Catcher in the Looking Glass - By Joelle Jung

This is a piece of chapter 3. It’s when Holden returns to his room after his encounter with his teacher, and hangs out with Ackley. In my sample he’s not exactly Holden, but a Korean alternate-universe Holden, I guess.

I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your whole life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the study hall on the 11^th floor and someone asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say that I’m going to the cafeteria. It’s terrible. So when I told old Park I had to grab my kendo swords from the gym, that was a sheer lie. I don’t even take kendo in the morning.

           The morning exercises they make you do here are a bit of a nuisance. I take tae kwon-do because I just like it—the other option was kendo, but the whole sword-waving business always struck me as slightly stupid—but boy, you should see what a big deal they make of it here in KMLA. What a deal! They blast this really loud music through the dorm speakers at six in the morning every day, just to wake you up and all, and usually it’s this guy from some indie band singing all sweetly about love and stuff. It’s not half bad if you listen to it some other time in the day, maybe, but at six in the goddamn morning it makes you want to carve your eardrums out. What’s worse is that they play it so goddamn loud that it makes the speakers crackle like hell, and you can’t even hear the music over the noise. It’s awful. Anyway, after making sure you’re awake and all, they make you go down to the gym for morning exercise. Tae kwon-do is done in the gym basement. Old Mr. Seong teaches it, and he damn near pitches a fit if you’re not there on time. Seriously, he threatens to lock the door on you and all after 6:30, which is when we have to be there. But I never saw him actually do it. He’s really quite a nice guy, Mr. Seong. I was sort of on friendly terms with him before they gave me the sack. I’d even guess he was kinda sorry when he heard the news. In any case, the other guys who take tae kwon-do complain about it something terrible. The whole school complains about morning exercise, actually. Personally I don’t mind it too much. It gives me some time to think in the morning, when I’m walking to the gym and all. But the huge fuss they make about it, that’s what kills me. A few weeks ago some guys from KBS came with their cameras to film a documentary about our school, and wanted footage of us doing morning exercise, ‘cause that’s what makes our school special or something. Old Seong just about lost his mind. He made extra sure that we were standing perfectly in line, that our actions were all synchronized and stuff, and started acting like some grand guy who cares about the “spirit of tae kwon-do” and all that phony crap. It damn near made me puke, except that during filming, something happened. This guy that stands in front of me in tae kwon-do, Min-jun, laid this great fart right when the camera was going past us. Boy, it ripped right through the whole basement! We couldn’t really laugh that hard because old Seong looked like he was going to breathe fire, but that made my day, it really did. The next day, though, Seong made us stay an extra fifteen minutes after morning exercise to deliver this furious speech, about how the guy that did it wasn’t fit to go to KMLA and all. We tried to get Min-jun to do it again in the middle of the speech but he wasn’t in the right mood. Anyway, they showed us the documentary on the big TV in the cafeteria a few days later, but KBS edited out that bit with Min-jun farting. It’s a shame, ‘cause I would have liked to hear the phony commentator woman say something about it. They would have found a way to make even a fart sound like a goddamn prince’s trumpet. You should see what they say about our school in the media. It would make you puke, it really would. According to them we’re all some sort of geniuses that are having a grand old time out in the mountains, studying to lead the future of this nation and all that crap. The leadership thing really kills me. It really does. No one does any more leading here than they do in any other school. And the handful of guys that do probably came here that way.

           After that icy trek from the teachers’ dorm, it was nice to get back into my own room again. Everybody was down at the night concert and the heating was on full blast. It was kind of cosy. I took off my hanbok, then put on this red hat that I’d bought from Dongdaemun Market a few months ago. It was one of those knitted caps that looked like they were thrown together by some old granny who was going blind and couldn’t see too well anymore, and the stitchings were off in some parts. I’d noticed it on display in a tiny corner shop that sold scarves and gloves among other things, and everything looked like it had been hand-made. It looked homey and warm and it got my attention. The old lady selling it was very nice about it and let me have it for a thousand won, and I wanted to pay more but she wouldn’t let me. So I got it and the way I wore it, the big tassel at the top hung down behind my head like some Christmas elf’s hat—very corny, I’ll admit, but I liked it that way. Then I got this book I was reading for English class, and sat down in my chair. It was a small chair compared to the fancy-pants deal my roommate Ji-Woo had, but it was comfy and had served me well for the past years.

           The book I was reading was something our English teacher had assigned us to read over the weekend. It was called The Catcher in the Rye, and I’d heard about it getting mentioned a lot in our high school textbooks, so I thought it was going to stink. It didn’t. The main guy, Holden Caulfield, he’s pretty cool. He’s dropped out of a lot of high schools, like me, and hates phony stuff, just like me. I think this Salinger guy may turn out to be my second favorite author of all time, after my brother Dong-Bum, of course. He’s fantastic. One time my brother gave me one of his own pieces to read, one that he’d written a long time ago, just for fun. It was a hell of a read, I assure you. He’d written it when he was 13, even younger than me now, and it was about this little boy who goes on a search for his sister. Only, he’s not completely sane, see, so the world looks really different in his eyes and it looks like he’s having an epic adventure when in reality he’s just cruising the slums of Korea. It was very Don Quixote-ish, in a way, and very profound for a thirteen year-old to write. Dong-Bum hated it because he thought it was damn depressing—he was having a rough school life when he’d written it—but I thought it was all right. It’s a happy ending and all, with the boy finding his sister, and getting mental therapy so that he could go live with his parents in the brighter side of the city. A little corny, maybe, but I liked it because it wasn’t corny the whole way through, just that last bit. I don’t mind corny happy endings too much as long as the entire thing’s good.

           Anyway, I put on my hat and started reading that Catcher in the Rye book. I’d already read through it about four times, actually, but there were some parts I wanted to reread. I’d only read about three pages, though, when I heard somebody coming down that mini-hallway that connects the two rooms in each ho. I didn’t have to look up to know who he was. It was Jung-ho, my ho-mate. About eighty-five times a day he would barge in on me. He was probably the only guy in the whole dorm that wasn’t down at the night concert, besides me. He hardly ever went anywhere. He even skipped morning exercise a few times a week. He was a very peculiar guy. He was older than most of the guys in our grade—almost by a full year—but he sometimes acted even younger than the freshmen, so we called him Noob. I sometimes called him by his normal name, just for a change, but the name stuck too well for other people. He hated the nickname, but no one except me and the teachers called him anything else. If he gets married and has kids someday, his wife and kids would probably call him Noob. He was one of those very, very tall, round-shouldered guys with lousy teeth and messy hair. The whole time I’ve lived with him as his ho-mate, I’ve never seen him brush his teeth even once, nor his hair for that matter. Besides that, his face was full of pimples. Most guys just have them on the cheeks or the forehead or something, but old Jung-ho’s face was peppered with them. Not only that, he had a sort of nasty personality. I wasn’t too crazy about him, to be honest.

           I could feel him standing around near our doorway, poking his head in to see if Ji-woo was around. He hated Ji-woo’s guts and never came over when he was around. He even hated our other roommate, who was a nice guy and not pompous like Ji-Woo was. Jung-ho hated everybody’s guts, damn near.

           He came into the room. “Hey,” he said. “You got any food? Man, I’m starving.” He was always asking for food, that damn sonuvabitch. Even though he pigged out on school food every day—I saw him pile food on his plate higher than his own face once—he was always starving. And the way he asked for it, it was like you would become a bastard if you didn’t give him any. Like you were depriving some poor old beggar on the streets. What a guy.

           “Hey,” I said, without looking up from my book, and rummaged around in my drawers and gave him a cup ramen. We weren’t allowed to eat instant foods here, but everyone did anyway and hardly anyone ever got caught. Old Jung-ho must have eaten the most cup ramens in the whole school, and he never even got caught once. I was sort of hoping that he would then get out of the room to go get hot water for the ramen or something, but he didn’t. Instead he just plopped down on the floor and started jiggling it around, making this very annoying noise with the food.

           “About that baseball game with Daewon. Who won?” he said. He just wanted me to stop reading and enjoying myself. He couldn’t give less of a crap about baseball. “We win, or what?”

           “Nobody won,” I said. Without looking up, though.

           “What?” he said. He was always making you say things twice.

           “Nobody won,” I said. I snuck a look over my book to see what he was up to, besides jiggling that crazy ramen, and saw that he was picking up a picture of this girl I was friends with in middle school, Yoo-na Lee. He must have picked up that goddamn picture about five thousand times since I got it. He always put it back in the wrong place, too, when he was finished. He did it on purpose. You could tell.

           “Nobody won,” he said. “How come?”

           “I left all the goddamn equipment on the subway.” I still didn’t look up at him.

           “On the subway, for Chrissake. Ya lost them, ya mean?” ­

           “We got on the wrong subway. I had to keep getting up to check this map.”

           He came right over and stood right in my light. “Hey,” I said. “I’ve been reading the same sentence about twenty times since you came in.”

Any other guy would have taken the hint. Not old Noob. “You think they’ll make you pay for it?”
           “I don’t know, and I don’t give a damn. How about sitting down or something, Noob? You’re right in my goddamn light.”

He kept standing there. He was exactly the kind of guy who wouldn’t get out of your light if you asked him to. He’d do it eventually, but it would take a whole lot longer if you asked him to. “What the hellya reading?”

“Goddamn book.”

He shoved my book back with his hand so that he could see the name of it. “Oh. This one. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, actually. Is it any good?”

“This sentence I’m reading is terrific.” I can be quite sarcastic when I’m in the mood, but with guys like Jung-ho it just sails right over their heads.