Cockeyed (15 page)

She grinned fiercely, as if her pigtails pulled the smile out of her face. I slid her materials my way, sketched a log cabin, then held it up for everyone to see.

“A cabin,” I explained, then wrote the word under the picture. “This is a cabin.” I added the name Kevin and held it up again, trying to enunciate the difference. “Cabin, Kevin, Cabin, Kevin. See? Cabin, you mean Kevin, right?”

Nobody made a sound.

I wondered if maybe my cabin didn't look like one at all. I could only make out bits of it myself. Maybe it looked like lumber or wieners in a package, if Pusan grocers sold wieners in a package. I didn't know. Or maybe it looked like a tidy pile of shit. Cabin finally ventured a different guess.

“Teach-ah is, um,” he pointed to the drawing, “Lion teachah's house?”

My good eye, the one that still had tunnel vision, surveyed the table. Slowly I cobbled together twenty blank and puzzled stares.

In that moment, a new pedagogy, my pedagogy as an ambassador for the English language, was born. I decided, for better or for worse, as long as I taught in South Korea, I would go along with anything my kids fancied.

I say I taught English in South Korea, but from that moment on it was my English, not the Queen's and not
Disney's. Scrabble quickly became the standard teaching tool and laboratory for my technique. A typical class would soon unfold something like this.

“Teach-ah,” Meg Ryan Two might ask. “What is—?” She'd point to the Scrabble board at the word she'd made but couldn't pronounce.

Let's say the letters K, P, I and Q were strategically placed with the Q on a double-letter score. First I would scan the board for whatever Meg had pointed at, and feign deep thought while my good eye searched. Once I found the word, I would then give a little lesson.

“Very good, Meg. A kpiq is a wonderful thing.”

I could now spend some class time at the chalkboard, preferably a lot of time, illustrating in great detail any number of objects from my imagination: a pinball machine, a garden gnome, lasagna, tinsel, a forklift. My students loved the tension and anticipation, shouting the Korean words for things they'd guess I was drawing.

Other times, I'd switch to a more student-centred approach.

“Well done, Cabin! Xpligo earns a triple-word score. What do you think it is?”

Up he would go to the chalkboard, and draw a wild guess at something I couldn't make out anyway.

“Yes!” I always said. “Very good, Cabin. That's an xpligo if I ever saw one. Who here has been bitten by a xpligo?”

Because of my approach, when Cabin first speculated I lived in a cabin, I had to agree. My kind of education demanded it.

“Yes, that's where Lion teacher lives. It's my house in Canada.”

We shared oohs and ahs, and the picture of my home was passed around for closer inspection. Everybody resumed their chatter, a few of the kids added a chimney, bears, and wilderness to my home, a few kids gave up on me altogether, and the chases I'd interrupted earlier began all over again.

At least my dynamic as a teacher took some shape now. I'd be alright as long as everybody sat still, as long as I held their attention. Serious lessons wouldn't work. In a commotion I'd be at a loss to find anybody or manage my own body among twenty frantic children. How to get by with my employers would be another matter. It's only a few hours a day, I reassured myself. Certainly I could pass for sighted a few hours a day. Besides, I was born and raised in a log cabin. Among my kids, I could move as slowly and strangely as I needed. They would come to know it as Canadian, that's all.

I handed my pen back to the grinning girl.

“Thank you,” I said, and realized I didn't know who belonged to the grin. “And what is your name?”

“My name is Shampoo.”

“Shampoo?”

Second to the bottom of my list, I found Shampoo, and below her, finishing off the class, I found Conditioner. They were best friends.

For the remainder of that first class, everybody went nuts. Instead of teaching, which is to say making stuff up, I busied myself with orientation, a wary Canadian shuffling about and touching the room into shape. A globe here, a box of pens
here, some books there, flashcards in this drawer. Class time would be the easiest task in my new home. The rest of my life and time would be the real work and the real mess.

The move to Pusan had started a couple of months earlier, in the summer of 1996. I was halfway through my graduate degree, and Tracy, unsatisfied with academia, had dropped out. None could believe her bravery. Quitting school? Loan collectors could find you. People with names like Will Powers and Lucy Duty would fill your call display. Although Tracy and I practically lived together, I worried that her leaving the program would give her little reason to stay in Vancouver, a city she'd only moved to for graduate studies. Her family and friends remained back in Saskatoon, not the most hopping place on the planet, but certainly stiff competition for Mr. Magoo and his rainy, minimum-wage city.

One night, over a game of pool with our friend, Reg, both he and Tracy toyed with the idea of teaching overseas. Tracy leaving would be torment, but Reg augmented the threat. The idea of my closest friends jet-setting for jobs without me was too much. I might as well live in some remote log cabin as stay in Vancouver.

I considered my options. I could follow them, earn a salary, and see a part of the world I knew nothing about, or I could stay in lonesome Vancouver and continue my studies, its reading load crippling me daily with headaches and eye-strain. At the time I was in a graduate seminar about V. S. Naipaul and postcolonial literary theory. Yee-haw, you bet. That afternoon four students had debated for two hours whether we had the right to discuss Naipaul's books. As fate
would have it, I'd sat too far from the window to throw myself out. South Korea with Tracy looked great. It was V. S. Naipaul's fault, too. I didn't want to read anything by a guy who said only a blind man could write a book as unreadable as
Finnegans Wake
. Better things could be done with my failing eyesight. Following Tracy to the other side of the world seemed like a good start.

The three of us found a recruiter in Vancouver. Mr. Kim would arrange jobs, airfare, and accommodations. Reg quickly took a position in Seoul, while Tracy and I waited for an opening for two instructors at one school. When the jobs in Pusan appeared, our recruiter phoned with the news and asked for our documents to fax first thing in the morning. He needed a copy of our undergraduate degrees and a photograph. A coffee shop meeting was arranged.

We'd only spoken to Mr. Kim over the phone, so he needed one more bit of information from me.

“How will I recognize the two of you?” he asked.

“Tracy has long brown hair,” I said, then realized that wasn't going to help. “I have a shaved head. I also carry a white cane because of my eyes.”

“A white cane?” he said.

“Didn't I mention it?”

“No.” Mr. Kim was stunned. “You're blind?” he asked.

“Uh, somewhat. Not totally. I can still see. Sort of.”

I waited for him to say something, but a tense pause built between us. My only hope was to play down his misgivings.

“It's no big thing. By day you probably can't tell, not really. I move a bit slow, and I sometimes use my cane just in case.”

“Just in case? I don't understand. So you can see?” He was as confused as anybody would be.

“Yes, I can see. A bit. Enough, I mean. It's like looking through a little tunnel in one eye. Around that it's like wavy water, and just waves all through the other one.”

“Hmmm.” He sounded as if he'd put something together only to find an extra part left over. “This may be a problem, yes? How will you teach?”

Two jobs at one school, Mr. Kim had insisted, don't happen often. I didn't want to blow our chance.

“No, don't worry, I can teach,” I said, although I'd never considered how. “I can read and all that. Most people don't even know I'm blind. Going blind, I mean.”

“Well, hmmm, okay,” Mr. Kim said, clearly reluctant. “The school may not like it. The school must look excellent.”

“That's fine,” I said. “I'll just keep it to myself, then. They don't need to know, okay? They won't be able to tell, I'm sure. Tracy helps me if I need it, but they won't even notice.”

He grumbled, tiring of the debate. I could hear, though, that Mr. Kim was worried. If he sent the school a blind teacher, he could lose status and reputation, which meant he could lose business. The airfare provided to us guaranteed that if we were fired for any reason, we could be sent home immediately. Our school would own our work visas, too. We could teach for them and nobody else, so they had to be pleased with our performance. Mr. Kim's job, in part, was to screen us.

The subject changed to Mr. Kim's next concern.

“And you have no hair?” he asked.

“Nope.”

He grumbled some more, probably wondering what the hell kind of dud Tracy had hitched herself to.

“Do you have a picture with hair in it?”

“Oh, sure, just slightly older.” By slightly older I meant the picture was from high school, but there was no need to crush the man.

“Okay. Just make sure you have copies of your degrees and your pictures with you tomorrow.”

Two weeks later Tracy and I stepped out of the Pusan airport and were greeted, according to Tracy's report, by the astonished expressions of our employers, Mr. and Mrs. Yun. We loaded our luggage into their Hyundai and headed for our new home.

“You have eaten?” Mrs. Yun asked, turning to face us in the back seat. Mr. Yun drove.

“Yes,” Tracy said, “we ate on the plane, thank you. We're just very tired.”

“I think you will eat?” Mrs. Yun asked.

“You think we will eat?” I asked back.

“Okay,” said Mrs. Yun. Our new desire to eat cheered her.

Tuning my ear to this idiom took time. Imperatives always came in the form of questions. Off we went to dinner, where more questions began to command us.

On our table a waiter placed bowls of sticky rice and fish soup. I could smell seaweed, cabbage, and garlic. The affirmation I'd truly arrived overseas came with the aroma. The knowledge and meal were both strong, and for a moment, a
rare moment in my time with blindness, I was excited by the future.

“You have no hair,” Mrs. Yun observed, “but, um, your picture, it is hairy.”

“Oh, yes, I cut it off. It's easier this way, and it isn't so ugly.”

“I think it is not so ugly with hair,” said Mrs. Yun.

Her tone was difficult to decipher. Perhaps she wanted me to grow my hair again, or perhaps she was being complimentary.

The meal now on the table, I probed discreetly for my chopsticks. I reached for a spot where I thought they might be, but Tracy, spying this strange gesture, as if I was about to play a piano, scooped my chopsticks, and jammed them into my hand. Later she said I was close to stabbing my fingers into my dinner.

“I think you will grow hair?” Mrs. Yun continued.

“I will?”

“Good.”

Mr. Yun fed clumps of noodles into his mouth. I tried to imitate him but I couldn't pinch one strand with my thin, metal chopsticks, let alone snag a nest of them. Dinner might take me the term of our contract. Without looking up, Mr. Yun further exposed the hair problem.

“In Korea,” he said, and rubbed his head with his free hand, “no hair is meaning two things.” He paused and looked for the English words. “You are, how you say—” He turned to Mrs. Yun and consulted her in Korean.

“My husband means you are criminal,” she said, “a criminal
who was in prison. You are free now? You are that or you are angry at government. At the government. You will eat this?”

I could see her pointing, but not the target. Tracy quickly handed me a bowl. “I think it's pumpkin,” she said, and tried a little before she set it down with a thump beside my rice. The sound placed the bowl within a pattern, within my memory of the table. Now I could find and return to the spot. “It's wonderful,” Tracy added.

Throughout the rest of the meal, she conjured a variety of reasons to hand me things, preempting any of my usual groping. Neither of us could articulate it yet, but Tracy and I sensed the all-consuming position we'd confined her to. Whether or not my blindness would have prevented us from finding jobs or keeping jobs wasn't clear. It didn't matter anymore. Either way, we weren't prepared to test the status of my disability now. We'd come too far, and we had too much to lose—an apartment, the experience, a good salary. Together we would keep blindness from interfering in our prospects, which meant, in this new country, Tracy would watch, catch, guide, cover, deflect, and mediate for me. She would live two lives, hers and mine, at least when we were around the Yuns or around the school. Given their reaction to baldness, what kind of reception could blindness earn? Keeping my eyes out of sight wasn't my job or struggle anymore. It was Tracy's.

After the meal, the four of us stood to leave the otherwise empty restaurant. Tracy took me by the arm, holding herself close to me, as if too much in love to contain herself. Discreetly she guided me to the car this way. I felt, as I would
for the next five months, like a wagon. My empty hand craved a cane the way some lips crave the weight of a cigarette.

As we walked to the car, Mrs. Yun turned to look at us. Occasionally Tracy pointed and observed the city, the architecture, window displays, whatever. Doing so, she covertly described things, prefacing with, “Hey, look at the . . .” or “Did you notice that . . .”