Abdication

Over a fortnight ago, I overheard the vice director discussing a developing situation at school with the other foreign teachers, James and Olga. "I will be conducting interviews this week," I heard him say. "As you know, four people are leaving."

We hadn't had any full-time staff memebers leave since Jack left for America in July; surely he didn't mean Korean teachers were saying goodbye. I interrupted him. "No, I don't know. Remember how you were complaining that no one tells you these things and you have to find them out yourself? No one tells me these things. What's going on?"

"I don't really know what's going on," he said as he turned towards me. "I just know that the director, Vicky, Michelle [Teacher], and Anita are leaving at the end of the month. It will be just myself and Grace."

Had I just heard him right? Did he just say the director of the school was calling it quits? I thought it was the captain's job to go down with his ship!--or hers, in this case. How could something like this actually be happening?

The following Monday afternoon, Director Michelle confirmed the reports I had heard. She pulled me into her office to inform me of her decision. "I have to recover my health," she said somberly. "The [stress of] school is not good for me."

Her statement alarmed me to a degree because I knew she had been pregnant for several weeks by this time. I also knew that she had recently been out of the office for three weeks, after major lower back pain just prior to Chuseok. "And what about the baby?" I asked gently.

"You didn't know? I miss... I missed my baby."

"You miscarried?"

"Andrew [my five-year-old son]," she said wistfully, "always asks about the baby. When the baby gonna come? When I recover, I have to try again."

As our conversation returned to school business, she reassured me that everything would run as normal and that payment would again be on time. "Jackson from downstairs gonna take care of everything," she promised. "If you have any questions, just ask Grace."

To her credit, Director Michelle wasn't actually a hagwon director in the Korean sense--for that would have involved owning the company and investing monies into the wellbeing of the school. If she were merely managing affairs for someone else, as indeed she was, it stood to reason that it was her perrogative to resign from such a position if she so chose. Ownership, it was known, rested solely with a group of men whom I'd never met whose offices were kept downstairs on the third floor. And they didn't seem to be going anywhere.

As I walked into the teacher's room after lunch the day following my meeting with Director Michelle, James and the vice director were again involved in deep conversation. It sounded as if they were intently discussing some pressing manly issue, a dialogue I would have been happily content to ignore. "Did you hear him?" James asked abruptly, breaking me from my thoughts. "He said he's leaving Friday." That was the end of October, just four days away.

It seemed like such a sudden decision. The vice director turned to me to reiterate his argument and vouch for his own defense. He had talked with the owners downstairs that day, he stated, and couldn't get what he needed to adequately perform his position in the company. When he asked for relevant past records regarding the school's performance and student history, for example, he was told to provide them himself.

He spoke too fast even for a native speaker's ears and tangled his sentences into a lumpy knot of incomplete thoughts. Straining to catch his rapid-fire, malformed English, I needed to recap. "Basically what you're saying," I summarized, "is that you feel like you're overworked, underpaid, and have not been given enough of the information you need. You've only been here a month; you have no real investment in this school. There's nothing keeping you here."

Six p.m. Friday evening saw the vice director standing at the elevator with a glass container of hot chocolate mix in his hands, the sum total of all his belongings from the office. I was standing near the water cooler observing him leave. "Bye, Jennifer. See you Monday," he said as a joke. Then he hastily added, "I wish."

If he had wished to remain, he wouldn't have come to the decision he had made on Tuesday, abdicating his own responsibility. "No, you don't," I corrected him in a serious tone. "Anyonghekahseyo." Goodbye.

I thought about these new developments as I rode with James to work on bus 27 one recent morning. I asked him what he thought of the turn of events and he reassured me that he had given his word and committed himself for a year to the school, regardless what else happened; it was still his mind to make good on that promise. As for me, I felt the same. It mattered little who came or who left anymore, I knew. For good or for ill, I had signed on for a year.

Good things have come from our managers' shocking decisions. As of yet, the only two to leave have been the two of them, which helps to maintain at least some sense of normalcy for the kids. We have a new part-time teacher in the afternoons, a woman named Leonice who prefers to be called "Leo," who has taken on the classes that the vice director's absence left unsupervised. And we also have someone occupying the director's office, one of the men from downstairs.

"The new director is the old director," Grace relayed to me. "We don't have the money to hire another [one]. Maybe later we will have the money, but for now we don't."

It feels better this way, to be honest, having the owner be the overseer instead of an uninterested, uninvolved third party. Though something surely can be said of stewardship, it's much more powerful when the proprietor of an establishment comes to set affairs straight. So far, he has been: For the first time in two months, I've been paid on time.