Student Writing

Student Writing Cloud Blues

By Anne Lee, 9th Grade Yongsan International School of Seoul

“Ya! Kim Yeon Seo, come here this instant!”

Mother’s voice erupted as I entered through the apartment door after a full night of hagwon, our endemic institution of cram schools. The painful recollection of Mother’s slaps dragged me Wham! Wham! Every strike of the mallet chipped fragments off of

toward her ferocious roar. Hagwon, home: the difference had long since become elusive. Suppressing my exhaustion, I reminded myself that midnight in South Korea was never a time spent sleeping anyway.

She was sitting at the dining table. It was typical of Mother to be in the kitchen; family members always crowded the kitchen to extol her culinary genius during Lunar New Year’s and Chuseok. She worked her magic in there, sweating over sizzling pans of bindaetteok, embedding colorful vegetables into japchae noodles glossy with sesame oil, and concocting aromatic potfulls of galbijjim—none of them anything but illusions now. The fluorescent lights of the empty kitchen illuminated Mother’s haggard angles, faded yet still rigid. I had noticed that no matter how much she was praised for her cookery, the emaciation that scarred her face never lifted. I lay blind in bed. I felt the heat in my guts as my hasty din-

Sprawled out in front of her was the constitutional collection of the household. My math tests. Paper after paper contaminated with red marks that proved my worthlessness. Blood pounded indignantly in er was watching could be heard.

my ears, but I had nothing to defend.

As if careful not to wake Father sleeping in the next room, Mother Wispy tendrils swirled around my free-forming mold throughout yet I was more real than ever—an absolute form with the sole purNighttime took over the world, and being among the stars, I could

began with a silent hiss.

“Why?”

The single word shattered my fragile shell. Unvented, inscrutable pain burst into fat tears rolling down my cheeks.

“Why can’t you be as good as everyone else? Do you know how much your father and I pay to make you better? I pour everyto my bed, my house, my country—any dreams of a cloud already

thing into you. Is this what you call appreciation?”

With a loud smack, she struck the table. Through a vision blurred by tears, I watched the test papers take flight and flutter down, scattering across the floor. Conflagrant blots danced around I was a shape being hammered into the wrong hole by a dull baby. me. I choked with held-back protests, but my mouth stayed taped shut with something more adamant: an old tradition that flowed in my bloodline.

Mother grew frantic. “Do you want to end up like your parents? Look at me!” She screamed, violently tugging at her shirt collar. “Do you want to live like me?”

Her voice broke, and she fell to the floor bestrewn with my failures, bawling. She clenched at the tests, crumpling them in her trembling hands. “Or him?” She flung the papers at the door behind which Father lay asleep.

The only sounds that followed were Father’s troubled snores that rose above the chords of Mother and my retching sobs.

ner of pyeon-ijeom cup ramen struggled to settle and threatened to surge back up.

Through the wall, animated murmurs of the late-night drama Moth-

In my sleep, I became a cloud floating through endless blue skies. continuous metamorphosis. Nobody questioned my existence, and pose of being alive. When the sun came down, an array of vibrant hues spilled over the heavens and saturated every ethereal soul. almost brush against the luminous moon…

Five hours later, the screech of an autocratic alarm drew me back my eyes.

fading away into the oblivion of a forbidden fantasy.

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