#108, Pain

On Thursday and Friday afternoon this past week, I read a few excerpts from the book The Pains of Being a Child, a work written by Phillip Kim's (former PEAI teacher) sixth grade students in 2011. The book chronicles the hardships of growing up in South Korea through the experiences of its authors.

A former student of mine similarly wrote about the pain she went through on Pepero Day (all names are fictional),

The day after was November 11th, easily translated to Pepero Day. Friends gave each other peperos and they had a good jolly time trying those mountains of peperoes out.... Except me. That day was 2011 11 11, translated to Millennium Pepero day. More peperoes were active and on sale, except me...

Since my former 'friends' had all deserted me, I was the only one sitting in my desk. All of my classmates were huddled together in their own group of friends, exchanging peperoes and laughing their heads off. My former friends were laughing around Janice's desk as she distributed the peperoes around and they all teased around about calories and fat. I felt a burning desire to join them. I looked around the classroom and saw many groups huddled. Daria was now playing with Wynne, Savannah, and Anna. Funny...how I never noticed that before. I scanned the classroom and found the boys all joking around. I looked beside me. Sure enough, at the desk on side of me, the most popular boy in class was in the middle of the turmoil of boys, getting choked under his mountain of peperoes. Shortly, I was the only one in class, perhaps the entire school, that was a complete and utter outcast just sitting in her desk with no peperoes. I looked longingly at the peporoes the classmates were eating. I longed for one of them. I did not long for peperoes because if felt famine, but I longed for a token of friendship, a pepero this day. I cannot describe the hollowness and desire and the sense of hopelessness I held in words as I looked around mournfully at the mountains of peperoes. Heck, even our hated teacher was nibbling on a pepero. I had no friends...I was a social outcast...whist my friends normally had two or three boxes of peperoes, I had zero. zero. zero. 0. I was a nothing, no it would have been better if I had been zero. I was maliciously hated, and people longed for revenge on me on their deepest hearts....I chuckled without mirth as I looked around. That chuckle, I know, was an insane one. My eyes flicked from the mountains of peperoes to my empty desk. I repeated the process again, and again. I could not seem to erase the ghostly image of how peperoes were scattered around while I looked at my empty desk throughout the whole day.

Later that day, my former friends forming a semi-circle around me for the third time. They felt that they were not yet done with me. I exasperatedly told them that yes, I was a *****, and let's me done with it, amigo. I shut the classroom door on them. With not satisfaction as a heroine does a bully, but guilt. Sometimes I wonder...just I wonder...whether I deserved more. If God had given me that to pay for my price. But then a part of my brain goes, you've paid for it when that another disaster fell. But another part goes 'that disaster was my own making...again'. I seem to have the need to learn that disasters....are our own making.