension between Mr. Lee and the school's brass was when he and the Vice Principal traded broadsides for something like ten minutes straight smack in the middle of the teacher's office. I sat fifteen feet away, pretending to be deaf as all the carnage unfolded. Everyone in the office could hear them. Yelling and shaking fists and stamping the floor. Eyes blazing with rage. It was awful -- and I bit my tongue to keep from laughing out loud at the horrible awkwardness of it all. I don't care what culture you're from -- any time you and your boss have a full-blown shouting match in front of all your coworkers, it is not a good sign. I never found out what they were fighting about. Mr. Lee tried to explain once, but for reasons of subterfuge or simple lack of vocabulary, all he told me was that his bosses "force me to do something I don't want to do," and that they blamed him for the disciplinary problems. To Mr. Lee, this was grounds for a blood feud.
"What do you think of principal and vice principal?" He asked, speaking in a subversive growl.
I hemmed and hawed, fearing the absolute power my feudal lords in the high school kingdom wielded.
"I think they are bad guys," he said, every word forged from cold hard menace.
One time Mr. Lee insisted on taking me out to dinner. We ate samgibsal, greasy-but-delicious bacon-like grilled pork. In between bites, Mr. Lee slugged down glasses of somaek -- the Korean version of a boilermaker. He told me about his sons, both of whom were studying at university -- and on whose account he couldn't quit his job. Not yet, anyway. Not just yet. His eyes shone with pride as he talked about his sons. I asked him about his wife, and a cloud seemed to pass in front of his face. He wouldn't say much about her. Apparently he had married very young, to a girl he scarcely knew -- their union the handwork of a matchmaker. I can still hear the sound of the words in Mr. Lee's bitter Korean brogue -- all the "Rs" ground out and the consonant clusters thick with menace.
"Matchmaker."
I felt sorry for Mr. Lee. Despite his bad temper and obvious drinking problem, he had worked hard and had a real gift for languages. None of this could save him from the fate the tides of Korean life had condemned him to. Hordes of lazy, insolent students, an obtuse academic bureaucracy, and, to add insult to injury, matchmakers. Mr. Lee seemed to sense this tenderness of feeling, and decided to play upon it.
"Hey Erik," he said, eyes thick with beer fog, "May I stay at your home today? I want to get really drunk."
And again, call me cold, heartless, anything else you like -- but, at that point, I decided that matchmaker or no, the thought of Mr. Lee, drunk out of his mind and inside my apartment was just not appealing.
"Uh, not this time, okay?" I said, "Let me help you find the bus station."
After that, things happened fast. First, Mr. Lee called a meeting of all the teachers to present his grievances with the Principal and Vice Principal and demand an apology. Apparently, word of the Mr. Lee/Principal War had reached the ears of the coordinator of foreign teachers for Chungnam Province, who had given specific instructions that I not be around for this particular bloodbath. As a result, when Mr. Lee showed up that morning, Grace rushed me off to another room where I surfed the internet and waited for Mr. Lee's storm to pass.
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Lee told me that he was filing a lawsuit against the school brass. I am not sure what offense he claimed they had committed against him, but I do remember the vindictive set of his unshaven jaw as he pushed the neatly folded complaint papers into an envelope. There could be no going back after he filed them. From then on, I knew his fate was all but etched in granite. A few days later, Mr. Lee left Hapdeok Jaychil on "extended medical leave," leaving me to teach the senior English class on my own until a replacement Korean teacher could be found. Given that Hapdeok is remote and considered a bad place to teach, we are now two replacements down the road and praying that the current one, Young Hee, decides to stay. I'm not sure I would if I were her.
As frustrated as I am by this situation, I have not been able to get angry at Mr. Lee. Maybe this is because, as little as we spoke, I felt like I understood Mr. Lee better than most of the other people I know here. Understood, and pitied -- loneliness and disappointment and pain transcend language. Between his sons leaving for college, his strained (or nonexistent) relationship with his wife, and his pariah status at school, Mr. Lee seemed terribly alone. Given the ultracommunal nature of Korean culture, I suspect he may have felt even more lonely than he seemed. I hope that the overlords of the Korean educational system will deal kindly with him in his next assignment after medical leave ends. I hope that he manages to find much more happiness than he seems to have now. Most of all, I hope that he manages to negotiate some mutually agreeable truce with the sometimes Kafka-esque strictures of life as a Korean.
"Matchmakers..."
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