Poster Child (21 page)

I fell in love with a place and the person I felt I could be in that place. I could morph and change and even relax. After class, I drank Guinness and smoked cigarettes. For the first time in my life, I felt that I belonged somewhere. I broke old bad habits and adopted new ones.

My time in Dublin and other parts of Europe released me from the stringent lifestyle and schedule I had developed as a teenager and maintained through the first two years of college. After years of whittling the body down and assiduously controlling it, I was released from my self-made prison in a new culture where women didn't think twice about having dessert, where people didn't go home to study for hours. After the first week, when I had been practically alone in the library for three days running, I realized that nobody did this until exam time. At the end of term, I, too, was madly photocopying articles and chapters, desperately reading books I'd never opened, and writing the names of professors I'd seen twice in my life at the tops of exams while sitting in a dusty room under huge oil paintings of former Trinity graduates. I felt proudly irresponsible.

I'd always been such a "good girl": Now I navigated a private life that was unfathomable to my parents and sometimes even to me. I felt like Supergirl all over again, only this time because I was
not
overachieving. I had discovered a new kind of excess. Instead of focusing on schoolwork, I went to nightclubs and parties. Instead of saving my limited spending money for food and necessary expenses, I racked up credit card debt traveling to Galway, Cork, and Donegal; Paris, Amsterdam, and Vienna—anywhere I had never been before, and I often went alone. Instead of waiting to have sex until I was married—something I'd been taught was the right thing to do—I was having it regularly with a man I didn't love and didn't even call my boyfriend.

I fired off postcards to friends and family from the great places I visited and, later, entertained them with elaborate stories of my adventures.
Look what I can do!
those postcards and stories communicated, practically daring someone to call me broken or different in any way. But this mask of normalcy was like a deep, unhealed scar: If I peeled off this protective layer—the bright, wonderful, adventurous, and now sexy and well-traveled Supergirl—I thought the revealed wound would destroy me; that open wound would gush, become infected. I thought it would kill me.

When I returned to St. Olaf, I immediately began surfing the newly expanding Internet, consumed with which part of the world I might get to next. How about an internship with the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva? I sent away for the application. A stint in Africa with the Peace Corps? I investigated that for a whole week before changing my mind. Want to try a one-year teaching gig in Slovakia? I wrote up future teaching plans and imagined what life would be like in Eastern Europe before I abandoned this project as well. I wanted to be the most adventurous, the most fearless. I was ready to seize any opportunity at any place in the world. Although I didn't realize it then, solo travel and adventure had become a part of reinvention and, also, forgetting, as if folding myself into life in another country would help me discover or accept myself by allowing me to release my own identity completely I naively thought that if I got lost in another life, I'd find the person I'd been searching for: myself.

On a chilly November afternoon, I entered the Marriott Hotel and saw Luke sitting on a couch in the lobby, reading the
Chicago
Sun- Times.

"Hey there," he said. He folded the newspaper, stood up, and gave me a hug and a kiss. He wore loose jeans and a crisp white shirt. His hair was shorter than I remembered it, the curls hidden by the new cut; his hands were soft and warm. He was beautiful.

"How about a beer?" he asked. I nodded, and we stepped into the hotel bar.

A few days before, Luke had called me in Northfield to tell me that he'd left Dublin for a corporate job in Chicago. When he invited me to the city, I hopped on the next bus from Minneapolis.

After a few pitchers of beer, we went up to his room and started fooling around. I had spent the entire bus journey telling myself that this time I would try sex with the leg off. In my theology courses, I'd been reading Paul Tillich, a theologian who defines sin as estrangement and separation. Tillich identified three kinds: from the self, from others, and from "the ground of being"—namely, God. Tillich's definition of sin as estrangement fit my predicament exactly—I was suffering in my separation from God because I was estranged from my created, deformed self. Although Tillich's philosophical understanding of "self" does not include the physical body, in a recent paper I had expanded the definition to include it. If sin was separation—from body or soul, from self as God's creation—I certainly felt guilty. With Luke I saw an opportunity to turn this around: I wanted to have sex with just my "real" body, as an amputee and not as a woman masquerading as able-bodied. If I did this, I thought it would make me feel more whole, more grounded.

Luke carefully dismantled my carefully planned outfit: the silver, button-down silk shirt, the black crepe pants, the designer negligee I'd splurged on during my last week as a lingerie store employee. When we were both naked and turned on, I said, "Just a second," and wrapping his shirt around my body, I walked to the bathroom.

I took off his shirt and looked at myself in the mirror under the too bright lights. I turned to the right side and then back to the front-—not bad. My cheeks were flushed, and my eyes looked bright. With my heart hammering away, I took off my leg and set it to the side, but as soon as I peeled off the silicone socket and looked at myself in the mirror, I felt a catch—like a punch—in my stomach.
No way can I do this,
I thought. The stump was hideous; it was scarred and disgusting—even penis resembling.
If I saw this, what
would I think?
There was Luke waiting for me in the other room with his lovely, softly muscled body, his warm scent, his wonderful back and chest.
How can I offer him this?
I quickly put the leg back on and splashed some water on my face. I looked at my reflection once more and forced a smile.

Looking at my one-legged form had killed all sexual desire in me, but I went through with our liaison anyway, thinking that I had already let it go this far. It was the postcoital moments I craved the most anyway: being close to Luke; feeling his arm around me; hearing his laughter vibrate in his chest; listening to his breath deepen and slow as he fell asleep.

For all of my self-talk about how sexy I was and how liberated I'd become during my year abroad, I didn't feel either when I left the hotel the next morning. I felt terribly confused and even strangely trapped. With Tillich's ideas in mind, I felt more like a sinner than ever before. As the bus rumbled back to Minneapolis, I wondered:
How can an act as intimate as sex detach me even more from my body and
from myself? What happened with me in that hotel room? Why can't I be as
free as Samantha? What the hell is wrong with me?
It occurred to me that continuing this behavior and refusing to sort out the dissonance between my projected self-image and how I truly felt was taking me down an even darker path from which it would be twice as difficult to turn back. But I bragged about the rendezvous to my friends, many of whom were engaged, as if I were leading a more romantic, thrilling life than they were. Secretly, I was jealous.

Soon after this, every paper I wrote became about the body, in particular mine. I found a way to weave disability into any subject at all, and delighted at doing so. Here I could use elements of my own experience to illuminate theories and philosophies. My theology professors particularly encouraged me to explore this line of thinking, and I began to vigorously investigate disability as a theological issue.

One afternoon, I was doing research for a sociology paper in the library, where I spent most of my time, when I came across a book called
With the Power of Each Breath: A Disabled Women's Anthology.
I matched the call number to a colorful paperback book at the end of a long row and slipped it from the shelf. As soon as I opened it, the book came alive in my hands. In it were disabled women speaking honestly about their experiences. The stories read like recorded acts of resistance. For the first time, I understood how deeply the disability experience informed my identity and the identities of women like me. The three themes repeated over and over again were the shame of being different, colored at times by anger; the silence of alienation and isolation, with an effort to break it; and the active longing for a more holistic vision of the self. I shut the book and stared at it. Whispered conversations floated up from the stacks, a stray giggle. I felt the rush of discovery and hope, like looking in a mirror that reveals a new and unexpected reflection. On a note card, I copied down a quote and taped it to the wall near my bed: "Able-bodied people tend to view us either as helpless things to be pitied or as Super Crips, gallantly fighting to overcome insurmountable odds. Such attitudes display a bizarre two-tiered mindset: it is horrible beyond words to be disabled, but disabled people with guts can, if they only try hard enough, make themselves almost 'normal.' The absurdity of such an all or nothing image is obvious. So, too, is the damage these images do to disabled people by robbing us of our reality." I read these words every morning—thought about them, mulled over them. I did not want to be denied my own reality—but what was it, exactly?

For my senior thesis, I decided to create a theology of wholeness. I would call it "Rescuing the Whole from the Parts: An Embodiment Theology of Disability." If estrangement from God and God's creation was the greatest and most devastating sin, and it was my thoughts that had taken me there, why couldn't they take me in the other direction? If I couldn't force myself into wholeness with my physical actions, I was hopeful I might find it on an intellectual level. I was determined to solve the problem of the body with the mind.

Every weekend, I scrabbled away at my computer. The walls of the dorm room were plastered with note cards full of gathered information and research from twentieth-century Christian theologians Paul Tillich, Sallie McFague, Letty Russell, and Rosemary Radford Ruether; quotes from Flannery O'Connor's story
Good
Country People; The Disabled God;
and the anthology of women's voices. I" delighted in this project, in dealing with the idea of disability in academic language. The disabled body as an object of research and an opportunity for intellectual inquiry seemed a safe way of approaching the issue. Or so I thought.

It was a cold Saturday in January one week before the thesis was due. The landscape and all the trees were covered in ice; the weaker trees bent to the ground in a nasty wind that howled and shook the single dorm window. I scattered the note cards one last time around the room and began slowly to piece together my ideas. I stayed up for two days, living on coffee, peanut M&M's, and saltine crackers. I could feel that I was digging to a larger truth, and as I wrote the last sentence of my newly created embodiment theology—"The path to becoming whole is lengthy, daily, and lifelong. I'm happy to be on my way"—I wept on top of the computer. I felt relief—it was finished—but I also felt a sense of terror. Was I really on my way? To where? Luke and I had planned more liaisons, and I rushed headlong into them. Not once had I succeeded in taking the leg off for sex—the image in the mirror stopped me every time. I still winced at my body every time I saw it in the mirror; I still picked apart elements of my appearance that could be changed or improved. Would this paper—these fifty-odd pages of theory—really help me reach the wholeness I desired? Did it have the power to restore me to the ground of being and to myself?

The attention and academic honors my work received muted any concerns I had about how what I'd written affected my life, but as pressure to make decisions about the next year mounted, I panicked. I felt I had to get away, see more, make myself new in a new place.

When I received a note about the Fulbright in my post office box, I was giddy with relief. Here was a scholarship that could trans port me to a place so far away, I could hardly imagine it: Southeast Asia.

I believed that travel would heal me, make me whole. The day I boarded the plane for Seoul, I walked down the jetway thinking,
This will be the adventure that changes everything; this will be the one that
makes things right.

Chapter Twelve

FEAR OF DARKNESS

"
Hana! Tul! Set! Net!"
I stood in the middle of a brightly lit gymnasium, kicking my right leg into the air and counting to ten in Korean.
"
Tasot! Yosot! Ilgop! Yodol! Ahop! Yol!"
It was three in the morning, and the overhead lights buzzed and occasionally flickered and snapped in the massive, empty room. Starting my count again, I did the sequence of forward steps and arm movements I'd learned during my month of weekly tae kwon do lessons in the city of ChunCheon, where I'd also received my Fulbright teacher and language training. For two hours every other day, I had kicked into the air hundreds of times and punched imaginary opponents in a purposefully sealed, saunalike room on the top floor of a commercial building. During the test for my yellow belt, my artificial leg had suddenly given out and I fell. The tae kwon do instructor gave me the belt anyway. I wore it now, tied securely around my waist.

"
Ahop!Yol!"
My shouts echoed down the hallway that led back to my small room with a single bed and a television that I left on all night, after the screen had gone to static. I imagined my voice rattling around in the huge shower area at the end of the hallway. Designed for groups of kids during the daytime, I had the enormous room to myself in the early mornings, at night, and during the weekends.

My life as a public high school English teacher in Seoul began in this gymnasium with an all-school assembly. The floor in front of the stage was divided evenly in half and packed with rows of uniformed girls on each side. I marched through the middle of the group with Ms. Kim, who I gathered was some kind of administrator, although I wasn't entirely sure. Seconds after I met her in the hallway outside the gym, she grabbed my hand and led me through the group of girls.

I stepped up onstage and was invited by the principal, Mr. Cho, to stand at a podium and say something into the microphone. I looked out at the sea of girls; their faces were lifted in anticipation. I smiled, said, "Hello," and waved. The crowd erupted into shouts and wild applause. Mr. Cho shook my hand; Ms. Kim took my arm, and we walked back the way we had come.

Now, in the predawn hours, I kicked and punched and jumped, turning in a new direction every few minutes so that I could keep my eye on the locked entrance door of the building as well as on all of the entrances and exits to the gym. I was waiting for the first hints of sun to appear through the tall, dark windows, behind which the shadows of trees were motionless in the night air. There were only a few more hours until daylight, when I knew I would be able to sleep, only then I would have to be moving through the hallways efficiently and with a purpose, preparing to teach my English classes.

After I finished the series of moves I had learned, I lay down on a blanket I'd spread on the floor—like a little raft in the middle of the gym—and stared up into the fluorescent lights. This was where I sometimes caught a few hours of sleep, before the alarm clock I set next to me went off. I lay on the floor in my tae kwon do outfit made of stiff cotton gone limp with sweat and waited.

After the six-week training in ChunCheon, I was assigned to a girls high school in a middle-class
gu,
or neighborhood, in Seoul, to teach five conversational English classes of thirty students each. The girls, all between fifteen and seventeen years old, stood and bowed to me when I entered the classroom each morning. In the beginning, every word I said prompted them to giggle, holding their hands in front of their mouths. They wore pink-and-black uniforms and had identical bob haircuts with straight, carefully clipped bangs. Each morning, the length of their hair was measured to be sure it matched the school's set standard.

It was not just the school administration that enforced conformity of appearance; the students imposed these standards on themselves. Sameness was paramount, and deviation from these norms could make a girl's life unbearable. Girls whose shirtsleeves were a little longer than the others' were teased relentlessly; those who were slightly chubby, in a country where most girls are slim, were ostracized. I saw one student with acne pummeled with fruit at recess, ridiculed for a condition beyond her control. With these realities in mind, I began the school year.

My initial lessons were basic English phrases. "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" "Where is the bathroom?" The faces of the students in the front row bloomed with excitement when they knew the answer; they waved their hands frantically, begging to be noticed. I had to wake girls in the back row and confiscate Walkmen, eyeliner, a pack of Brad Pitt playing cards. I returned these items at the end of class, although I was informed by Ms. Kim, who was in fact the assistant principal, that I could either throw them out the open windows or keep them for myself. "That's how I got this," she said, holding up a Sony Discman.

Teaching was difficult, physical work. We moved desks around to imitate city streets and navigated through them. We memorized the words to a Celine Dion song and sang it like a choir, the girls' mouths and tongues bending around the words. I tried to be energetic, encouraging, and kind, as all my favorite teachers had been.

Usually the girls ran out of the room as soon as the lesson was finished. They had only five minutes between classes to visit their lockers, eat
kim'chi
(spicy cabbage fermented in clay pots in the ground) from the sealed containers they brought to school, gossip, and peruse the latest tabloid magazines that were stuffed into the trash cans at the end of the day.

One afternoon, Sue (each girl chose an English name for the class), my brightest and hardest-working student, hung back after class. She had a wide face, small, round glasses, and a terrific smile that she never hid from me. "Hello,
sung sang nim"
she said, giving a quick bow. Then she glanced around, leaned her face close to mine, and whispered, "Let's be friends."

As I became better acquainted with the girls, I longed to explain my disability. I felt their eyes on me when I mounted the stairs to the teacher's platform in the classroom; I sensed their stares trailing after me when I walked down the halls.

I wanted to explain, but I didn't have the language skills. How could I tell them that I went to the bathroom between classes, locked myself inside a stall, waited to be sure the other stalls were empty, and then wiped the sweaty socket dry to keep my leg from sliding off my stump?

My students' curiosity was never offensive or even overtly expressed, but their code of sameness made me anxious. I was afraid that if they discovered my glaring difference, if they saw the leg, they would be horrified. I imagined a group of them coming upon me unexpectedly in the bathroom and running away screaming.

I was certainly a novelty in the teachers' room, a place I despised and feared. It was perpetually hot in this open-plan room, even when the windows were thrown open wide. Although I wore a suit jacket over my sleeveless dresses in the classroom, I took off the jacket at my desk, which was marooned in the middle of the room. One day, a teacher approached me and said, "Your clothes are wrong." I looked around. Everyone wore long sleeves, even in the heat. I slipped back into my sweaty jacket, blushing.

Once, when I was leaving the room and had to return to my desk because I had forgotten a class ledger, I found every teacher staring directly at my feet. Chairs scraped against the tile floors as people pivoted to get a better view. They continued to watch every footfall forward as I moved across the room. Suddenly, I saw myself through their eyes: I saw my left hip shift to accommodate the swing of the prosthesis with each step forward; I heard the slight creak or click in the hydraulics as the knee bent; I noticed the way my artificial foot meets the floor, stiffly, on the edge of the heel, betraying its inflexibility. I was used to being an object of fascination, but it had never felt so intense, never so pointed. I could not break the tension in the room or close the space between myself and these able-bodied people. Language was useless. Humor? Impossible. I never forgot anything in the teachers' room again.

The days of teaching were a healthy challenge, but the nights were miserable and long. I hardly slept. Until I could be placed with a host family, I was expected to live in a small, white-walled room with a single bed at the end of a long corridor next to the school gymnasium, where the students had greeted me some weeks before. I had always been afraid of the dark and knew that every night would be torturous for me.

Each afternoon, the students and teachers left and I began to panic as the sky darkened. The days were never long enough. There were no security guards or permanent night staff at the school, only the steady drip of the mass showers at the end of the hall, the occasional sound of leaves rattling together in the courtyard, and hundreds of empty rooms. Fear made my head spin, kept me up in a constant state of anxiety, and sent me on repeated trips to the bathroom to be sure nobody was hiding in the shower stalls. I left my television and every available light on all night. I tried drugging myself with Benadryl, but I still woke up terrified throughout the night.

I survived the first week with little sleep. During my lunch break, I hurried to my basement room, where I slept deeply for thirty minutes, thankful for the loud activity upstairs and the warm sun shining through the windows.

In an effort to distract myself from constant worry and panic, I added the tae kwon do ritual to my evenings and early mornings. I thought exhausting exercise might help me sleep. After finishing my punches and kicks, my sit-ups and push-ups, I went back to my little single bed or lay down on my blanket in the middle of the floor and tried to sleep. Sometimes this system worked, but usually it did not.

At the end of my first two weeks in the basement, I had the recurring dream I hadn't had since my final orthopedic operation in 1982, when I was eight years old. The dream was always the same: Animals floated by in a pool of thick blood in the following order: cats, unicorns, dogs. All of them had the wrong limbs in the wrong places: Cats had hooves where their eyes should have been; unicorns had dogs' legs for horns; the dogs had no limbs at all. The animals groaned and cried out; they begged and whined for help, but when I reached out for them, they recoiled. I could never see myself and didn't know which body parts were mismatched or missing on me.

The dream, which I started having when I was six or seven, used to wake the whole house. Mom would run downstairs to my room when she heard something fall or the piano keys sound. It must have sounded like a break-in, but it was me, sleep-hopping without my leg, floating along with the animals, trying to get away, shrieking and swatting at everything in my path—lamps, tables, toys, the telephone.

In Korea, when I woke up in my little room or in my makeshift camp on the gymnasium floor, I was so scared that I could hardly breathe. I stared at the black-and-white television static, trying to slow my breathing and remain calm, or I looked up at the huge gymnasium lights as they flickered and hummed. I told myself there was nothing to fear. My body told me otherwise.

Mom used to calm me down after the dream by sitting next to me on the bed, singing hymns or telling funny stories. I would fall asleep with the hall light shining directly on my face. I did the same in Korea—I stared into the single lightbulb on the ceiling or the gym's bright overhead lights—only I felt completely, horribly alone. I fought until sleep took me, or I struggled up and went through the tae kwon do routine again. I often slept with my leg on, truly afraid that I would have to run from some imagined intruder, and I paid for this phobia by nursing sores during the weekend. I often stayed in bed on Saturday, drinking only Coke, eating nothing, and attending the sores on my stump while watching reruns of
Baywatch
dubbed in Korean.

Tae kwon do lessons had been an effective way to relieve stress during language training and the long, hot days of waiting for school assignments. I took lessons with some other Fulbrighters, and this was how I learned to count in Korean. At night, as I practiced my moves in the gym, I thought that whatever danger might come for me would at least understand that I was a force to be reckoned with.

After a month of almost no sleep, I was exhausted and irritable. During my classes, I was muddled and short of breath. I lost my appetite and my interest in teaching. After school, instead of going to the neighborhood market or working on my lesson plans, I sat in my room and watched mindless television for hours. I wandered around the gymnasium hallways in the hours before dawn, looking at sports trophies and old photographs of the school's athletic teams. Sometimes I sat underneath these displays and sang the Italian arias I had memorized and performed in high school. They didn't sound as they once had when my voice was younger and more flexible, but I liked to hear the notes echoing against the walls. I sang the love songs our Korean teacher had taught us in ChunCheon, trying to make myself cry, thinking it might put me to sleep.

I called Mr. Adams, the Fulbright program administrator. I didn't tell him the details of my struggle, because he was the last person to whom I wanted to admit failure or fear. I had never forgotten his warnings that disabled people were shunned in Korean society. Instead, I reminded him that placement with a host family was a stipulation of my fellowship, which mandated a "cultural immersion" experience. I asked him if it was because of my disability that I could not be placed with a family. "No, it's not," he said. "I'm working it out." He told me to trust him.