John Amos Comenius. Orbis Sensualium Pictus: A Facsimile (1659 / 1968): 248.i.m. In-Jae Ra, d. 29/12/97
I slept so soundly I did not know the
mountain rain had stopped.
Waking up, I felt the whole house airy
and cool.
– The Sound of the One Hand, trans. Yoel Hoffman (1975) [1]
Monday, December 29, 1997
I took the bus before my usual one for some reason (curiosity?) and so arrived early at the school, around 8 a.m. Martin and Hamish were standing outside smoking. We exchanged good mornings, then went upstairs to the teachers’ room.
The first we heard of it was when Ian, the temporary Director of Studies, came bustling in. Teresa, the Korean counsellor, had told him that one of the students was dead, had died during the night. Car crash? I enquired. No, some kind of seizure or haemorrhage he thought, but she’d been too upset to say.
As more of us arrived, the news began to get more circumstantial. The dead student’s name was In-Jae. It sounded vaguely familiar, but it was only when Hamish told me she was in the TOEFL [Test Of English as a Foreign Language] exam class that I realised I’d been teaching her the week before.
I still couldn’t put a face to the name until I looked at the school notice board (I went over to check after I saw Dong-Youl pointing her out to another student). Then it suddenly clicked. My class had all gone shopping for the Christmas party, then we’d had coffee together in Robert Harris on Queen Street – iced coffee for Hyun-Kyung, cappuccino for Su-Jin, latte for me, and black coffee (I think) for the rather undemonstrative In-Jae.
We chatted about our plans – Christmas, etc. She was a university student, doing the TOEFL exam in order to get a better job back home in Korea. In class she seemed a little reserved, as if awed by those who’d been studying for so much longer.
•
How can I convey the strange – uncanny, almost: unheimlich [eerie] – atmosphere of a language school? I tried to say it in a poem once:
Inside this roomThat isn’t quite it, though. It isn’t that Auckland rushes by while we sit suspended, flies in amber, caught in some Eastern dream of serenity. What is it, then? Perhaps it’s that normal rules of conduct change. We become more exemplary of ourselves – as if we, as teachers, felt compelled to represent a Western dream of compromise, freedom, fair play – as if the students were countering with Confucian virtues of filial obedience and respect.
it is Korea.
Auckland rushes by. [2]
All the guessing games – Trivial Pursuit; Botticelli; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral – go wrong, bound up as they are with cultural assumptions. Who was Marilyn Monroe? What was John Wayne’s real name? Where is Big Ben? Our textbook writers seldom show the imagination to bridge this gap.
Of course there are students from Russia, from Europe, from South America, but the overwhelming majority (here in Auckland, at any rate) come from China, Korea, South-East Asia, Japan … the term “Asian” soon ceases to have much significance when you teach ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages).
It’s not enough simply to avoid pejorative clichés, though. What I do like about the poem is the sense it gives of a kind of secret society – an initiation into difference which has been the common property of English-language teachers in the age of the Pax Americana.
For a long time the only way I could find to express this was by copying bits of writing and drawing from the walls of classrooms (realia we call them, in the ESOL world). It wasn’t that I thought them cute or funny, but dislocating, as if they offered a new way of looking at things, from the outside looking in:
When I was child, I would rather be naughty, than a good one.
One day, my mother told me not to go out after having dinner because she had a bad dream about me, last night.
So, she was anxious about what happen to me.
But when she washed the dishes in the kitchen, I went outside secretly to play with my friends.
We played at a narrow side street without any accident for one hour.
All of a sudden some one pushed me to the corner way and then I fell down.
Unfortunately there was a fire pot beside the wall.
I was aware of falling down with it.
My arms were burned and my head was hurted.
I was surprised at the bleeding from my head but I couldn’t tear homing back to my house rightaway so I called her.
She was very surprised at my appearance and called the doctor and moved to the hospital.
A couple hours later I was awake.
Both of my arms were bandage and a right part of my head was stitched by a doctor.
When the effect of anesthetic wore off, I was very painful.
I was absent from school a week.
In spite of growing up, I can’t forget it.
– Tee Young
•
The first intimation that anything was really wrong came when I saw Hyun-Kyung sobbing in the office next to the teacher’s room (she’d just asked us how to get an outside line). Janine went in to comfort her.
From then on, things began to get increasingly strange. More and more students were arriving and being told the news, and then reacting in their various ways – some pacing like cats, others giggling in small groups, others heading straight for the telephone.
All of us were aware that this was moving beyond our control. Hyun-Kyung was sobbing openly, comforted by some of her classmates (I even had a go myself, but to no avail). Vic, too, was sitting and sobbing by himself till Hamish went over and joined in.
As class-time (9 a.m.) approached, it became clear that anything like a normal working day was impossible. Jim Salter, the Kiwi Academic Director of this Korean-owned school, sent up to say that he would address the school in ten minutes time. By then, though, many students had already disappeared. Getting to the hospital was the one thing on their minds.
Visiting hours in the Critical Care ward were, Jim told us, from 11 onwards, so there was little point in going there right away. I managed to get my class to sit down, and we talked for a while. No study was possible, we concluded. After a bit they went out to smoke, then May, an ex-student, an older Korean student, arrived, and we all talked together some more. They decided to go off in her car without waiting until eleven o’clock.
•
China [la Chine] is one thing, the idea which a French petit-bourgeois could have of it not so long ago is another: for this peculiar mixture of bells, rickshaws and opium-dens, no other word possible but Sininess [Sinité]. Unlovely?Perhaps a better alternative to the “unlovely” Sininess might be Chinoiserie. There’s a great temptation to indulge in Chinoiserie, or Orientalism, or any of those tried-and-true devices by which the Westerner attempts to assimilate, and distance, the Other (in the guise of understanding) when talking about language schools. Actually being there is, fortunately, a different matter. The sheer solidity of the individual students, with their individual problems and points of origin, resists our generalising tendencies.
- Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (1987) [3]
The Christmas party was a case in point. We’d all gone shopping for small presents (under two dollars, if possible) at the Korean Gift shop “Morning Glory” just off Lorne Street. This was before the days of Pokémon and Pikachu, but the bizarre kitschiness of the shop’s contents still had to be seen to be believed:
Koala-bear backpacks, Snoopy watches, fluffy-bunny stickers, fluorescent tissue holders, furry-toy pencil sharpeners, “Sunny Day” T-shirts …Have a Happy!
Hello❤️Kitty
Lovely Boat
Mr. Lonely
I love me!
As a contrast, I could cite the slightly surreal figure of Dong-Youl Shin, long-term student at the school: ex-monk, martial arts expert, windsurfing champion, survivor of apocalyptic motorbiking accidents, philosopher, part-time caretaker, rapid language assimilator, Renaissance man, he always seemed to be living on some heightened plane of reality. Martin defeated him once at arm-wrestling, which surprised me, as I’d become accustomed to regarding him as the Asian superman. We were, for a time, good friends, and he gave me a lot of advice which I felt I understood at the time.
My point is that it’s not enough to see these as normal parts of our cultural landscape. We have to find new categories to put them in. Barthean Sinité may not be the solution, but perhaps a more self-conscious and pervasive sense of strangeness might be – a Brechtian alienation effect, but without the latter’s dependence on the dogmas of class struggle.
•
By the time break came (10.30), most of those close to In-Jae had already gone. Jim’s rather dilatory way of dealing with the emergency had left us with a fait accompli. It was decided that Hamish, Janine and I should go to the hospital with any remaining students. Martin said we could borrow his car, and I ended up driving various young Koreans there in his Mitsubishi automatic. Somewhat unexpectedly, parking was no trouble at all.
After some wandering about inside the main building, we ran into Dong-Youl and Sunny, who told us to make for the second floor. There we found an immense horde of people, and a rather flapped receptionist. She insisted on telling me and May (the closest thing to authority figures?) the rules: only two people at a time, none till the nurse allowed it, no-one to slip through the door unnoticed.
When we turned the corner, we found that Helena, another student, was letting in large numbers of people, something she claimed the nurse was happy to allow. All of the kids went in together. I waited, suddenly unsure whether I really wanted to join them. I felt like an intruder suddenly – a tourist to their grief.
Finally I did steel myself to go in, with May. After threading various twists and turns, we came to a curtained-off recess. In it there was a complex mechanised bed, surrounded by various stands, charts, benches, etc. In the midst of it all a small, official-looking nurse was bustling about the patient. In-Jae lay there, with a swollen face, tubes running from her nose, hooked up to two sets of pinging machines. Her breast rose and fell under the thin hospital gown. She looked quite alive, but completely unconscious.
“She’s combed,” the nurse said. The brain haemorrhage had crushed all the basic functions in her brain stem, so she was, effectively, dead. Her heart was still beating, though, and might go on doing so for some time to come. She’d combed in fifteen minutes, the last time she was timed, she told us.
•
Life Support
No doubt you’ve heard she’s combed
– little In-Jae –
the nurse told May and me
A rupture in the wall
of the blood-vessel:
brain-stem injury
She came here from Korea
to learn English; she returns
burned dry as dust
Dead when we saw her
(breathing still)
… Perhaps the word was coned
•
The major point of controversy at this stage was whether the Korean Pastor would be allowed in to conduct a prayer meeting. The receptionist was doubtful, but the nurse had no problem with it at all. She was going off to lunch, but said we could all come in. So the tribe trekked in again: Natalia and Oleg (the two Russian ex-students In-Jae had had dinner with the night before), all her classmates, Helena, May, Mae-Jong, Hamish, Janine, the Pastor. He began to pray over the girl in Korean. We repeated “Amen” from time to time. I joined in on what was, I hoped, the Lord’s prayer.
•
Points to bring out:
- Amazing tolerance, forbearance, dignity of hospital staff (especially the nurses).
- Dong-Youl’s penetration of the hospital byways (as reported by Hamish). Later that night he led him down a labyrinthine set of stairs and corridors to a little coffee room in the bowels of the building, no doubt reserved for staff.
- Long, intense conversation with Chinese girl in class next day. (A Taiwanese girl, jilted by a gambler boyfriend who took all her savings. She had come back to the school in a stricken state, at a reduced tuition fee).
- Hamish weeping with the others in the hospital corridor. How much I admired him at that moment.
- Photos of the exam class going skydiving, leaning out of the plane, In-Jae in their midst.
•
There was a great deal of coming and going. Helena and I were shut out at one point, and had to petition the receptionist specially to be let back in. So much coming and going, dissolving into a blur. I even saw the doctor at one point, for a minute. He spoke to me (presumably) as the only European present.
The whole thing hinged on when the respirator could be switched off. In-Jae was, to all intents and purposes, dead. It was only the machines that were keeping her body going. They needed the bed, and her parents couldn’t be there till next day. In any case, it was questionable whether they would really want to see her in that state.
I couldn’t help him, though I sympathised with his dilemma. These decisions were clearly beyond me, beyond any of us there. We felt that only her parents had the right to decide.
Jim arrived about half way through the prayers, so I was able to fill him in on what I’d been able to gather up to then. It was a relief to hand over even this tenuous responsibility. Shortly after that I decided to leave, and drove the same boys back to the school with me (Hamish and Janine chose to stay on). Then I was off. I went home, exercised, took a long swim, went for a drive – life activities, the only ones I knew how to do.
The gravity of it all seemed somewhat compromised by the bizarrerie of the circumstances, the pinging bed, the endless complicated viewing arrangements, but it hit even me from time to time. More often, though, I felt like Meursault in Camus’s L'Étranger, unable to cry or show the expected set of human reactions.
•
Hokoji pointed to the clouds in the sky and said, ‘All these lovely snow-flakes do not fall on any particular place.’ At that time a monk by the name of Zen said ‘Where do they fall then?’ Hokoji slapped him … and said, ‘You see, but you are just like the blind. You speak, yet you are no different from the dumb.’Next morning Jim had pinned up a note FYI: For Your Information, which we could hardly understand at first. It gave an account of the onslaught of the brain haemorrhage – the fact that the ambulance had arrived within five minutes of being called – the fact that this was the best and largest critical care unit in Australasia – the fact that there was nothing more that could have been done, or that was left undone.– The Sound of the One Hand, trans. Yoel Hoffman [4]
Hardly anyone was in class. Language schools stay open all the time, every day except statutory holidays, as many of the students have no other place to go. Only a skeleton staff is usually needed over the period between Christmas and New Year, but now any semblance of instruction had broken down.
Or had it? What does a teacher do at a language school? You talk, essentially. You need some kind of crutch: a text-book, a theme, but the main thing is to talk and cause to talk. These are the ESOL dogmas: the Four Skills – two active (Speaking, Writing), two passive (Listening, Reading); the Three P’s: Presentation, Practice, Performance. Essentially, though, it’s talking that’s required.
We talked that day. We talked about In-Jae, about life and death, about our feelings. The atmosphere was hushed, tense, emotional. The students needed each other and they needed us, they needed us to show we cared about them, about their loss, about the fact they were so very far from home at such a time, just after Christmas (important for Koreans – not so much for Chinese, Japanese).
By the next week the whole thing had died down. The other teachers came back, the daily routines were re-established: “How was your weekend?” “Have you done your homework?” “Don’t fall asleep in class!”
It was a moment which called for something extraordinary from each of us, and afterwards it was impossible to know how well one had performed. Simple human gestures were what was required, yet they didn’t seem enough. The gulf between us and the students, between them and poor In-Jae, could not be bridged.
So what does it mean? Little enough, in this bleached-out world we spend our time in – we don’t have a context for such weighty matters. It was a strange day at the language school. That’s all, perhaps.
•
Today was fine: I could look at the sky and I felt very fine. however it was a strong winds. And when I woke up in the early morning. I felt cold. Sometimes I sneezed. I woke up in the morning by my friend. he told me I was too late and if I didn’t go to school, ~ll forgive teacher. But I couldnot wake up as easy. Anyway I must wake up and go to school, because of I’d like to speak in English. But it isn’t easy to speak in English well. I think I’ll have more time that listening and understand. And a friend of mine advised me to think about something in English. How do I do? Still I’ll try to srudy hard.
Today my class mate who called Hans finsished this school In order to go to school in his country. I was friendly with him. He was young boy, but he was clever. I liked him. I’ll miss him. Adios amigo. ^ ^
I hope I’ll meet him after long time. Maybe he will be gentle man.
– Soo ii
Notes:
[1] Yoel Hoffmann, The Sound of The One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers. Foreword by Hirano Sōjō. Introduction by Ben-Ami Scharfstein. 1975 (St Albans, Herts: Paladin, 1977), 63.
[2] Jack Ross, "Morning at a Language School." City of Strange Brunettes: Poems (Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 1998), 23-24.
[3] Roland Barthes, "Myth Today." Mythologies. 1957. Rev. ed. 1970. Ed & Trans. Annette Lavers. 1972. A Paladin Book (Frogmore, St Albans: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1973), 109-59 [121].
[4] Hoffmann, The Sound of The One Hand, 100.
Landfall 203 (2002)[7-30/6/01]
[3055 words]
[Published in Landfall 203 (2002): 119-25;
Monkey Miss Her Now (Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004): 83-93.]
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