Soyeon spoke to me today, after class ended. It had been one of the "CC" classes where I make the advanced middle-schoolers "teach" the class after preparing the materials, and I'd complimented her on having done a good job. She had. She's a natural teacher, maybe. And her spoken English, despite her twisted morass of underlying grammar problems, comes off as well-accented and mostly quite idiomatic.
She announced, somewhat proudly, "A boy asked me out yesterday."
Soyeon's in the seventh grade. I don't quite know what the typical "growing up" trajectory of a Korean teenager is like, but Soyeon far from typical. She is the most "American" Korean child I have ever known. I don't know how she got that way – she's never lived abroad and in fact has never visited an English-speaking country as far as I know. The closest she's gotten, I think, have been a few short trips to Thailand and Malaysia. I only mention that by way of saying that for all I know she's not particularly typical among her peers, but rather seems to be following a more Western route through adolescence, in which dating in middle school, if not universal, is certainly not viewed as unprecedented. I expect the more traditional Korean household would have none of this. But this is a society in rapid cultural transition, as usual, and individual families occupy quite distinct subcultures despite the broader homogeneity. Some families are utterly westernized, while others hove to a more traditionalist, even Confucian line.
Anyway, that's just background. I felt flattered that she offered this piece of news to me. It's demonstrative of a kind of trust. I've been her teacher for 4 years now, so I guess it's somewhat to be expected.
I said to her, "That's great. Do you like him?"
She nodded, and added, "He liked me."
"Liked you? Why do you say it in past tense? What happened?"
I was, pragmatically, wondering if this was grammatical mistake. Hence my question. But I was quite wrong. She demonstrated this, after a disproportionate delay in answering.
She looked at me slyly, and said, "Nothing happened. He liked me…." Another too-long pause. "Now he loves me." And an emphatic shrug, for punctuation.
Ah. It was a joke.
"Well that's fast," I said, as neutrally as possible.
"Uh huh," she said, with a near native-English-speaking teenage tonality. And walked away, playing some game on her smartphone.
[daily log: walking, 7.5km]