Sad Peninsula. Mark Sampson
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