Loss

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-Elizabeth Bishop

I have always been a master at losing things, and with all of the items I misplaced in Korea, I may have even earned a doctorate. Unlike all of the Korean teachers, I had more teaching materials than I could carry, and I probably looked like a bag lady as I trekked to class each day balancing 30 students’ nametags, a grocery bag of stamps and candy, a pile of worksheets or cards and dice for a game, the key to the English Village dangling off of one finger and my USB off of another. Each time I darted back into the teacher’s lounge for a forgotten item after ascending two flights of stairs to the classroom and back, Okhee would smile and say, “You make me really happy.” This was short for, You make me really happy when you forget to bring things to class every day because it makes me feel not so old when I occasionally forget something myself. I don’t think she could be as careless as me if she were 92.

I lost my wallet twice. The first time, during winter vacation when my co-teacher wasn’t around to help (and I was a little too humiliated to tell her anyways), I panicked quite a bit, checking in at the apartment security office and trying to explain my problem to the train station management. Finally, after buying a new wallet, replacing my alien registration card, canceling and replacing my Korean ATM card, and having my parents mail me a new bank card from home, I returned to school to find my wallet waiting for me in my school mailbox. The second time I lost it, I already knew the ropes. So, I waited patiently for some kind person to again return it to my school mailbox. They didn’t. I pulled out my backup wallet and made my rounds to the bank and the office of immigration, happy that I still hadn’t managed to lose my passport or my apartment key.

Then, I lost my apartment key. Because my USB held my life in digital form, particularly my lesson plans and class activities, I attached it to my apartment key so that I would never be able to leave it at home when I went to work. I knew the risk involved in this and surprised myself every day when I returned home and felt my key safely at the bottom of my purse, wondering when I would finally forget it. I chose the most inopportune time to do so.

I am an avid Ultimate Frisbee player, a sport still largely unheard of in the States, not to mention in Korea, where I would explain it as ‘a plastic plate that you throw like this’ and gesture until someone would finally exclaim, “Oh, you throw it to dogs!” So when Jeju, Korea’s famous island that is especially popular with honeymooners, hosted an Asia-wide Frisbee tournament, it was a rare opportunity. I was unbearably happy that weekend in May running across grassy fields, which are hard to come by in Korea, flanked by turquoise ocean and a snow-capped volcano among Frisbee lovers from all reaches of the globe, from England to China to Guam, and including the most bad-ass Korean I have ever met, who played on my team despite the six-month-old fetus in her womb. I had left for the airport straight from school on Friday and arrived home battered and smelly late Sunday night. So when I realized that my apartment key was dangling from the USB port of the English Village computer in my locked school, I almost broke down. In the apartment security office with my backpack at my feet, one guard searched frantically for the phone number of the handyman for my unit while the other shook his head and said, “You’ll have to sleep in a jimjilbang tonight, and we can fix it tomorrow.” Tears began to well up in my exhausted eyes, when the other guard chirped, “There he is,” and a man with a briefcase of miracles finagled my front door open.

The second time that I left my key in a computer, I was much more resourceful. After teaching a day-long English camp in a small town about an hour away, I returned home keyless and called my friend to tell her not to come to Waegwan for the night after all, when I noticed my kitchen window cracked open. I hung up the phone and slipped the glass aside to create an opening about the size of a computer monitor and at about the height of my chin. With my legs jutting out into the hallway, I thought of the security guards on the other end of the motion-activated camera having a good chuckle before wriggling my way onto the kitchen counter.

My favorite loss, which was really a very unfortunate loss but led to a great fiasco, was not actually mine. When my friend Anne visited from China, she and another friend of mine ventured into the podunk town of Danyang. Although there were a few tourist activities around the village, tourist season was long over and far from starting again and it was very clear that we were the only foreigners Danyang had seen in a while. We chose Danyang to visit for its caves, and the two that we saw were incredible, with winding passageways and huge stalactites. In the morning, though, Anne realized she had lost her camera, and we didn’t find it retracing our footsteps from the previous day. Before leaving Danyang for good, we decided to stop into the police station briefly to find out if anyone had turned it in. Although we did not find the camera, we managed to put the entire Danyang police force into a frenzy over Anne’s camera. The officer at the gate, who had interrupted his university studies in Indiana to serve his obligatory term in the Korean military and therefore spoke great English, escorted us inside and set everyone in the station on a hunt for the woman in charge of lost items, who eventually had to be picked up from a different location. They brought us coffee and sat us down for an interview so thorough that it included questions such as “Do you remember which company’s taxi you rode last night? No? Well, did it have any distinctive features?” and “Would you mind drawing us a picture of the camera case in question?” The best was when they asked if we had a photo of the camera and, having happened to have had a ‘photo war’ taking pictures of each other taking pictures the day before, we in fact did have a photo of it on my other friend’s camera. Much to their chagrin, we did not have the cable to download it onto the Danyang police station computers. When what had meant to be a quick stop to see if anyone had turned in the camera reached the scale of a missing person investigation, we couldn’t help but laugh. “Have you ever done this before?” asked the officer. We shook our heads and he grinned. “Neither have we.”

Then, I lost a student. I think that it was the hardest thing that I went through while I was in Korea. It was the beginning of summer and Okhee was working at my main school. One morning, she got news that over the weekend three boys from my second school, Yangmok, had waded into the reservoir on the school property to cool off, but that none of them could swim. Somehow, they had slipped into the deeper water, and while two of them had escaped, they weren’t able to help the third and he didn’t make it. It took me a moment to grasp what she had told me, but once I did it worked its way deeper and deeper into my conscience throughout the day. The worst part was that I didn’t know which student it was because I only knew them by their English nicknames and not their actual names, and so I couldn’t refrain from cycling through the faces of my students imagining each of them as the one. I cringed at the thought that it was one of the students who participated and joked in class, the kind whose name I learned the first week of school. I cringed when I thought of the less prominent students whose absence might have slipped my attention if it wasn’t pointed out.

I dreaded going to Yangmok the following week. I always began class by passing back name tags to help me remember the names of my more than 600 students, and when one student was absent another would often giggle, “He die!” Although unrealistic, I kept envisioning myself calling out the name of the boy and hearing in reply “He die!” without the accompanying laughter. Because of exams, it ended up being two weeks before I returned to Yangmok, and it wasn’t the disaster I had imagined. I let students find their own name tags that week, and one name tag was handed back to me. The name was Nick. Several weeks before we had played ‘The Price is Right’ and I left the classroom one laminated hundred dollar bill short. It was Nick who popped his head into the hallway after me with a smirk on his face. He pulled the bill out of his pocket and said “My money,” but he gave it back to me, of course. From that day on, every time I passed through his hallway he would yell after me, smiling, “Where is my money?”

The day that Okhee had informed me of the drowning, I had all of these thoughts pushing at the back of my mind, but I was also preparing for my first class of the day. I had felt heavy all day, and each time one of my students would excitedly call out my name I would smile and forget, only to remember how much I love my students and feel that much worse at the thought of one of their lives being taken. When school ended, I needed the chance to be alone and grieve for the boy. I walked down to the riverbank and sat under the bridge, where I was alone for about two minutes before an old man, the owner of the cow tied to the bridge beam nearby, squatted beside me to ask where I was from. He asked me about my family and job and told me about his second hand store and his cow and his children who were grown, proudly demonstrating the English he had learned in the army. At that moment it clicked for me why friends and family are so cherished in Korea. In a land where privacy is near impossible, it becomes a lot more difficult to cope with problems on your own, and much easier to rely on loved ones for support. Just then, my phone interrupted the chatty old man. In Korea, there is a concept called ‘kibbun’ which is not perfectly translatable into English, but it basically refers to a person’s mood or well-being. Okhee was on the line informing me that she had sensed that two teachers from our office had bad kibbun that day, and she wanted to cheer them up. Then she thought of me, and was wondering if I would like to join them for a bowl of noodles.