Issue 37: "Reply 1998: Exploding Frogs" by Frances Cha
Immigrant Hustle: A Monthly Mini Memoir
Heeey KP!
It’s not everyday we get a personal story from an international bestselling author. But for today’s mini memoir, we do! Meet Frances, whose memories from middle school in Korea stand in stark contrast to the soft American cultural norms of today. I read her entertaining retelling with both horror and delight! It’s such a great reminder that life is a full-spectrum experience. We feel pleasure and pain, ups and downs, the good and the bad. And in the end, this duality shapes us however we decide to respond to it. HWAITING!
P.S. For readers in Northern NJ, Frances will be giving an author talk at the Tenafly Public Library on Thursday, November 14th at 7:00p EST. Go check it out!
“Reply 1998: Exploding Frogs” by Frances Cha
Frances Cha is a Komerican author and dual citizen of the U.S. and South Korea. Her debut novel If I Had Your Face was named one of the Best Books of the Year by Time Magazine, NPR, USA Today and Esquire.
Her first children’s book The Goblin Twins was published by Random House Kids last September. The picture book features two ancient trickster dokkaebi brothers who stowaway to New York after hearing about a strange land where people like haunted houses and trick-or-treating. The second children’s book The Goblin Twins: Too Hard to Scare, featuring the two mischievous dokkaebi trying to prank New Yorkers, is out now.
Frances worked as the assistant managing editor of Samsung Economic Research Institute’s business journal in Seoul and as a travel and culture editor for CNN in Seoul and Hong Kong. She has taught at Yonsei University, Ewha University and Columbia University.
Follow her on IG @franceschawrites or learn more about her at francescha.com
In Korea, I went to a public middle school about two hours outside of Seoul, in Gyeonggido. It was a relatively newly formed town, and school was assigned by lottery. I was assigned to the newest school, the furthest from my apartment, and there was nothing around the lone school building but fields of weeds and wildflowers, and an orphanage down the street which had been around for a few decades.
One of my standout memories of my first year of middle school was that of walking to my friend’s house, which was in the middle of a field with reeds that were up to our chests. The ground was wet and marshy, and with every other step, we stepped on frogs. Have you ever stepped on a frog and had it explode under you? What about two dozen of them? It was the most miserable walk of my tween life but I couldn’t say anything because there was no other way to get there. I could see the house in the distance, and the only way there was through. I had on shrimp-pink fabric sneakers, and let me tell you – it is impossible to get frog guts out of thick cotton shoes. Her dad ran a taxi driver restaurant, and recently I couldn’t believe it when I read about the new and hot “taxi driver Korean restaurant” in Manhattan. Each dish probably costs more than what that restaurant made in a day.
When I think about those school days, there are so many details that would make people incredulous. It was a different time! The teachers measured the lengths of our (very short) hair and the lengths of our skirts with rulers - the hair could not be longer than 3cm past our earlobes, and our skirts could be no shorter than 3cm below our knees. Boys’ uniforms were not allowed to drag beyond their shoes. Any violation would result in caning. We had tests twice a semester, in 13 different subjects, and after each test, our names and scores and rankings were posted on the wall. One morning, the teacher said there was a national census being conducted about parents’ education level. “Everyone whose mothers only graduated from elementary school, raise your hand.” Then it was “everyone whose mothers only graduated from middle school, raise your hand.” And so on and so forth until graduate school. And then the survey about fathers began. We were all so sweetly innocent - none of us objected or were embarrassed or cared about each others’ parents’ education levels and all of us raised our hands accordingly.
My worst subject was Sociology. I still don’t know what I was supposed to learn in that class. I got into a huge fight with my teacher because of it, and that was when such a concept was unfathomable. I probably should have been suspended, but luckily, and probably because the administration was so new, I wasn’t. My best subject was surprisingly Technology. It’s funny to think about now – I think it would be flipped.
During lunch, we swapped “letter notebooks” and manwha (comic books) and I have many of them still. In the letter notebooks we wrote letters in code about our idol crushes and hagwon crushes and what we were saving money up for - perfume, CDs, and posters. Once a semester, we would have field trips where we were permitted to wear regular clothes and this was always a BIG Deal. My friends and I took a bus to Ewha University to go shopping at the boutiques in front. I wish I still had my 292513 STORM sweater- with the gradation of a Kim Whanki painting. I couldn’t bear to wear it more than once because I loved it so much.
I remember one of the boys got hit by a teacher so hard that his eardrum burst. Another girl was dragged to the bathroom by the “bad girls” during lunch and beaten up so badly she lost her sight for awhile. She didn’t come back to school until the following year. One of the boys had a motorcycle accident and went into a coma for years and was taken off life support. We used to sit on the roof with our feet dangling off the side. Nobody show this to my mother.
Perhaps I am giving the wrong impression. I loved those years. Now that my children are coming up on middle school, I really want to pull them out of school in America and enroll them in Korean school in Korea. We will see.
H Mart Happiness: What’s your favorite product and why?
“Sliced tteok rice cakes which I always keep on hand. You can make tteokbokki and tteokguk of course, and you can also stir-fry with vegetables with a splash of soy sauce, throw them in bulgogi, jeyukbokkeum, or other meat dish, put them in ramen or dumpling soup, crisp up in the airfryer and eat with gochujang sauce….I can keep going!” - Seo C.
What’s your favorite H Mart product? Share the love and leave a comment!
Sweet 1998😍