Short Faction

September 26^th, 2012

‘Faction’-Identity & Community

Mr. Menard/American Literature

11b4 111150 Ho InHee

  

The school backyard was covered with wet black pebbles. The frostily winter rain had wet the pebbles cold. I was stepping on those black wet pebbles with my black leather shoes, just like anyone else in the backyard.

“So who are going over to Heather’s house this weekend, exactly?” I asked, and the girls stole secret glances at one another.

“Shannon, Lizz, and Charlotte,” Heather answered, after some silence.

“Is she going too?” Lizzie asked, her eyes directed at me. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

“Probably not, my mom told me to bring maximum three. I’m really sorry.”

Things started to go weird when thirty three shots were heard in a university nearby. I had absolutely no idea what that shots were, why they happened, who had done it, or anything about it. The only I knew was those shots seemingly irrelevant to me were enough to make the girls somehow shun me. Whatever the reason for shunning me was, I was confronted by a sense of severe exclusion. The isolation was a little too heavy for an eleven-year-old girl alone in the US all by herself to handle. I desperately needed somebody to share my agony. I needed anybody to have an attached conversation with.

Apparently, I didn’t. I was a total newcomer from a nameless eastern country. On my first day at this new school, all they asked me was how dangerous was my country right under Communist North Korea. Anyhow, they were very friendly and amicable to this newcomer. I learned their culture, and taught them few Korean words.

Then there were the thirty three shots. This one guy who had made these shots was somewhat very related to me. I merely saw his name on newspaper. But he was still very related to me. Because he was Korean. This simple fact was enough for my friends shun me. Friends whom I had woven hands on the day before didn’t wave back any more. Weird words always disturbed me, biting me. The planned sleepover was canceled only for me. The naked ostracism had left me alone in a continent where no one was with me. I felt a desperate need to cut whatever relation was between the guy and me, but didn’t know how.

Another day, we were getting back our math quizzes. Mark, the boy sitting next to me, sneaked a look at my quiz sheet, even before I took a look at mine. Then he burst into laughter, so loud that everyone’s attention was on him. I looked down at mine, too, and noticed I got one wrong.

“What’s a hedgehog?” I asked. One question asked me to figure how many hedgehogs there are when there is a given number of total legs. Hedgehog sounded somehow similar to ‘hen’, and I assumed hedgehog was a kind of bird with two legs. After my question, Mark laughed even more hard. My ignorance was something to cause laughter to them. Or the fact that I, a Korean, got something stupid wrong in a math test was something funny, perhaps.

Similar pattern repeated until the day I returned Korea. By then, I wasn’t alone anymore, at least superficially. The ‘friends’ were not evils who were never willing to accept me forever no matter what. We were all eleven then, and ‘eleven’ wasn’t a number large enough to help us understand what nationality meant to us. I didn’t know then that I was shaping myself to be more non-Korean way, not caring about the grades so much and giving our creative (or even absurd) ideas. The only thing I knew for sure was that there were typical behaviors that made ‘friends’ be with me. 

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Some memories not so pleasant. Anyway, writing this, I noticed I’ve changed a lot in KMLA as well. But the described ‘me’ in this story is what I had frequently heard about me till I was in middleschool.. or even till freshman year. Life in KMLA could very well be a good version2 of this faction about identity, maybe?