(2020 - Coffin, Buried Alive)
Call me Doctor. I am D R Kim, but you can call me doctor, he said as he met me at Kimpo Airport to take me to my new home in Seoul. I knew I should have listened to my old district manager, that I was selling myself into white slavery. What have I done?
I had dreamed of earning the title one day, of carving out a place where my knowledge and expertise would be recognized. But belonging was an illusion, much like everything else I had built in this country.
I arrived in Korea decades earlier, stepping off the plane at Kimpo Airport, my maroon Samsonite luggage balanced precariously overhead as I navigated the uneven planks stretched over the construction site for the Purple Line in Jongnosamga. It was Seollal, Lunar New Year, and I found myself at the Dongnamjang, an aging hotel wrapped in the hush of holiday quiet. The transition from Mardi Gras in the U.S. to Seollal in Korea was surreal—beads for mandarins, bourbon for barley tea, crowded streets for silent hallways. I sat on stiff sheets, ate rice cakes that clung to the roof of my mouth, and listened to the muted hum of a city momentarily at rest.
That was then.
Now, in 2020, the city was silent for another reason.
The world had shrunk to the walls of my office, the glow of my laptop screen, and the repetitive loop of emergency announcements detailing areas of contagion. The foreigner community fractured under the weight of closures, flight restrictions, and the unbearable uncertainty of what came next. Returning from a trip to the U.S.—a journey meant for family visits and conferences—I found that life as I knew it had dissolved. Schools shut down, friends disappeared, and the bureaucracy thickened into an impenetrable maze of QR codes, temperature checks, and contradictory regulations.
A friend reached out, asking me to check on his soon-to-be ex-wife, a woman teetering on the brink of something he could no longer name. I agreed, even as my own world cracked beneath my feet. But in the isolation, old ghosts found their way in. A private message, a name that should have remained buried. A past ‘friend.’ A man who had left bruises I never let heal.
His words appeared in a Zoom chat—casual, familiar, a hand reaching from the grave to pull me back into the vortex of fear.
I could still hear the sound of my breath catching in my throat.
I shut the laptop, but it didn’t matter. The walls had already begun closing in.
Teaching became both a sanctuary and a prison. Online classrooms where I performed as if my world had not tilted sideways, as if the walls weren’t pressing against my ribs, as if I hadn’t become something spectral. My students logged on, their faces flickering, sometimes blank, sometimes engaged, and I fought to remain present.
The hours blurred together.
Meetings. Lessons. Emergency notices. More meetings. More lessons. The gym was closed, no access to the stationary bike that had provided so much relief. My back and knees ached from long hours hunched over a desk, from the weight of remaining visible in a space where no one truly saw me.
The walk home was always dark. The campus buildings loomed against the night sky, structures carved into the mountainside, shadowed and unyielding. My steps were slow, uneven. Pain flared through soft tissue never adequately diagnosed. I moved like an echo, a thing caught in the frame of a screen, dissolving at the edges.
Even my body was disappearing.
Somewhere in the silence, I realized: I was becoming the ghost of my own story.
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