tutoring Lily (my boss's wife)

I might've failed to mention this, but I'm tutoring my boss's wife.

She's a scary lady. She definitely wears the pants at Reading Town. She's tall (about as tall as her husband, who must approach six feet) and has long curly black hair. Her skin is on the pale side, somewhat similar to Esther's, though both she and Jacob are the eldest at Reading Town. That's no accident. Since the oldest are accorded the most respect under Confucian law and Korean custom, naturally the oldest folks wind up running companies with younger ones under them. She usually dresses severely, in dark colors and modest cuts, though occasionally she'll break with tradition and wear sweaters and skirts.

She's the head secretary at Reading Town, and runs the front desk with an iron fist. It's her face, though, that reveals her true nature. Whether it's beautiful or not is neither here nor there. It's the expressions she wears: a near-constant glower. Lily is something of a tyrant. Misbehave in her sight and you'll come in for a razor-sharp scolding. Should the kids act up in class and she is summoned (or worse, hears the ruckus and comes of her own accord) watch out! There's going to be a dressing-down. If a child has failed to transmit his parents' money from his parents to Lily's hands, she flies off the handle. All of us foreign teachers have either seen or heard Lily screaming (literally screaming) at the kids. She can really belt out a lecture, that woman can.

But that's not the scariest part. After she's through giving a child a tongue-lashing (at the end of which the kid will either be sitting silently in their seat, or staring at the floor, or crying gently, quiet as a mouse) she'll turn to us, give us an ear-to-ear grin (showing her humongous teeth) and leave the room like nothing happened. It happens all the time. She yells at the kids then turns to talk to us with her finest two-dollar grin on her face. The rapid switching of personalities (or the semblance of such) is disquieting.

Getting the picture?

This wouldn't be as awkward in a purely academic setting, but it happens everywhere. Lily is a born autocrat. She doesn't just administer Reading Town, she controls it. Time was, new and unused black board markers were kept in a box in the teacher's room for all to use. Lily apparently thought that they were getting used up too fast, because not long after I came she took them out of the teacher's room and put them in the conference room desk where only she and Jacob can retrieve them. So now, if we teachers need new markers (and we need them frequently; you can use up a whole marker during one writing class) we have to go and ask her and wait for her to get them.

The paper towel situation is rapidly becoming untenable as well. A few months back there were plenty of paper towels and toilet paper in the bathrooms. Now, I know not why, there aren't. No paper towels, no toilet paper. If you want any you've got to ask the desk. Lily apparently thought those were getting used up too fast, too.

Lily's always on the lookout for ways to cut costs, but either she doesn't realize the inconvenience she's putting everybody through or she doesn't care. She doesn't speak English. That's why I'm tutoring her, in fact. So whenever she needs to transmit a new edict to us, the foreign staff, she uses Jacob or Charles. Some of these edicts include:

• Don't turn on the air conditioning units yet because the children are suffering from the cold (when it was balmy outside and some of the classrooms had been heated by the sun into resembling conservatories).
• Don't let the kids pack up their bags too early. Keep teaching them right up until the moment the bell rings, then give them their homework assignment. (This is after she caught us giving them their assignments five minutes before the bell rang.)
• Do make the children finish their books. (This is impossible. The children all have textbooks and they're supposed to be completely filled out and handed in, classwork, homework and everything, at the end of the month. But the lazy ones don't do it, and there's nothing on heaven or earth that will make them. They leave their vouchers at home so we can't take them away, and they just laugh at study hall. Since those are the only two manifestations of discipline at Reading Town, our case is somewhat hopeless.)

As if these mandates weren't unreasonable enough, Lily personally enforces them. I've seen her prowling the halls many a time, peeking into classrooms to make sure we're following her wishes. I've been teaching with the A/C on, my students happy and content, and then suddenly Lily pokes her head in and switches it off, without a word to me or them. It's frustrating, to say the least. I feel sometimes like I'm working for her instead of Dr. Song in Seoul, or Jacob. The prospect is unattractive.

This month I began tutoring her, starting from Square One. She spoke just a few words of English, mostly loanwords that have entered the Korean lexicon, the bare minimum she needed to know to run the front desk. The textbook we've got is adequate, but somewhat repetitive. She has stated that she likes my lessons; I for my part must admit she's an able student. She tries hard, does her homework perfectly and promptly, and is attentive and studious. But the control freak in her finally won out. In our second-to-last lesson, I turned the page of our textbook to go on to the next lesson and she said firmly, "Next time." Remembering how she could explode, my courage temporarily deserted me. I leaped back and gave her a deferential "okay." Afterward I kicked myself. I am the teacher, I said to myself; she is the student. I dictate the pace, not her. I was ashamed of myself for my momentary lapse of backbone. Here, thought the devious part of my brain, was an opportunity to put the witch-woman in her place.
But I didn't go for it. We had gone over quite a lot of material that day. It was okay by me if we stopped there. I just wished I'd been the one to say it.

In the next lesson I got my revenge. So I gave her a pop quiz. It wasn't punishment; I'd planned to do it anyway, and had warned her that I might a couple of lessons back. But when she asked me when the next one would be, I refused to tell her.

"That's a surprise," I said.

Ha! I'd stood up to her! She could take me by the hair and demand to know when that quiz would be, but wild horses couldn't drag it out of me.

We shall see where this goes. Will our sessions together escalate into a battle of wills, an epic ideological conflict? Shall Lily get her way once again and reduce me to a quivering, obsequious, subservient pile of unmanned jelly? Or will the heroic Andrew T. Post, master of all he surveys, lord of the classroom and symbol of justice and proper Confucianist values, save the day and sock it to that dastardly control freak bottled up inside my boss's wife?