3
Transit
Bo’s hagwon teacher paged him twice, but Bo did not call him back.
With his high school degree and good manners, he got a job right away at the nicer mart a block from the gosiwon.
Working full-time as a cashier and stocking shelves, Bo felt productive.
The mart manager, a thirty-two-year-old man from Daejeon, admired Bo, who was punctual, responsible, and honest. When other employees came late or didn’t show up, Bo picked up extra hours.
One evening, the manager mentioned in passing that he had graduated from a college no one in Seoul recognized and hadn’t been able to get office work no matter how hard he’d tried.
He didn’t see the point of the years and years of hagwon payments and countless job applications, all to end up at this mart, but the degree, matted and custom-framed, had made his late parents proud.
The manager’s cheerful wife, who was a head taller than he, also worked at the mart.
They did not plan on having any children.
Bo’s parents offered him a ticket to Sydney, but he asked for time to consider his options.
Moreover, he asked Helen and John not to send any money until he knew what he was doing.
With his own earnings, he was able to keep living at the gosiwon.
At the end of the workday, a mart employee could purchase discounted meals, and often, the manager and his wife saved him the best of the expired goods, which were still perfectly good to eat.
Between Bo’s mother and father, it was Helen who took Bo’s news harder.
She had trouble sleeping and focusing at work.
Even as she completed everything she had to do—work, family meal preparation, housecleaning—even as DH and Mido were doing well in their studies, Helen’s mind dwelled on her disappointed son in Korea.
It was difficult to imagine her brightest child selling cigarettes and beer and sweeping the sidewalk.
Hearing that the manager and his wife were being kind to him gave her little comfort.
Born to careless parents who often ran away from creditors and gambling debts, Helen and her siblings had grown up on their wits, dependent on the charity of the church and pitying neighbors and doing jobs that were forced on children.
One summer, when the girls were in primary school and Kenny was still a toddler, her parents had disappeared, and she and Sonya had packed sneakers in boxes for the owner of a small factory, who gave them food but almost no pay; during another school break, Helen had washed towels and cleaned the facilities of a public bath.
In middle school, Kenny had mopped floors and broken down crates at a nearby dry goods store.
All three of them had plucked chicken feathers and scaled fish at a wet market, when they could even get the work.
When Helen was pregnant, the memory alone of slippery chicken carcasses had made her unable to even look at a bowl of chicken soup.
If Helen didn’t have to keep her well-paying job at the department store, she would have flown back to Seoul to get him. Her husband asked her to be patient.
“Bo will figure it out. He’s the most sensible of the three,” John said.
Helen called Sonya anyway.
When Sonya met Bo at the tonkatsu restaurant, she wore a simple camel-colored dress and didn’t carry one of her expensive handbags. Bo arrived on time and took a seat across from her. He looked remorseful, as if he deserved to be reprimanded.
“I ordered your favorite set and a cola with ice,” Sonya said, smiling.
“Thank you, Aunt.”
The young man in front of her had just turned twenty-one, but Bo was still a boy. Like her sons, her nephew was the size of a man, but despite his clean-shaven face and the rising Adam’s apple of his thin, corded neck, Sonya could still see the childlike innocent expression behind his eyeglasses.
“I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you. The tutor you found me was very good. It isn’t his fault.”
“What are you talking about? I think you’re amazing, Bo.
I imagine this feels awful right now, but this could be providence,” she said.
“I believe this needed to happen. Your aunt is over fifty years old, and this is what I’ve learned.
Sometimes the things you wanted most and still don’t get are terrible things you’ve been delivered from. ”
Bo looked up, his mouth opened a little.
“It’s still upsetting. I understand.” She paused, sensing he might resist her next proposal.
“I talked to an admissions counselor about you, and she said that you should go to America.”
Bo’s expression darkened. “Aunt, I can’t give up.
I should take it again. I already spent three years on this, and my scores were really high in my practice exams, and on the first two.
I was just tired, so I thought this job would be a kind of break.
I don’t even have to learn that much more for the next Suneung. I just have to wait another year.”
“Your mother said something about a girl that you were helping the night before. Is she your special friend?”
“Oh, no.” Bo shook his head, understanding her meaning. “She’s like my elder sister at the gosiwon. She got sick, and we had to take her to the hospital. It’s not like that.”
“Is she well now?”
“Oh, I think so. She’s studying to take her civil service exam.”
The boy was too nice for his own good, she thought. Sonya’s husband thought it was crazy that he wanted to live in Korea when he had US citizenship.
“So you’re not staying in the gosiwon because of her, then.” Sonya looked at her nephew carefully, the way she did when she spoke with her sons, checking for even the smallest of telltale facial expressions. Bo shook his head again, and she decided to believe him.
“The admissions counselor had an idea, and I think it can also help your parents.”
The server placed the tonkatsu sets on the table and left them.
They bowed their heads and prayed silently, then she gestured for him to eat.
“Bo, this admissions counselor is famous. She is the best in Seoul and she has a plan, which apparently she’s used many times with her students who can get visas.
You move to California and go to a community college for two years.
After you establish residency, then the cost will be almost nothing.
You can pay for it by doing part-time jobs if you like working so much.
If you do well, and I know you will, you can transfer to a California State school, or one of the University of California schools, or any four-year school.
You could transfer to an Ivy if you wanted to.
” She detected her nephew’s resistance and felt herself trying to sell him on the idea.
“The rich schools give financial aid. Just think, you don’t have to do military service since you’re an American citizen, and Bo, you can start again.
I know you will flourish. It’s not your fault that—”
She stopped herself. The boy was clearly upset, but trying not to show it.
Bo felt worse. She must think he couldn’t pass, yet he could not defend himself because the evidence against him was irrefutable. He had failed. Three times. None of the context mattered, only the results. He chewed the fried pork but tasted nothing.
“I’ve spoken with your parents. They think this is a good idea.”
“Aunt, I can pass. I know this has been a terrible burden, so I thought I’d save the money from this job and try to do it alone—”
“Bo. Listen to me. I know you can pass, too, but what for? Is it worth it? Do you really want to live here, or did you just want to know that you got into Yonsei University? If you really wanted to live here, you could have chosen an easier school to get into, isn’t that right?
There were dramatic changes in the past few Suneungs—first the Yonsei bongosa, which they didn’t have before, then they get rid of the bongosa, and all those extra questions in this recent one.
Almost all of the children of my friends didn’t get good results.
It’s not their fault. This unpredictable system of testing just to weed children out is unfair, and I don’t know why you have to bear it any longer. ”
Bo said nothing. He had believed in his plan, and in a few sharp, well-reasoned words, his aunt had pierced his logic and purpose.
“I don’t know anyone in California. Where would I live?”
“Mido has that church friend, Yun, from middle school, and her boyfriend, Lion Han, said you could work for him.”
Bo looked confused.
“Yun’s boyfriend owns a hagwon in Orange County, and he needs a van driver and a math tutor. You can live with him, he said. You can go to school and work part-time.”
“How would I get there?”
“Uncle Kenny will get you a ticket to Sydney, and then, after you see your parents, you can go to Los Angeles.” Sonya held her breath. This plan had been in the works for over a week, and if Bo agreed, she felt it could be the ideal situation.
“I guess no one thinks I can get into Yonsei.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, impatient and unwilling to indulge his self-pity. “You want proof that you can get in. I get that you feel embarrassed. That’s normal.”
Bo put down his fork and knife and wiped his mouth with the paper napkin.
“I know you can get admitted. There were some tough breaks, and I’m positive that if you keep taking it, you will pass.
I read that this Korean-language section for the 1997 Suneung was the hardest one in the history of this stupid exam.
How were we supposed to know that? Your friend got sick and had to go to the hospital. You did the right thing.”