Nae Chingu (My Friends) Chapter Two

Nae Chingu (My Friends)

Chapter Two

    "Aish*, jinjja*!" Mae Ri grumbled as she poked at her convenient store ramyeon, or ramen as they were most commonly called in other countries.

    "Mae Ri-ya, you knew this was coming! How could you not have thought about it," Jong Hwa poked his chopsticks into her face. "So lazy," he muttered.

    "Ya, Jong Hwa-ya, she knows what she wants to do," I pushed his own bowl of ramyeon towards him and he dutifully shoveled more noodles into his mouth. "She just doesn't know where she's going. Give her a break," I winked at Mae Ri who graciously smiled at me.

    "Thank you, Lily," Mae Ri said sweetly. "I'll just go where you go so you decide where we're going."

I nearly choked on my ramyeon which earned me a questioning look from Jong Hwa. I tried to play it off but whether I was convincing or not, I wasn't sure. I hadn't told them yet but I wasn't entirely sure I was going to be staying in Korea. The thought made me feel suddenly depressed and less hungry. My dad was talking about maybe being transferred again, God only knew where, and if my dad went then I went as well. I desperately wanted to stay in Korea and go to college here but by Korean standards I was still considered a minor even at the age of eighteen. My attempt at nonchalance made my smile feel a little forced, "Ya, you can't put that kind of pressure on me."

    "It's easy then, we'll all just go to Seoul University!" Ji Soo piped in and earned three identical stares or horror.

Jong Hwa tapped the brim of Ji Soo's fedora which had been precariously "resting" on Ji Soo's hair and made it fall to the table, narrowly missing Ji Soo's own ramyeon.

    "Mwo*! Do you know how hard it is to get into Seoul University," Mae Ri asked shrilly. It wasn't really a question because we all knew just how hard it was. The acceptance standards were extremely high and only the best of the best got in--or someone who knew someone and none of us knew someone.

    "Well, we all got into SFLHS," Ji Soo said sheepishly while fake-punching Jong Hwa who gave him a dirty look in response. I tried not to smile at the adorableness of the two.

    "I'm sure you and Jong Hwa would get in just fine since you are both certified geniuses but Mae Ri and I," I let my sentence trail off. Mae Ri and I were good students, we consistently ranked top ten in our entire grade which would sound like an accomplishment if there were more than 60 students in our grade. It still wasn't anything compared to Ji Soo and Jong Hwa competing for the top two spots and therefore had first pick of colleges after graduation. "Listen, I have to get going but I'll see you all tomorrow."

Mae Ri and Ji Soo waved their goodbyes but Jong Hwa stood up, "I'll come with you." Before I could protest, he was already picking up his backpack and walking out the door. Mae Ri's eyes narrowed at me and mouthed "Call me".

I nodded. "Annyeong*," and followed Jong Hwa out the door.

***

Jong Hwa waited for me outside, "You didn't have to take me home, I'm taking the bus anyway." I walked passed him on the way to the nearest bus stop. We weren't too far from the apartment my father rented but far enough that I didn't feel like walking in the cold February weather.

    "Wae Geurae*?" He asked quietly as he slowly caught up. His legs were long er than my so it wasn't hard.

    "Animnida*," I said in answer to his question. He thought something was wrong and I didn't want to jinx my luck by talking about the possible move in my near future. My stomach fluttered a little bit though at the thought that he cared enough about me to ask if something was wrong and then offering to walk me home.

    "Lily, something is wrong, what is it?" He nudged me slightly with his elbow.

Usually his caring persistence was totally endearing but right now I wished he wasn't so observant and let me stay in my bubble of denial. "I don't know what you mean," we reached the bus stop and waited. The buses in Korean usually ran every half hour so even if I had missed the last one, the next one would arrive soon.

    "I saw your face when we were talking about college, are you not going to apply?" He put his hands in his pocket and waited patiently for me to answer.

I sighed. "My father is thinking of moving again and I don't know if I'll be here long enough to even finish high school let alone start college," I rushed the words out and knew that my pronunciation was horrendous but Jong Hwa nodded slowly as if he'd understood what I said. I tried not to let my throat close up. Moving always made me feel sad and helpless because wherever my father went, I had no choice but to go as well. I never got a say in whether we stayed or not and this time would be no different. Moving from Germany to Seoul had been the hardest because I had spent nearly seven years in Germany. I was given less than two months to wrap up my school year, say goodbye to my friends and pack for South Korea. I still tried to keep in touch with my old friends but it was hard since we didn't have much in common any more, plus they were all in college and I was still in high school due to the many school transfers in my educational history. Now that I was nearly an adult and had a good solid friend base in Korea,the last thing I wanted to do was be forced to give up on them as well, not to mention the delay in my schooling...again.

    "Why can't you stay? Aren't you considered an adult in America?" I could see the wheels spinning in his head trying to figure a way out of this. I just wanted to hug him but public personal displays of affection between boys and girls were seriously frowned upon in Korea, especially if you were of school age.

    "I am but with no money to pay for my tuition or a place to stay, how can I stay here?" I had thought about getting a job but dashed it right away because I wouldn't have time to study and what's the point of staying if my grades suffered and I couldn't get into college anyway? I sighed and took a breather because I could feel my old depression beginning to overtake my mood. "I"m sorry, can we not talk about this right now?"

    "Sure," he said quietly.

    "Thanks and don't, you know, tell Mae Ri or Ji Soo," I looked at him but he didn't look at me. He just looked straight ahead which meant one of two things: either he was angry with me or he was thinking really hard. For some reason I was reminded of the first time I met him...

***

Three Years Earlier...

How could I possible have thought German was hard? Oh that's right, because I never thought my father would drag me off to some East Asian country where there were so many linguistic rules! Why couldn't I ask where the bathroom was without having to consider the age of the person I was speaking too?

I tried to grab the attention of a passing student, "Sheel-la-Sheel-lay-"but before I could even try to get the word out the boy nudged passed me and gave me a weird look. I sighed in frustration, how hard was it to say "excuse me?" Oh yeah, really frggin' hard! Under normal circumstances I wouldn't even ask, I would just keep looking until I found a picture that looked like a stick-figured woman except there weren't any pictures! Just signs written in Hangul, their written language, that indicated what the room was used for.

I tried again to get someone's attention, "Sheel-lay-ha-", which earned me nothing more than a weird look and a rude brush off. That was it, I'd had enough! "Sheel-hap-da!" I yelled in the middle of the hallway which garnered me a lot of notice. Within moments of my outburst, the hallway filled with laughter and pointed fingers in my direction. I could feel my face burning with embarrassment but no one offered any kind of help. I turned around, fully prepared to storm off rather than face my laughing peers but someone grabbed my elbow. I turned around, more than ready to throw down but I couldn't do anything but stare at the boy who stopped me.

    "Iz sheel-lay-ham-ni-da," the boy who stopped me said in somewhat broken English but I barely heard him as I stared in wonderment at how incredibly good looking he was. His hair was neatly tousled around an oval face framed in glasses. His smiled reached his eyes and I took notice of the cute little dimple on his left cheek. "And yu don' need to so say shilahamnida to 'dese people. Yu can say chu-gee-oh, iz ress formal."

    "Th-thank you," I stuttered once I found my voice again. "Umm..."

    "Do yu need hep' finding sometink'?" He finally let go of my elbow and smiled encouraging. By now the laughing crowd had dispersed and I took a step back from him.

    "Ah, bathroom, I can't find the bathroom," I swallowed and could feel my face burning again.

    "I will show you," I followed him down the hall and around the corner until he stopped in front of a door with a simple gray and white placard. "Yo-jaw Hwang-jang-sheel. Yo-jaw," he pointed to the symbols as he sounded them out. I committed the symbols to memory so I would never have to go through something like this again.

    "Yeoja, yeoja, yeoja*," I repeated the word again and again. "Thank you."

    "Animnida, I will wait fol yu," he said and leaned against the wall.

     "No, you don't have to," I started to protest.

    "So yu know where yu class iz?" He asked innocently.

    "Well, no but-"

    "I will wait fol yu," he leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

***

Present Day...

Needless to say he'd waited and took me to class that day. He even showed up after class was over to help me get around to different places and just like that, I had made my first friend in Korea. It wasn't until later when my language skills were deemed ready that I was able to join the other students in normal classes where I met Mae Ri. Jong Hwa had always been my savior,which is probably why I had a hard time accepting that he liked Mae Ri. However, if there was one thing I learned in the last three years it was that it's good to have friends and I desperately didn't want to leave the friends I'd made in Korea.

To Be Continued....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Aish : Korean exclamation for a sigh or sometimes an "ugh" or "Damn", it's a general purpose word, more or less

*Jinjja : "Seriously" think Grey's Anatomy's "Seriously" ha-ha.

*Mwo : "What"

*Annyeong : short/informal version of "Annyeonghaseyo" which could mean "Hello" or "Goodbye"

*Wae Geurae : "What's wrong?"

*Animnida : amounts to "It's nothing"

*Yeoja : "Woman" or "Female" oppote of Namja which means "Man" or "Male"

Please feel free to leave comments below, they are much appreciated!

Nae Chingu (My Friends) Chapter One

Nae Chingu (My Friends)

Chapter One

It seemed so long ago that I first passed through these high school doors as a freshman and faced the horrors that came with it. Of course, being a freshman is hard enough but when you are being sent to a new school with no friends in a foreign country on top of it, well, the experience was more than horrifying. 

The recruiter must have done a real mind-bender on my father when he said "You can travel the world" because my father joined the Navy shortly thereafter and hasn't stopped travelling since. At first my mother, a newlywed at the time, was ecstatic at the thought of traveling around the world. So far I have lived in England, Spain and Germany. However, moving to South Korea was apparently too much for her because after nearly 20 years of marriage  she called it quits and moved back to the States. I could have almost hated her for leaving me here if she hadn't been so distraught at the thought. She assured me as soon as she was settled in America she would bring me home with her but there was a problem. By the time she got settled, I had already settled into Seoul and had no desire to leave. That was three years ago.

The last three years have been tumultuous at best but I had found my niche at Seoul Foreign Language High School, SFLHS for short as the students liked to call it. The schoolwork was grueling but that was to be expected considering it was one of the most prestigious schools in Seoul. The only reason I got to take the entrance exam at all was because my father was a well known Navy personnel and because I had spent almost 7 full years in Germany and could speak the language fluently. Because the school specialized in languages such as German, I was almost a shoe in  but I still had to study day and night for the entrance exam and that was nothing compared to the interview! Three years later and I still pitied everyone who had to partake in both entrance requirements. 

Now, sitting in my homeroom waiting for school to start, it all seemed so long ago. It was the first day of my senior year and this would prove to be the most difficult year of my entire high school experience. Listening to my iPod, I impatiently waited for my best friend to show up but like always she was habitually late. Kim Mae Ri, Drama Writing Extraordinaire as she liked to call herself, finally burst through the door a little while later with her usual flamboyant flair and plopped  herself down at the desk in front of me. I no longer batted an eye at her sometimes outrageous outfits which was saying something considering we were required to wear plain tan uniforms. Although the skirt was mandatory for girls, we were encouraged to wear nylons under our skirts to protect our modesty. Because of this, it wasn't uncommon to see girls wearing knee or thigh high stockings or, if you were Mae Ri, pink and white horizontally striped nylons. Her long, black hair was braided into two ponytails which were each accented with a pink and white polka dotted bow. I had no doubt that Mae Ri had matching eye-shadow and under normal circumstances, would have applied it to her face except our school had rules against wearing make-up. Not that she needed make-up to look absolutely stunning. Like most Koreans, she was slender from her feet to her face which I couldn't help being jealous about. Not that I was fat by any means, I just would never be able to exchange clothes with Mae Ri, not unless I wanted to become anorexic in the process. 

It was hard not to feel inadequate when you were constantly surrounded by above-average looking people but I stopped letting it bother me a long time ago. Although my father was as white as white bread, I had my mother to thank for my tan skin. It was her Native American ethnicity that saved me from being as lily white as my name which also happened to be Lily. Back in Germany, most people had short hair so I tended to keep my hair shorter to help feel like less of an outsider so it wasn't a surprise that when I was moved to Korea, I tended to keep my hair longer for the same reasons. As long as it was, I still wasn't able to make it look as elegant as Mae Ri's always seemed to be but then again, she woke up almost two hours before she had to in order for it to look that way and I valued my sleep way to much to sacrifice two hours of it for such a frivolous reason.

    "Mae Ri-ya, tangshineun gugeoseul bolsseubnikka*?" I asked her as soon as she sat down. 

    "No, my dad wouldn't let me watch it! He told me I should be studying but honestly, school hasn't even started yet!" As she replied in Korean, her voice reached the high pitch it usually did when she felt like she'd been wronged. In my opinion, I totally understood her annoyance. "How was it?" 

    "I can't tell you," I smiled smugly knowing that by lunch she would get the truth out of me anyways. 

    "Ya!*" she flounced while she turned around in her seat in feigned annoyance. 

    "It's the first day of class, how could you two be fighting already?" I turned and looked at Kim Jong Hwa, another classmate and good friend of mine. You know those memes about nerdy guys being cute, well, Jong Hwa was the very reason for those memes. I had a serious crush on him but I also knew he held a torch for Mae Ri so our unrequited love triangle couldn't be helped. Jong Hwa wore square framed glasses on his oval face but it really was his overtly friendly nature that was so endearing. Even though he looked like he stepped off the pages of GQ--you know, if GQ had a high school, nerdy edition--he also had the smarts to go with the whole package. You had to be relatively smart to even get accepted into SFLHS but Jong Hwa was genius level and put most of us--most of the school--to shame with his brains. 

The only person who really challenged his smarts was Lee Ji Soo. He too was ridiculously smart and made it look effortless so studying with him was hard. Ji Soo, Jong Hwa's best friend, casually walked in behind Jong Hwa and took a seat at a random desk. He was the exact opposite of Jong Hwa and was often perceived as arrogant but the three of us knew different. Underneath his egocentric exterior was an inconceivably kind and caring person that only a few were privy to. I was lucky to be one of them. It saddened me that he wasn't in our class but in a classroom down the hall. He swore the people were stupid and primal in his class so he usually hung out in our room until school started. If I were the plain one, Mae Ri the beautiful one and Jong Hwa the nerdy guy then Ji Soo was the equivalent to the female fashionista. He always seemed to have the perfect accessories and today it was a soft looking fedora that perfectly framed his expertly coiffed hair, he had rings on nearly all of his fingers and the necklace was nothing short of complimentary to his entire ensemble. He made the ugly, tan uniforms look cool. I knew back in the States his sexual orientation would have been questioned but in Korea, it was almost a crime to not look your best regardless of whether you were a male or a female. It was one of the many things I appreciated about the Korean culture. 

    "So what're you two fighting about now," Ji Soo asked as he settled into the chair.

    "She missed "Snow Water" last night," I explained as she 'humphed' at me. 

    "Oh, it was a good one too," chimed Jong Hwa as he studiously pulled out his text books and prepared for our first class. He had to duck or else be assaulted by the pen Mae Ri whipped at him. He chuckled as he picked up the pen and passed it back to Mae Ri fearlessly. Jong Hwa didn't even like TV, he only watched it because Mae Ri wanted to be a screenwriter for TV dramas when she graduated and felt that watching them at least gave him some common ground with her. 

    "Ya! Seriously, the both of you are being too much don't you think?" She complained.

    "It doesn't feel like school unless Mae Ri-ya is complaining about something," said another newcomer, Shin Joo Jin, as he walked through the door followed by his normal entourage, Mool Min Gook and Mool Bin Gook--twin brothers. We all laughed except Mae Ri. 

Slowly the classroom filled up and the ambient noise increased as people reconnected with friends after the school break. Everyone knew everyone else because we had been in the same classroom with the same classmates for three years. This was a new transition from changing classrooms every forty-five minutes like in Germany. Oddly, being around the same people day in and day out with only the teacher changing was comforting and more conducive to learning.

Soon the homeroom teacher, Seonsaengnim Cho, arrived and welcomed us all back in her usual perky manner before promptly kicking Ji Soo back to his classroom. It was hard to not to like our homeroom teacher, though, because she was  always so bright. 

    "Long time no see, everyone! Did everyone have a good break?" She chirp. Several "Ne*"'s and "Anieyo*"'s were murmured in response, "Well, this will be a difficult year so I hope you all rested up!"

And just like that....school was back in session.

To Be Continued...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*tangshineun gugeoseul bolsseubnikka : "Did you see it?"

*Ya : Korean exclamation for "Hey!" An admonishment, sometimes.

*Ne : "Yes"

*Anieyo : "No"