Busan 2060

Jake Stetson stared blankly at the pile of reports on the table of his Jangsan studio apartment and sighed. Wearily, he opened the first book:

“Teacher is stupid and me is kill Teacher”

Typical, he thought, and was just about to score out the “is” when he remembered the most recent communiqué from the Ministry of Education; “Is,” it said, was now an acceptable marker for either past, present or future tense, (“I” had surrendered a long time ago.) Jake blithely wondered whether this particular entry was a confession or a threat but left the sentence untouched. Looking out the window onto the greying expanse of Jangsan Old Town, Jake allowed himself a rare moment’s contemplation. Where, he thought, did it all go wrong?

There’d been struggles in the past, but Jake had always thought the Foreigners had won. None of these were clearer in Jake’s mind than the push for citizenship that had galvanised the foreign community in the 20s and resulted in the Universal Franchise Act of 2028. Since then his stake in society had grown while his pay packet had shrunk; the “price of dignity” he’d once convinced a room full of foreigners in the run up to the Bill. Looking around the sparse studio apartment he’d rented for the past decade, he wondered now whether they’d gotten their moneys worth.

When he had arrived in Korea things had been different. In those days people still stared at you when you walked down the street, now Jake reckoned they just looked through you. Work back then had been a joke too. Before ME centralised Hagwon curriculum and management, foreign teachers could almost get away with murder. Gone were the days when a teacher could slump into class still reeking of the night before and fling a worksheet at the students. Now that everything was rigorously standardised, monitored and evaluated, it had gotten so you couldn’t blow your nose in a Hagwon without someone reporting it.

Oh but how he had ranted and raved back then! The pointing, the misunderstandings, the disorganisation – the slightest thing would set him off! Many times he felt like packing it all in and heading home to some sort of normality. But still Jake remained. The truth was, back then Jake felt like he was a pioneer with the world at his feet, a renegade who’d had had enough of society and checked out. He’d found a place where he could live like a king and under his own set of rules. Looking back, Jake realised he’d been something of an idealist.

“Use this place before it uses you” someone had once told him. At the time he’d dismissed it as cynical, but now the words kept coming back more and more. He’d spent the last four decades with his shoulder to a wheel that had been spinning in the opposite direction and his fire was gone. He was beginning to think he might just have wasted it on the wrong thing.

Jake’s eyes wandered over the smoggy Busan skyline. Since the time he’d lived there that same skyline had danced up and down like the bars on an old fashioned graphic equaliser, and still showed no signs of reaching any state of permanence. It was like the city itself was mocking his own entrenchment and Jake wasn’t sure he could live through another reinvention. Although he occasionally thought about going home, there was no guarantee he would get a job and it seemed pointless to return at a time when people were clambering over each other to get away. If the East was the “new West,” where did that leave someone like him?

Perhaps, Jake thought, it was time to teach somewhere new. Africa was opening up in ways he never could have imagined in his youth and seemed like the perfect place to recapture some of the frontier spirit. Sure, it might be a little hard at first but he had moved before and made it work, why shouldn’t he be able to do it again?

So, as he had done every couple of years for the last decade or so, Jake opened up a clean page in his notepad, swapped the reports for the heavy book on top of the wardrobe and opened it up at the first page.

Now, he thought, if I can only get my Chinese up to scratch.

Finishy

A Divine Intervention

When I was nine years old I thought St Dominic had it in for me. He lived on the wall of the bedroom I shared with my brother and I was terrified of him. It wasn’t that he was particularly scary looking, (with his pale skin and boyish demeanour he actually looked quite harmless,) but there was something in his eyes that reached into the pit of my stomach and made knots out of it, like he knew something about me that I didn’t. Nightly I pleaded with my grandmother to remove him but nightly she refused: St Dominic was a good man, she’d chuckle, and if I’d done nothing wrong I’d nothing to worry about.

I suggested changing rooms, but my brother couldn’t sleep alone and no other room was suitable. I threatened moving out, but my grandmother packed me a lunch and offered to give me a lift to the train station. In desperation, I even took one of my grandfather’s old golf clubs and tried to destroy St Dominic myself. I couldn't however, defeated in the end by his reproachful eyes and my own weak will.

Eventually however I conceived a way in which I fancied I could get rid of my tormentor and remain free from both guilt and suspicion. One rainy afternoon I coaxed my brother into a game of bedroom football, cleverly arranging it so that St Dominic would be directly in the line of fire should I fail to intercept his shot. My plan worked with surprising effectiveness, and within a few minutes, St Dominic was lying on the floor, his frame smashed to smithereens. My grandmother raced to the room and my brother tearfully admitted everything.
“Boys will be boys,” she sighed, eying me curiously as she picked up the fragments, but after mildly chastising us for playing football indoors, St Dominic was packed away without another word. I was free, or so I thought.

Many years later, when my grandmother passed away, the whole family – aunts, uncles, cousins and partners – gathered at her house to hear what she had bequeathed us in her will. I felt the usual unease I associate with events of this size, but nevertheless joined in as the family reminisced about my grandmother and the time we’d spent there. Such was the collective feeling of nostalgia, in fact, I even considered telling the story of St Dominic's accident all those years ago.

Before I could decide however, the executor called out my name and my inheritance was handed to me. To my horror, I discovered it was none other than St Dominic, completely refurbished and reframed! I felt sick - what distress and sorrow had my act caused the poor woman for her to deliver her revenge in this manner after all these years? As I held him aloft and looked into his eyes I once more felt the fear they had instilled in me, only this time I recognised as well the guilt and self-doubt that had always accompanied it! How, I wondered, was I going to dispose of him this time?

While these thoughts and others occupied my mind however, my wife had noticed something attached to the back of the frame. It was a note, written on yellowing paper, in my grandmother’s elegant hand:
"Dear Patrick,” it read, "Please do take good care of St Dominic when I’m gone. He always did remind me of you!”
“How sweet,” said my wife, admiring the painting, “I think we should hang it in the living room.”

I looked again at his sombre eyes, pale skin and worried expression, and agreed. After all, my grandmother always did have a wicked sense of humour!