Cockeyed

by Ryan Knighton

  Who knows if I was in the right house that night. My lady in waiting hadn’t mentioned a child or a kid brother or sister, but then again I hadn’t mentioned a few details of my own. On the coaster she’d given me was an address but no phone number. In the sober light of morning, I felt no temptation to navigate my way back. Instead, I phoned Tracy. She was home and hoping I would call. We talked for hours over breakfast, as if in the same kitchen. It was one of many dates to come.

  I like to imagine a family getting up that morning, and one of them opening the front door to fetch the newspaper. Next to it is the doll, asleep on the front steps, like a drunk who didn’t make it all the way home. Nobody can figure it out. Perhaps little Cathy left her Wailing Hazel on the porch yesterday. Or maybe Cathy’s dad, Critter, dropped it while unloading the family monster truck. Or maybe the doll is given the mystery it deserves, like some ownerless white cane left at the station.

  The Pusan Roach

  “Batman?” I asked. “Is Batman here?”

  Children darted back and forth across my tunnel vision. Again I hailed Batman, louder this time, with a little more authority in my tone.

  “Everybody stop, please, please stop. I’m looking for Batman.”

  It occurred to me that I might never utter this phrase again, not without straps and a gurney holding me down.

  It was my first day teaching in South Korea. Among other things, I could hear lips sputtering like the engines of cars and planes, a soundtrack for the ongoing chases around the room. Only a couple of kids sat around a large, yellow table and quietly disappeared into their stashes of paper and pens. So far, roll call involved nobody but me.

  As a boy flew by, I caught his elbow. Maybe I was in the wrong room. Taped to the door, an illustration of a piece of fruit identified each class. In my eyes, though, an apple could be a strawberry. The globby smear looked red, but that’s about it. I couldn’t even be certain of the colour.

  “Is this Apple Class?” I asked and pointed to the drawing.

  “Apple teach-ah! You Apple teach-ah!” he agreed.

  “Yes, good. Do you know who Batman is?”

  “Batman!” he agreed, and performed some superhero gestures. That’s what I thought I saw. Maybe he suffered a violent tic. I couldn’t tell.

  “Okay, Batman, I’m Ryan.”

  “Lion?” He was ecstatic. “Lion teach-ah! Lion King!” He growled, roared, then swiped my thigh with an imaginary paw.

  Because teaching English was my new job in Pusan, I made my first attempt to concern myself with Batman’s pronunciation, confident, however, that I really couldn’t care less.

  “No, not Lion. R-r-ryan. R-r-ryan. See? Now you try.”

  As he ran away, he belted out my name.

  “R-r-r-r-l-lion King teach-ah Lion the King his teach!”

  Both Tracy and I had arrived in Pusan late the previous night. At 7:30 the next morning, I took charge of my first students, gobsmacked and clueless what to do. Had I the resources, Apple Class would be bobbing for Ritalin after roll call. No such luck. I didn’t know any educational games, either. A few promising titles came to mind. “Which Plant Am I?” suited my pace, or, better, we could play “Sleep Clinic.”

  Schooling a kid named Batman was a surprise, and it wasn’t. I say I taught English in South Korea, but that’s too noble a job description. Really I made American cultural products and franchise crud more accessible. It didn’t take long to figure out. Waiting on my desk, next to the class list, was a textbook. The first chapter focused on a movie called Dinosaur Park. It wasn’t an ad, of course, no, but a helpful narrative about, what else, verbs. Giant lizards, both extinct and resurrected, need a constant supply of past tense. Add the Lion King and Batman to that English class. Somebody’s native culture was losing to the usual superpowers, kaplowy and hakuna matata.

  Of the little Korea Tracy and I had encountered so far, much declared the firm economic presence of the west. Everything was familiar but new, mistranslated, and garbled, as if we’d moved overseas to live in a nifty satire of America. As we drove from the airport, Tracy saw restaurants with English names in neon, everything from Bone to Poem to Smog. I, for one, loved to grog at Smog. Forgotten Hollywood personalities crowded billboards with their big white teeth. According to Tracy, Meg Ryan seemed especially popular. Meg’s face adorned the city enough that we had to wonder if she’d led a coup.

  Postered about the streets were ads for bands, too. Tracy rattled off some names as we drove by. I’d forgotten most of the groups long ago, along with any desire to wear sweat-bands or cock-rock iron-on shirts. Kam-sa-ham-ni-da, South Korea! We are the Scorpions, and we rocked you like a hurricane! Maybe they taught English on the side. Everybody relied on the industry enough.

  Then came the images of some older, other Korea, the one being edged out. Tracy described the scenes to me. She saw squat neighbourhood temples between international banks, sidewalk noodle and soju tents in front of Subway, and, between megamalls, the slender alleyway entrances to original public markets, their fresh fish and eel aquariums stacked like retainer walls against brightly painted chain stores.

  All this in one night’s drive from the airport. Arriving at our new home, a sign and a fence warned about the undetonated landmines in the neighbouring hillside.

  This isn’t to say Pusan lacked its own modernity. Taking in the neighbourhood on our first morning, Tracy and I passed groups of high school students who sported pink, furry, oversized gloves, purses, puffy jackets, and aviator helmets. The candy-floss look belonged to a new Korean tweeny band called H.O.T., or High-Five of Teenagers. Dig it. A spiffy style, some would say, although far more suitable to snowy northern British Columbia than a country with punitive humidity. Still, the puffy gloves were handy. My older students begged to shammy the chalkboard with them, or, if need be, with their jackets and purses and hats, everybody rubbing their wardrobes against the day’s English.

  Even the soundscape gave new meaning. My first morning began with a garbage truck bleating opera through a scratchy megaphone. Tracy and I lived in a renovated office several floors above the school. From our bedroom window, she watched our neighbours scramble roadside with their trash and receive a fresh roll of toilet paper in return.

  Overseas, in all these extremes of the familiar and the new, I would test my relationship to blindness and Tracy. Here I would become a caricature of myself by exhausting the limits of my sight and my denial. My brother, Mykol, had foreshadowed the problem well. As a going-away present, he made me a card. Cartooned on the front was a bald, spectacled, and gangly Ryan, pigeon-toed and squinty. On the chalkboard behind me, my name appeared as only I write it. All four letters were different sizes, scattered, and at different heights on the board. That’s what happens when you see as little as I did then. Batman and I had something in common already. We were both imported cartoons, and, most worrisome, I too had a secret identity. For the next six months, I would pretend I could see.

  Now that I’d found Batman, I returned to the roll call. My micro-island of good sight dropped down a line and revealed the next name two letters at a time. Another Batman. I checked the next name, and the next, and counted four more to go. The roll call wasn’t alphabetical. Below the Batmans bulged a pile of five Arnolds. A dull ache began behind my eyes from reading. Adding to it was the noise, the firefly movements of children, the jet lag, and the immediacy of my situation. How would I manage all of this with such dismal eyesight? What was I thinking when I signed on for manic seven year olds? I honestly hadn’t considered my body among theirs, not until reality flew around the room making car and airplane noises.

  I called the next Batman, but nobody answered. Because pleading didn’t work, I trawled the room with my arms open like a fishnet. Finally, with all twenty kids corralled around the yellow table, we got down to who was who, and who I would be.

  Ours was a specialty private institution called a hagwan. Extra school, you might say. We taught English, math, and arts,
employing local teachers, except Tracy and me, the ex-pats. Our two positions were most of the branding and marketing, a couple of western white faces smiling on the school’s brochure. Such faces suggested we don’t just teach English here, we teach real English, the kind that passes through glossy North American lips. The kind of lips Meg Ryan uses. Upon enrollment, everybody adopted his or her favourite English name. Fantasy Island never offered so much.

  Along with the Batmans and Arnolds, all of whom were reborn as Batman or Arnold One through Five, I taught bouquets of Lilies, Daisies, and Roses. I taught gangs of video game characters, a few hopeful Meg Ryans, an equal number of Michael Jacksons, and even a couple of Kevins, as in Costner. Those kids had sat through the Robin Hood flick a few too many times. When I called their names, each said, “Here, teach-ah!” then perforated me with imaginary arrows.

  Between the two Kevins on my Apple Class list, I found what I thought was a lost third.

  “Cabin?” I called.

  “Here, teach-ah!” he replied, then stood up on his chair and shot me.

  “Thank you.”

  I checked the list again. The previous teacher had spelled the name just the way I’d said it.

  “Do you mean you want the name Kevin, Cabin?”

  I said each name slowly and exaggerated the difference. I still didn’t care one way or the other, but since I didn’t know what else to do with my class, Cabin’s name seemed a good enough pastime as any.

  “No,” he said. “Cabin.”

  “Cabin Costner?”

  “Yes, teach-ah.”

  “You mean Kevin, Cabin.”

  “No, teach-ah, Cabin, Ca-bin.”

  His impatience was noted. Before I took another arrow, I asked a girl next to me for help. “May I use your pen and paper?”

  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 quic
kly 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.”