The Final Words Of A Student Editor (Not An Obituary)

The Final Words Of A Student Editor (Not An Obituary)
By Hyeongseo Daphne Park

“Are you doing your homework?”
“Yes…actually, no, not technically.”
“Then what are you doing? Oh, wait. Is this Expresso again?”
“It’s been two weeks since I’ve worked on Expresso articles, Mom. Give me a break.”
“Well, for some reason to me it always seems like you’re editing someone else’s article. Do you really have to waste so much time doing that?”
“It’s not wasting time, okay? I’m doing it because I want to.”
“I’m not against the fact that you’re doing what you like, but it’s true that you’re spending a little too much time on that. The least you could do is set up a ranking that defines what’s more important. I hardly see you studying your textbooks anymore.”
“Fine, fine, I’ll stop, okay?”
“Oh, are you angry with me now?”
“No, I’m just saying I got your point.”

That’s the typical dialogue between my mom and me while I’m caught up with editing the reporter’s articles. No, I’m not whining about the fact that I have a huge workload; rather, I’m whining about the fact that there are only so much as 24 hours given to a person each day.
Reading and editing five to six articles at a time is a lot of work, unlike what most people think. The process of editing a single article takes about an hour: first, I go over the whole text seeing if the general flow is okay. Second, I read the whole thing again and fix grammatical errors. Third, I read the article again to see if there are any stylistic improvements that may make the article better. Finally, I read the article through one last time to check if I’ve missed anything. Only after adding a few general comments about the article at the bottom of the draft can I say that I have sufficiency edited an article. If the length of any article goes beyond two pages, it takes at least an hour and a half to get through the whole ordeal. That’s why I usually pull an all-nighter when editing articles. If you haven’t seen any edited articles get uploaded on Dropbox by Sunday midnight, that generally means that I’ve been procrastinating—which is something I often do—and am going through each article that night, then uploading the full batch on Monday.
Apparently, what I do doesn’t seem to please my parents at all. They barely see me during the weekdays, on which I spend about an hour or so fumbling with my GLP homework and then go straight to sleep, and when they eventually get to see me during the weekends all they see is my everlasting process of editing articles. That’s a biweekly, or even monthly, occasion, yet the sight seems to leave a rather deep impression on both of them, making them think that I’m always spending my time working for Expresso.
But then again, that’s the inevitable life of a nerdy Expresso editor who is watched over by nerdy parents. That’s when my motto kicks in: “if you can’t avoid it, enjoy it.” And so I’ve pushed through an entire year; that career, though, is about to come to a close. It was hard in the beginning; I’ve never been so good with people, and I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to build ties with my new hubaes. I wasn’t—am still not—a natural lover like Moses (i.e. the other editor in chief), nor a sassy fireball like Abby (i.e. the assistant editor in chief); the system by which Expresso was run had changed dramatically (which was critical considering the fact that computers have never liked me as much as I liked them); we had large-scale plans ahead. Frankly speaking, I wasn’t sure whether anything would work out the way I wanted it to. The only driving force was that naïve courage that seems to swell up from somewhere deep down below whenever I execute another reckless plan.
The role of an editor was much more cumbersome than I’d expected it to be—it wasn’t just about submitting articles anymore; it was about taking full responsibility for other people’s work as well as my own. But that sense of duty is what eventually provided the stamina I needed to endure the work throughout the year. I was often required to play the devil’s advocate in order to maintain order and discipline among the members of Expresso, but it never felt so good to have to be mean (I thank all the members of Expresso for coping with such harsh treatment; I know it was irritating for many of you). There were times when I found the workload overwhelming, but somehow, just somehow, everything slowly found its place. It was a smooth sail from then on.
What mostly kept me from giving up was my love for being a part of Expresso. It may sound somewhat narcissistic to say so, but I believe Expresso has made great progress this year thanks to the wonderful teamwork of reporters, photographers, and layout workers. I felt great joy whenever I patted myself on the back after publishing an awesome issue, and was always full of hope that the next issue would be even better. The sad part is that all that’s over now.

----

Just a moment ago, my mom came into my room to check what I was doing.
“What are you typing? Do you still have homework to do? I thought GLP was over.”
“Yes, it is. This is the last article I’m writing for Expresso.”
“Oh, really? That’s good news. Expresso’s so jinggeureoweo.”
I just smiled. Other people will never understand what Expresso means to me or to anyone else who is a part of Expresso unless they actually participate in the process themselves.
About a week after I upload this article on Dropbox, it will be published at Digital Copy, and Moses, Abby, and I will scurry around the school distributing the final issue of the year. Then that will be that; I will no longer be the editor in chief of Expresso. In fact, I don’t know exactly what I will be.
Joining Expresso was the first independent lunge I’d made ever since I’ve begun noticing peer pressure. Applying for the position of Expresso’s editor-in-chief was the second. Now this is my third. As I write the final words of my last article, I feel some hollow space occupying a corner of my mind. Amid that feeling though, is a sense of satisfaction: that I’ve left a footprint, a big, deep, beautiful footprint to be remembered by on what I love most dearly. If that’s not immortality, what else is?

The First Day

The First Day
By Moses Kim

Today is the first day of something called the Global Leadership Program. I have my sister’s old backpack in one hand, five book reports in the other (three of which I have never read), and eleven other classmates with me, all of whom look much more studious than I could ever dream of being. Oh, and don’t forget the butterflies flittering around in my stomach.
The door opens and a man, six-foot-one at the very least, walks into the room with an impish grin. His messy hair hits that perfect balance between order and chaos, while his tidy suit betrays not a single speck of dust. If you looked up “teacher” in the old Merriam-Webster, this dude would be there.
He puts his bag down next to the podium, writes his name (Mr. Catinari) on the board, and faces us. “English is a weird language!” he declares, and my eyes widen in curiosity—and fear.

----

The story of the fresh Daewon student, I imagine, is always some amazing story of brutal competition, eye-gouging schedules, and rigorous preparation. Not so for me: I practically stumbled blindfolded into the doors. The first time I had heard of the news was a cold February day in 2010, where a banner flapped over the entrance of our middle school congratulating “Lee Doo-Hwan” sunbae for his acceptance and matriculation into one of the most prestigious foreign language schools in Korea. My uncle noticed the banner on a random visit, and he told my parents, who cooed happily and pressed me for my opinion.
I knew only one thing: it would be a cold day in hell before I ever cracked open a suneung book.
So began an eight-month sprint towards admission: haphazardly putting together an application, hastily preparing for the interview (which would be in Korean, how wonderful), and generally cramming every little speck of information that would boost my chances of getting in. In the end, my survival had less to do with my efforts and more to do with the sudden change in education policy. When it turned out that the only subjects Daewon would need from me were English, math, and literature, my generally mediocre grades became a non-issue, and my path was settled.

----

I stare at my first quiz paper. A crimson 1/10 stares back.

If there is one punishment Mr. Catinari doles out without discrimination, it is grammar. He sets up little presentations full of cute characters like Thomas Neckchomper that conceal horrifying lessons within them. The students of Class D are just learning how ignorant they really are.
The other classes aren’t much better for my talents or self-esteem: in Literature, Mr. Han’s readings go in one ear and out the other. In Speech and Debate, I learn just how unruly my tongue is in what I retrospectively don the Moses Kim Meltdown of April 2011. I sign up for the debate team, in some vague hope of becoming more eloquent (less useless): the first question the senior captain asks me at my audition is whether I suffer from ADHD.
But I keep trying, undeterred by just how much I suck at everything. Every Tuesday, I grab dinner from the local church in a hurry, running back up our school’s hill at 5:45 sharp to study for a quiz that I will almost certainly fail. Every step from the bottom of the hill to the doors of the school is an arduous battle, a reminder of how far I have to come.

----

Eventually, the hill secures a temporary win. On the last day of the first semester, I barely secure an A in Chinese, hold back a wave of nausea, and struggle towards the subway station. I make it all the way to Gunja station before I finally lose it, rushing towards the nearest wastebasket and hurling my breakfast. I still don’t remember how I got home after that, but I remember a lot of juk, a lot of vomit, and a lot of sleep.
The next day, I go to the ER for the first time in my life. The diagnosis: advanced pneumonia, vines grasping onto my lungs and squeezing them for air. The bigger defeat for me is a psychological one, the cherry on top of a semester full of disappointments, failures, the sudden realization that I am out of gas while everybody else is chugging on towards the finish line. When I return on the first day of the summer session, it feels as if something in me has changed. I quietly begin to observe the people around me. I begin to look at what Daewon does to all of us.
It’s funny to see the universal reactions of terror whenever Mr. Catinari grins like the Cheshire Cat and produces a fresh stack of graded essays or yet another grammar quiz: everybody here lives in constant fear, whether justified or not. Even those at the top live the constant nightmare of having their position usurped. If you’re good at math, then you focus on your lousy English grade. If you are good at grammar, your essays are terrible. Every friend I look up to has his own problems, his own demons to battle. And every morning, we take the trip up the hill to confront them.
Even worse, sometimes the demons are to be our own teachers. One night in November, I return from third period to find two girls in my class weeping silently while my classmates huddle around them, patting their backs, consoling them gently. Only later do I find out that my homeroom teacher had pulled them out of class for talking earlier, berating them, declaring that neither would ever go to college. One year after the fact, the incident remains etched in my brain so clearly; mostly, I remember how it felt as if all of the heat in the classroom had been sucked out, how this haven of education had suddenly become as cold and stormy as the world outside it.
Ultimately, all we have to rely on is each other, the very people our school tells us we’re competing against for entrance to the schools we want to go to. It’s a weird state between warfare and ceasefire, where we live in constant awareness of the harsh reality awaiting us in just two years but hold each other up anyway. I love my friends all the more for how helpful they are, but I hate myself for daring to think about what happens after the end, hate myself for being selfish, two-faced, and worst of all, incompetent.

----

Fast forward one year to November 22, 2012, the last day of GLP. I am one year older, several centimeters taller, and ever-so-slightly more well-read. But in many ways, I’m the same person who wandered into Daewon two years ago: awkward if assertive, talkative without a lot to say. On the outside, I bounce around, as jovial as ever, but inwardly I shudder to think of what’ll happen after today. Even as I wonder what the last words of Mr. Dranginis and Mr. Kim will be, I fear that they won’t be enough to assuage this avalanche of dread.
The last five minutes of Composition II roll around, and to my surprise Mr. Dranginis is still lecturing us on this lobster article we’ve read for the last day of class. I mean sure, this is the teacher who reacts to sentimentality by threatening to throw us out of windows, but surely the last day of the year must mean something, right?
Instead, he turns the significance of the day around on us. “The reason I’m not doing anything special for the end of class,” he explains when all of our work has been finished, “is because you shouldn’t stop learning here. If something interests you, find it. Learn more about it. Don’t let your brains turn to mush.”
Later, as Literature II, the last class of the year, rolls to its finish, Mr. Kim smiles in that wearied but genuinely happy way only he can manage and asks us to write one more haiku to close out the year. One by one, we step up to the front, smearing chalk on the tips of our fingers as we write our last words and pass the pieces onto the next person in line. To me, the board, drenched in colors and words spilling over each other, feels like endstopping, a supposed conclusion that doesn’t conclude anything.
Mr. Kim’s last words are those of Nietzsche: “One does not repay a teacher well by remaining a pupil.” As we ponder those words silently, he looks over all of us and concludes, “When we meet again, let it not be as teacher and student—but as fellow students, students of life.”
There it is, the end of two years of the most rigorous program I had ever pulled myself through, one that I entered almost by accident. We’re seniors now. The best of the best. Global leaders, as Daewon said we would be. But I don’t feel like a leader at all, and I’m not ready to leave. So instead of taking the initiative to do what my teachers had told me to, in the last thirty seconds of my junior year I do what I had learned to do so well in my time here.
I look around at what everybody else is doing.
I see one of my closest friends, one of the most compassionate, humanistic people I might ever know, devastated, rubbing tears from her eyes. I see others embracing, holding hands. Others sit in absolutely stunned silence. Others are clapping quietly. I, on the other hand, don’t know how to feel, as always. All I know is that I love these people, all of them, this time with reckless abandon.

I am the last one to leave that day, and my steps echo through the hallways to remind me just how alone I am. But something I know well but have never made room for wells up in me that day: the desire to belong, to see something bigger than myself. And sure enough, on my way to the subway station, I pass Deungchon and look at the window. Ten hands wave back. No longer are we the rivals that Daewon pushes us to be, enemies conjured by my broken mind, demons that will take years for me to fight.
But the fight begins today.
That night, I step into the room and join in.
That night, I stop being afraid.
That night, I become a fellow student of life.

----

Today is the first day of something that nobody bothered to put a title on. Today, there will be no teachers, no classes, no essays—just me, forty-eight of the closest friends I will ever make, and this backpack, so burdened over time that it now threatens to tear at the seams. We face the same hill we have fought every day for the last two years of our lives, the icy wind blowing at our backs, the swirls of dust that make it difficult to see where we are sometimes, difficult to see the people around us.
As I close this chapter of my life, I open a new one—and this time, I’m not alone.

Believe!

Believe!
By Abby Kim

My two years at GLP have been those of mixed messages and confusion. The naïve, slightly intimidated girl with her crisp new uniform and shiny shoes has run a long lap and found herself a cynical, weary, soon-to-be high school senior with permanent dark circles under her eyes and a penchant for bad jokes. Sure, maybe she’s learned a thing or two in class, and maybe her essays are a little better and she knows what a sonnet is, but other than that, sitting cross-legged on her bed and staring off into space, she can’t remember anything sold enough to slip into her pocket.
That is, if you look at it from the cynical, weary, soon-to-be high school senior’s point of view—the naïve, slightly intimidated girl can look back and see a lot of things worth scrapbooking: the poems that Mr. Bruske made us memorize for extra credit, the coffee Mr. Hidalgo would sometimes give us if we were all falling asleep in class, the GLP excursion to Leeum, the giggly study hall hours during which we would do everything but our homework, Mr. Dranginis’ excoriating-turned-endearing sarcasm, Mr. Lee’s Jay-Z performance, and Mr. Kim’s very very interesting Romeo and Juliet lectures. There are two years’ worth of laughing and singing and all-nighters and caffeinated drinks and learning piled up in my memory shed, and it would be a shame to call that nothing just because it can’t be on a resume.
My memory shed, however, is sometimes locked tight by what I am told constantly—don’t trust your friends too much; they’re your potential competitors, what you love isn’t exactly what’ll send you to college, that party / reunion dinner / trip is a total waste of time you could spend on something else. On top of that, we are perpetually urged to give up our rainbow visions, and our heads are shoved into cold water by strong, ruthless hands.
It is no longer surprising when a ten-year-old kid says that she wants to become a teacher because the job is stable with an ample paycheck. Politics seep through children’s books, movies, and cartoons and kids are disillusioned by society too soon. They no longer inhabit playgrounds but instead fill English and math hagwons, taught by their no doubt well-meaning parents the fundamental rules of competition—you have to crush some heads before you can reach the top.
This rule becomes even more pronounced at Daewon, where a select group of students compete with each other for entrance to prestigious colleges. We see, or rather, are told that we see, the battle unfolding before our eyes, and are under constant pressure to compare and beware. Lofty ideals and ambitions are condemned as impractical. This becomes even more confusing for us because in our GLP classes, we are told to uphold those very ideals, to question hegemonies and power structures.
It’s a mixed message indeed, when we study in a program designed to offer us an opportunity for an escape from the oppression of the Korean education system, to expand and grow into “global leaders”—how can we achieve such elevation when any chance of dreams is cast off?
Therefore we clash, and are thrown into confusion—maybe that’s why, in the midst of rushed cramming and essays and APs we feel cramped and lost, and maybe that’s why there isn’t a moment into which we wholly put ourselves. And at the end of a year, I feel that we need a new message.
I’ll make it brief: kill that high school senior inside of yourself, along with all that cynicism, weariness, and distrust. Instead, believe in fairy magic, and build castles in the air. Do every silly, impractical thing that people tell you not to do. I know that it seems like an incredibly reckless thing to do, something that will leave you totally unprepared for the years ahead of you, but come the eightysomething years after Daewon, you will find that this sort of vulnerability will be extremely beneficial.