The Smartest Kids in the World Read online

  To her surprise, small donations started trickling in. They were all from relatives, who probably just felt sorry for her, but she took the money.

  Still, she didn’t dare tell her grandfather about Finland; she was sure he’d think this was another one of her hippie-dippie plans, like the time she’d become a secret vegetarian for three months. How could she tell him she wanted to move to Europe for a year? Europe. As it was, he kept referring to President Obama as “Kim’s president.”

  Kim was very close to her grandfather, a retired drilling superintendent for an oil company. They spent hours together, neither of them talking very much. He was an old-fashioned man with no desire to leave the countryside of Oklahoma. She feared he would never understand why anyone would want to move to Finland.

  Meanwhile, all around Kim, the Oklahoma economy was coming apart. The Therma-Tru door and window factory, citing the downturn in the housing market, announced plans to shut down its nearby manufacturing plant, taking 220 jobs with it. A horse-racing track called Blue Ribbon Downs, one of Sallisaw’s larger attractions, also closed its doors. The unemployment rate hit 10 percent. For a brief period, the county jail ran out of money.

  Even the good news came laced with anxiety: The Bama Companies, the Oklahoma-based supplier of McDonald’s apple pies, was expanding. The company already had four facilities in the state. That year, it opened another new factory—in Guangzhou, China.

  To Kim, these headlines were like smoke signals, warning her to get out while she could. She sent in her AFS application and got tested for tuberculosis. She started teaching herself Finnish, watching videos of Finnish bands on YouTube, impressed that any language could deploy six syllables just to convey the word pink. She bought a hermit crab and named it Tarja, after the first female Finnish president.

  Money wasn’t her only problem. AFS couldn’t find anyone in her area to do an in-home interview; apparently, she lived too far from civilization. Her mom was willing to drive her to Tulsa, but AFS insisted that the interviewer had to come to her home, to see Kim in her native living room. She waited and worried.

  To distract herself, she wrote blog posts and tried to explain herself to the world. Sometimes she succeeded, hitting just the right note between self-aware and sincere. “Basically I’m just a walking contradiction. For example, on the outside I appear sarcastic and cold, but in actuality I’m a bleeding heart,” she wrote. “I get a little sad whenever a spider is killed . . . [But] I think squirrels are pure evil (chased twice, bitten twice—three separate occasions by the way).”

  In November, she mustered her courage and sat down with her grandparents to tell them about her plan; her grandmother interrupted her: “You mean your trip to Finland?” Kim was shocked. They had known for weeks, as it turned out. Kim’s grandmother was on Facebook and checked it daily. Daily! To Kim’s relief, they had no objections. Kim’s grandfather asked her if she knew the capital of Finland. Helsinki. He didn’t say much more about it, and Kim didn’t ask. She remembered then that he had traveled to oil wells in seven different countries as a younger man. He must have known that the world was a big place and worth seeing.

  Just after Thanksgiving, Kim got a three-thousand-dollar scholarship. She wasn’t sure where the rest of the money would come from, but she noticed that her grandparents started talking about “when” Kim went to Finland, not “if.”

  That December, she and her mom went to Walmart to get her passport photos taken. She didn’t want to jinx anything, but she was impatient for her life to start. Then she got lucky again, winning a two-thousand-dollar scholarship intended for someone from Arkansas. AFS officials decided Sallisaw was close enough.

  Finally, AFS found someone to interview her. It took three months, and the woman had to drive for hours to get to Sallisaw. Kim and her mom tidied up the bathroom, set out some scented candles, and waited, nervously. When her interviewer arrived, Kim felt herself rambling. She heard herself criticizing her town, and she knew she’d made a mistake. The woman looked worried.

  “You sound like you are trying to escape.”

  Kim tried to reassure her; okay, yes, maybe she wanted to escape a little, but she also wanted to explore, to see what life was like somewhere else—what she was like somewhere else.

  The letter arrived soon afterward. Despite the tortured interview, Kim had made it. She was officially an exchange-student-to-be.

  Finally, just a couple of months before she was supposed to leave, Kim got one last donation—from her grandparents. She tried to refuse, but her grandmother wrote her the check and walked away.

  With that, Kim had $10,000.

  One thing led to another, and soon everything became tangible and specific. That summer, Kim was sitting on her grandfather’s recliner when the phone rang. She recognized the country code and jumped out of the chair. She pulled out her retainer and ran outside to get a better signal.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, this is Susanne from Finland!” Her host mother’s voice sounded far away. She spoke excellent English, with only a slight, hard-edged Nordic clip. “We can’t wait to meet you!”

  Kim walked in circles, barefoot on the hot rock pathway. Susanne told her she was a journalist and a single mother of twin five-year-old girls. They lived in an apartment in Pietarsaari, a small town on Finland’s west coast. Kim would be going from one country town to another; from one single mother to another. Susanne told her to bring her warmest clothes.

  chapter 3

  the pressure cooker

  From Minnesota to South Korea: Eric in Busan.

  Nothing seemed real until he saw the sign. It was dark pink with blue letters, and he spotted it through the sliding glass doors in front of him, as he rolled his luggage cart toward the arrivals lounge at Gimhae International Airport in Busan. “Welcome to Korea, Eric!” it said in bubbly script, the kind waitresses use to write Thank You! on the bottom of their checks. That boy holding the sign must be his host brother, standing next to his host mother and host father. His new omma and appa, he thought. Or maybe it was appa and omma.

  He slowed down, his small frame finally absorbing the implications of this decision. He’d spent all eighteen years of his life in Minnetonka, Minnesota, a white, affluent suburb of Minneapolis. That was over now. For the next year, he had chosen to live in Busan, South Korea, with total strangers. He ran his fingers through the thick pelt of brown hair on his forehead, which was growing frizzier by the second. The humidity had wrapped around him like a wool blanket from the moment he’d gotten off the plane. The glass doors opened and closed and opened again. Then, he took a breath and rolled his cart through.

  Before he’d even left the United States Eric was, in some ways, living in a different country than Kim in Oklahoma. Minnesota was one of the very few states that ranked among the top twenty nations in the world in education outcomes. Minnesota did not make it into the top tier with Finland or Korea, but in math, the state’s teenagers performed about as well as teenagers in Australia and Germany.

  Even by those standards, Eric had attended a particularly high-powered high school. Newsweek regularly ranked Minnetonka High School among the top high schools in America. The place had four gymnasiums and a hockey rink and looked more like a small college than a high school.

  Eric had opted to join the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, an intense track within the school that was benchmarked to international standards. He had several teachers who were legendary in Minnetonka. Ms. Duncan, his history teacher, held an annual trial for Napoleon; her students picked sides, researched their arguments, and then presented their case in full costume to a jury of alumni. On paper, anyway, Eric was going from one of the smartest states in the United States to one of the smartest countries in the world.

  Eric had already practiced what to do when he met his host family. Following Korean protocol, he bowed deeply from the waist as a sign of gratitude and respect. He also smiled widely, like a proper Midwestern boy. His Korean fa
mily all bowed in response—not as deeply, but it was clear that they were pleased with his effort.

  Then Eric froze. He had not planned out what to do after the bow. Should he hug them? Too much. Should he shake their hands? Too businesslike. Instead, he tried to introduce himself in Korean. This was a mistake; his lips would not cooperate. The sounds squeaked out of his mouth like the chirps of a spastic parakeet. Rosetta Stone had not gotten him far.

  “Don’t worry,” his Korean mother said in English, interrupting him with a smile. “We’ll teach you how to do that.”

  Then, his Korean brother gave him a hug and started chattering away, excited to deploy his choppy English on a real American as they all walked together to the parking garage. Eric stuffed his heavy suitcases into the trunk of the Daewoo hatchback, and they headed off to his new home.

  At first, the car sped through a long tunnel that went on and on, revealing nothing of Eric’s new city. But then, suddenly, the Daewoo surged into the open air. He looked back through the rear window and saw a steep, lush mountain behind them. They had driven through the middle of the rock and now emerged into the heart of Busan, a pulsing city with nearly ten times the population of Minneapolis.

  To Eric, Busan (pronounced PU-san) looked like a city stacked on top of a city, a kaleidoscope of commerce and color. He strained his neck, looking up through the window, and he recognized what looked like a pharmacy, built on top of a police station, perched on top of a Dunkin’ Donuts, their glowing green, yellow, and pink signs cantilevered out over the street. Cranes sliced up the skyline like windmills, each marking a high-rise in progress.

  “This is amazing!” Eric exclaimed in English, as the car merged onto the Diamond Bridge, a suspension bridge that sheared across the sea, running the length of eighty football fields. From the front seat, his host mother smiled.

  On one side of the bridge, Eric could see the Pacific Ocean stretching out to the horizon, calm and polished. It was nighttime by then, and the bridge’s white spotlights spilled out onto the expanse of water below. On the other side of the bridge, he saw a city in full. It was like watching split-screen television. Neon-lit skyscrapers were lined up like dominoes along the edge of the water, as if the gods had dropped a booming metropolis right onto a beach.

  The host family lived in an apartment on the seventh floor of a luxury skyscraper complex called Lotte Castle. Eric got his own bathroom, a rare amenity in Korea’s crowded cities.

  One morning shortly after his arrival, he and his host mother walked outside to catch the number eighty bus. By then, Eric had emerged from the fog of jet lag and was eager to visit Namsan, the Korean high school he would be attending for the next year. He had read that Korean students performed at the top of the world on international tests, just like the Finns. He also knew that Korea had one of the highest high-school graduation rates in the world, far higher than the United States, despite having dramatically less wealth.

  Getting on the bus, he felt nervous in a detached way, like an anthropologist on a field visit. Eric had already graduated from high school in Minnesota, so he was not worried about passing exams or getting credit. He was in Korea for a break, or so he thought.

  A lot had happened in the last few years of his life. He’d worked extremely hard to keep up with his International Baccalaureate classes, pushing himself to stay up later and study harder. He’d also come out to his family at age sixteen. His parents had been supportive, and he was now comfortable talking about his sexuality openly. He didn’t plan to talk about being gay often in Korea, a very conservative country, but he didn’t plan to lie to anyone either. He hoped that, as an outsider, he would be exempt from the worst cultural strictures. He was here for the experience, determined to keep his mind open to whatever he found. Next year, he would go to college, and it was hard to say when he’d have this kind of adventure again.

  The bus stopped at the top of a long hill, outside a flimsy metal archway. Eric and his host mother got off and walked across a dirt field, where a group of students were playing pick-up soccer, kicking up a cloud of dust in the humid morning air. Looming behind the field, up on an incline, was Namsan high school. It was a massive four-story, red-brick compound that stretched on and on, bending at an angle at one point as if to fit between all the neighboring high-rises.

  Inside, a single hallway ran the full length of each floor. It felt very cramped and very vertical compared to Eric’s school back home. Nothing looked dirty exactly, but the school had clearly seen a lot of use. The walls were dinged and the white boards were scuffed. The curtains were tied back haphazardly to let in fresh air—not to look nice. In this school, function clearly came before form.

  Eric and his host mother met up with an exchange student from Canada who had also just arrived. The hallway was quiet, and, through the open doors, Eric could see students sitting behind rows of desks.

  The shrieking began without warning. First one girl and then another and soon dozens of girls were screaming in unison. Eric froze. What had happened? Had he done something wrong, triggered some invisible alarm?

  The shrieking was the kind of screeching he’d heard on old news footage of the Beatles appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was high pitched and sustained, and it started a chain reaction. Students from other classrooms spilled into the hallway to investigate.

  Groups of girls approached in gaggles, still shrieking, which was when Eric realized that this hysteria was for them. “Hello!” one of the boys shouted in thickly accented English. “How are you?” Eric smiled, eyebrows raised, uncertain whether to be flattered or frightened. A boy reached out to high-five him, and he cautiously complied. “We’re rock stars,” he whispered to the Canadian girl.

  The adults ushered them away for a brief meeting with the principal. They didn’t stay long; for the exchange students, classes would begin the next week. Soon afterward, he and the Canadian left to catch the bus home.

  Walking down the front steps and across the dirt field, they heard yelling behind them. Eric looked back and saw kids hanging out of five or six classroom windows to wave goodbye. They were smiling, high up in the air. He smiled and waved back. Strange as the experience had been, it felt good to be so warmly welcomed.

  Before turning the corner to catch the bus a few minutes later, Eric glanced back one last time. The kids were still there, lined up at the institutional windows with their arms dangling out—as if they wanted to get as far from the building as they could, without actually falling.

  Watching them, the feeling of gratitude faded slightly. In its place, he felt something more foreboding.

  “have you ever shot anyone?”

  He hoped that the uniform would help him blend in. It was early in the morning on his first full day of school, and Eric was putting on the dark-blue pants and the white collared shirt required for all Namsan students. His exchange counselor from the Rotary Club had gotten it for him. She’d also explained that he would be assigned to a class with kids two years younger than he was. The older kids, she’d said, were too busy to talk to him. They had to study for the college entrance test. This exam was so important, so all consuming, that going to school with them would be like going to school in solitary confinement. Eric had nodded as though he understood; the SAT was a big deal in Minnetonka, too.

  As Eric made his way to sociology, his first class, he tried to make himself as small as possible, to minimize the screaming. In the back of his classroom, he put his outdoor shoes in a nook and traded them for indoor flip-flops, just like the other students. He noticed that many of the kids wore colorful socks with sayings he couldn’t understand—or cartoon images of Batman. The school banned makeup, earrings, long hair, and hair dye, so socks seemed to be the main outlet for free expression.

  Eric found an empty seat near the front and waited for class to begin. Looking around, he noticed that the classroom looked a lot like a Minnesota classroom might have looked thirty years earlier. There were wooden and metal desks lined up
in rows and a faded chalkboard at the front.

  At his high school in Minnetonka, every classroom had an interactive, electronic white board that usually cost a couple of thousand dollars, and teachers had wireless clickers to hand out to students for instant polling. However, Korea’s cultural obsession with digital toys did not seem to extend to this classroom, which was utilitarian and spare.

  As the other students filed into the classroom, they crowded around Eric’s desk. The class was large by Eric’s standards, bursting with over thirty students, but typical for Korean classes.

  “Have you ever ridden a horse?”

  “Have you met Brad Pitt?”

  “Do you own a farm?”

  “Have you ever shot anyone?”

  Eric remembered hearing that the Koreans were known as the Italians of Asia, more emotive and chatty than the Japanese or Chinese. Now that the shrieking had diminished, he found the kids’ curiosity charming. And he had always liked to talk.

  “Yes, I have ridden a horse,” he said. “I have not met many celebrities. I don’t own a farm, and I have never shot anyone.”

  The teacher walked into the room and stood at the front of the class. She was tall compared to most Korean women, and wore glasses. She carried a delicate microphone in one hand and a stick with a stuffed frog on the end of it in the other hand. It looked like a backscratcher, something you might find in a gift shop at the mall. Eric stopped talking and sat up straight at his desk, wondering what to make of the frog.

  Strangely, no one else seemed to react. The kids kept chatting with one another while the teacher stood there, waiting. It was painful to watch. Finally, the teacher tapped her frog stick on a desk to get everyone’s attention, and the students slowly took their seats. As she lectured, a few of the kids talked over her in the back. Eric was surprised. He had seen worse behavior back in the States, but for some reason, he had expected Korean kids to be more deferential.