Beixi Li

PhD student with an accent, he had stood there and looked at their aspiring faces, their confident stances, swallowed hard and put his soul into his lectures twice a week for a semester.

 

She had sat in ergonomic chairs, struggled to stay awake, and learned management operations with a class of 80 who knew that they wanted to make money when they left that LEED certified building—and they would all go on to do it.

Last day of class he stood up there and asked what family was. Wearing a blue fleece half zip and dress pants, he looked expectantly at the students, and they were embarrassed to answer.

 

Looking down he threw up a picture on the screen of a little boy looking through the cracked undergrounds of a street. She looked and looked and the perspective was so skewed she couldn’t understand what was going on. What existed below a street? Cement, earth, clay?  No, people did, with furniture and a family.

“My grandfather used to be a reverend and I would always play soccer against one of my best friends right in the courtyard of the church. Whoever won would always get a little monetary prize, and I made it so that I won every time. He was always furious and I thought it was hilarious.”

 

He looked back at the screen, at the little boy looking up through broken concrete with big eyes, and then turned slowly back to us, “Then, one day, I went to his house for dinner, and that picture you see, that’s where he lived. The road had caved in and there was a hole in the ground under the street and that’s where his family had made their home.”

The slide flipped and nighttime Korea was illuminated by the lights of sky rise buildings, captured in a five by eight to share with others half a world away. The laser hovered on the tallest building.

“That’s where I worked.”

The red dot jumped to a squat, blue building on the side of the mountain.

“That’s where the President of Korea lived.”

The red dot wavered, then disappeared. He turned back to us and said wryly, “Literally, I stood above the president.”

 

She allowed herself a laugh and the sound was echoed out of the students around her, undulating with their ambitions.

“But then I came back to teach.”