5
College Tour
Yun stared at the spreadsheet on her screen, tapping her pencil against the conference table. Seated opposite her, Lion was drafting copy for the Fortress college tour poster. Peter and Mido sat beside Lion.
It had not taken long for Lion, Yun, Mido, and Peter to figure out the itinerary and costs. The Fortress college tour group would fly into Boston, charter a bus, sleep in motels, and fly back home from Philadelphia.
“We won’t make a cent from this,” Yun said. “We might lose money.”
“It’ll be a great trip, though,” Lion said. “I wish we could go with them.”
“We need to be here,” she said, and turned to Peter. “Can you and Mido really handle twenty-six kids?”
Peter scratched his head and smiled at Mido.
“Well, the students listen to the Surgeon, and we’ll have Ginny, too. She might as well be a teacher.”
“This whole trip is for her, really,” Lion said, smiling.
“No parents, huh?” Peter asked.
“No parents. No way,” Lion said. “They’d be harder to control than two dozen teenagers scrambling to buy Harvard T-shirts at the Coop, then racing for the bus.”
“The price for the trip is down to the bone,” Yun said, shaking her head. “Is there any room to find some profit in this? How will we pay Peter and Mido for their time?”
“I’m okay,” Mido said. “I think this is important.”
Lion smiled at her. “Yes. Our students have vague ideas about colleges, and many of them haven’t seen a single campus.
Most of their parents are too busy to take them across the country, and some will be the first generation to attend colleges in the States.
A tour like this could be less intimidating and cost-effective for the families. ”
“It could also be fun,” Peter said.
“But you’ll be losing a lot of private tutoring income if you’re gone for a week,” Yun said, looking worried.
“I’m okay with that,” Mido said. “But I shouldn’t speak for Peter.”
“He’s fine with money,” Lion said. “We pay him handsomely.”
“Handsomely?” Peter cocked his head.
Lion ignored this. “It would be better if the kids actually saw Princeton before applying to it as their top choice, when it’s possible that Williams is a much better fit for them.
It’s just Ivies, Ivies, Ivies. I’m exhausted by these conversations with the parents telling me that their kid has to get into an Ivy. ”
“Husband, you went to Princeton,” Yun said, laughing. “Had you even seen it before applying?”
“Yes, because my mother forced my brother, Ray, to take me there. She wanted to make sure that no one would beat me up. I was sixteen when I went to college, and I looked like a tall twelve-year-old. I didn’t need to shave until I graduated.”
Lion still found it hard to believe that nothing bad had happened to him.
Most of his closest relationships had been with his professors, who must have felt sorry for one of the youngest undergraduates at the university.
Not a single person had said an unkind thing to him in his three years there; however, he had never felt quite normal, either.
Those years had shaped Lion Han. It was while he was at Princeton that his father cut him off, forcing him to tutor to pay for his tuition.
At school, he had easily grasped the mathematical elegance and mystery of the Fourier series, Dirichlet characters, and Hilbert spaces, and he felt like he had become a man because when his family abandoned him, he could take care of himself and continue to learn.
Not everyone should go to college, but Lion wished that anyone who did could experience the exquisite pleasure of learning for its own sake.
Getting a degree merely to get a job could not be the sole purpose of higher education.
Lion was about to turn thirty-one, and that was not old, but he had lived long enough to know that one should never be cynical about learning and growth.
Over the years, the more money he made, the less important it had become. If it weren’t for Yun’s reminders about their overhead, he would have cut in half the tuition bills for the middle-income families at Exodus and forgiven the tuition for all the lower-income kids.
In contrast to Exodus, Fortress never lost money, and its extraordinary profits more than covered Exodus’s losses.
There were parents who would never be able to pay back the money they owed Exodus, but Lion still allowed their kids to come.
The parents had no other childcare, and Lion reasoned that the kids would just get into trouble if they were left home by themselves.
He and Yun agreed that they could afford to let 10 percent of the kids attend for free as long as no one else knew about it, especially the children themselves.
For four years, Ginny’s parents hadn’t paid any tuition or for room and board.
Lion and Yun paid for her annual plane ticket to Korea so she could see her family.
This year, Ginny had refused the ticket so she could go on the college tour, and when Yun said they could still send her, she would not accept it.
“I want to get into Dartmouth first. Or UCLA. My mother wants me to apply to Yale or Harvard, but I think it would be better if I went somewhere that I chose—”
“You can make up your mind about the college list after you visit some of the schools,” Yun said, not wanting to disagree with Ginny’s mother, who was a kind woman but single-minded about making her daughter into a doctor.
She had initially wanted Ginny to attend UCLA, but with Ginny’s exceptional marks and test scores and her high class rank, her mother was feeling more hopeful.
Then Ginny was voted yearbook editor, and upon learning that another yearbook editor had been accepted into Yale two years prior, her mother had grown only more ambitious for her child.
Ginny’s mother reasoned that being fostered, more or less, by famous Orange County hagwon owners would position Ginny to get into Yale or Harvard.
In the five years since its inception, Fortress had sent on average a dozen students to Ivy League schools each year, and its reputation had spread even to Seoul.
In the past two years, students had flown in from Korea for the July essay boot camp to work on their applications with Mido.
Finding twenty-six students for the college tour, each paying $1,500, was not a problem.
In fact, there was so much demand that mothers asked Lion to create a second tour, and Peter and Mido agreed to take a new group of students a month later.
When the students returned, application boot camp would start, and that was another $2,000, which was less than most counselors in the region charged.
A bargain, several mothers had said. Yun said they could double the boot camp fee, and parents would pay it. Lion said that wouldn’t be right.
When Ginny stepped onto Dartmouth’s grassy campus, she felt certain that she should apply. It was unseasonably warm for March, so she removed the blue winter parka she’d borrowed from Yun and stared wide-eyed at the pristine colonial buildings painted white and the Georgian revival brick facades.
As guardians of a responsible child, Yun and Lion had given her latitude and freedom, and Ginny never abused her privileges.
If anything, Peter and Mido worried that she was far too mature at sixteen.
The other students on the tour followed Ginny’s lead as if she had been deputized by Lion himself as a third teacher.
After the group tour led by a student guide from the Admissions Office, Fortress students separated from the others and formed a kind of moving huddle around Mido and Peter as they walked across the Green.
They were the only all-ethnically-Korean group of visitors.
Some of the other visitors thought they were on a bus tour from overseas and didn’t speak English.
“Are you from Japan?” a preppy-looking White boy asked Kate Gwon, Ginny’s closest friend.
“No. We’re from OC,” Kate shot back, irritated. “OC is the acronym for Orange County. That’s in Southern California, dude. Near LA, which stands for Los Angeles. Have a nice visit in Hanover.” She flicked one of her long dyed-blond braids before showing him her back.
Ginny giggled, then pulled Kate away from the stunned young man. He had been just trying to make conversation with a cute girl who’d reminded him of Sailor Moon.
“I know I could be happy here,” she said to Peter, Mido, and Kate while the other students took photographs of each other.
“Really? Why is that?” Peter asked.
“It’s so beautiful. There are so many trees that we don’t have in Los Angeles. I love this building,” Ginny said, admiring Dartmouth Hall.
“Yes, but you’re seeing New Hampshire in late March.
It’s very cold here for most of the school year.
I remember being at Andover, which is considerably more south, and wishing for sunshine and better weather so I didn’t have to wear a heavy coat.
It gets really fucking cold in New England,” Peter said, then covered his mouth with both hands when he saw Mido’s stern expression.
She was always having to remind him not to swear in front of the students, although the students seemed to love it.
Lion and Yun never used curse words, and they would have preferred Peter not swear, either.
“Too many trees and mountains for me,” said Honey, a fair-skinned girl wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses as if she were a celebrity trying to avoid being recognized.
She spoke English with a faint Korean accent.
Honey, or Ha-yeon—she answered to both—attended one of the international schools in Seoul.
She and six other students had flown in from Seoul just for this tour.
“Hanover looks boring. I’d rather be in Boston. ”
“Don’t tell me, you want to go to Harvard,” said Charlie, a sophomore from her school.
“No, I don’t. Harvard won’t take more than one from my school, and my class rank is not top five,” she said with certainty. “My mother said I’d be better off applying early to Tufts or Wellesley. She doesn’t want to waste my early decision application.”
“But you won that international debate thing, though. Man, if you can’t get into Harvard, then who goes there?”
“I mean, I’ll apply, but I’m not counting on it.” Honey put her arm around her best friend, Cindy, who was just happy to be on the trip and had no expectations of getting in anywhere close to the top schools. Charlie snapped their photograph.
After Mido did the room check for the kids at the hotel, she went downstairs to the bar to meet Peter.
“The kids are freaking scary,” he said as soon as she sat down.
Mido smiled. “I don’t remember knowing so much about schools and my likelihood of getting in or not. I mean, Australia is totally different than here. Nothing is like here. It’s madness. Why are so many of these kids from Korea trying to study in the US?”
“Are you serious?” Peter asked, shelling peanuts. He made a pile of the shelled ones on a napkin and set aside the shells in an empty bowl. “This is the globalization strategy.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“Every Korean kid needs to speak English, and ideally, if the parents have any connections, pull, or money, they want their kids to leave Korea and not deal with its education hell.”
“I mean, I know that, but still. The kids are so cynical and in many cases, misinformed.”
“Well, they’re just repeating stuff they heard from their parents, classmates, tutors, relatives, and whatever the media says.”
“Did you call your friend Jack?” Mido said.
“Yeah, he’s heading over. He couldn’t meet the kids. He said it would be a disaster.”
Peter raised his hand when he saw his friend walking toward them.
“You’re buying, right?” Jack said, giving Peter a hug. He shook Mido’s hand.
“Yeah, man. Order whatever you want. On your assistant prof salary, you can’t afford the steak here.”
“No, I cannot, but I’ve had everything on the menu here. The History Department pays.”
The three of them talked about college admissions, and Mido didn’t know if she should excuse herself so the guys could catch up, but Jack kept pulling Mido into the conversation, so she thought it was okay for her to stay.
“What are the students like here?” she asked.
“They’re awesome. For the most part, very sophisticated, can handle the work, and a lot of them become consultants, lawyers, or go into finance. No one wants to get a PhD in history. That’s only for morons like me.”
“Wait, hang on. You have a second book coming out. Religious revivalism, right?”
“You are kind to remember, Sir Peter.”
“Sir Peter?” Mido glanced at Jack, wanting more details.
“Yeah, that’s what we called him at King’s.
Even when he was a lad. He was the poshest Asian we had ever seen.
His mum would have sent him a valet and cook, but the guardian wouldn’t allow it.
So Sir Peter had to learn how to make his bed and attend to all sorts of horrid sundry matters.
Dreadful. Oh, how he suffered trying to be just upper-middle-class like the rest of us. ”
“Change topics,” Peter said, laughing. His British accent became more pronounced around Jack.
“You have a bit of an Aussie accent,” Jack said to Mido.
“Oh, you picked up on that.” She covered her mouth. “I thought I got rid of it.”
“I never forget a pretty face or fail to distinguish a Commonwealth accent.” Jack smiled at her.
“Are you fucking flirting with my colleague? She’s too young for you.” Peter threw a peanut shell at his friend.
“I’m twenty-five years old,” Mido said.
“He’s thirtysomething.” Peter pointed to Jack.
Mido looked down. “It’s late. I better get to my room. Tomorrow starts early. Western Massachusetts. Day four is Amherst and Williams. Nice meeting you, Jack. I’ll let you two catch up. See you at breakfast, Peter. I think the bus is at nine a.m.”
Jack looked disappointed. “Don’t leave me here with this toff.”
Peter waved at her. “Good night, colleague.”
In the morning, Peter said that Jack had wanted her number, but he had not given it to him.
“Really? He wants a long-distance relationship with a woman based in Southern California?”
“Not sure if he wants a relationship per se. Jack is a dog. Did you not notice his friendly-mutt qualities?”
“I did sense some of that. He’s not my type.”
“I know. You like lawyers.”
Mido smiled. “Change topics.”
“Nicely done,” Peter said.
When the kids were on the bus, Peter sat in the back and listened to music on his headphones, while Mido sat in the front reading A House for Mr. Biswas.