A Greater Music by Deborah; Suah; Smith Bae

years of formal education hadn’t taught me a single thing. Thanks to my parents, I’d already mastered hangul and basic sums before I ever set foot in a classroom. Perhaps, like some kind of prodigy, I was already reading by myself at the age when most children are only stumbling through the alphabet. My parents took all this as a matter of course, and everything stemmed from there. Before long I was able to read books cover-to-cover, and ended up better acquainted with the pleasure of reading than that provided by school or friends. Once I started school I was forced to study the alphabet despite already knowing all the letters, which immediately put me off the lessons. In any case, these were little more than Spartan exercises in rote learning. I would sit there with my own book hidden inside the textbook, and after several years of this I’d lost all ability to even attempt to concentrate on what the teacher was saying. Even the most exciting topics fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, the school curriculum progressed far beyond what little I’d picked up at home, moving on to topics which I hadn’t a hope of understanding unless I paid attention in class, but by then the habit was too far ingrained, and I couldn’t bring myself to concentrate even once the lessons stopped being mere repetitions of things I already knew. In less than two years I could only think of school as an endless progression of tedious, dragged-out hours, of feigned obedience and non-participation. The only way for me to get through each lesson was to read a book the whole time. Naturally, there was a limit to the number of books I could get my hands on, so it wasn’t unusual for me to read the same book more than ten times. At first no one had any idea that I wasn’t listening in class, because I always did the homework and my grades were generally above average. However, this was only possible because once I got home I would run through the things we’d been taught that day. This self-studybecame progressively less effective as the lessons increased in complexity. From a certain point onward the equations I was faced with remained completely impenetrable no matter how many times I went over them, and when the exam period came I had reams of notes to read, which, to make matters worse, were peppered with words that might as well have been written in a foreign language, and the free periods we were given at school simply weren’t enough time for me to take in such an enormous amount of information. Instead of flowing on by, the everyday reality of school piled up on top of me, suffocating me under its oppressive weight. The lesson periods gradually became longer, and I spent those long hours battling anxiety and ennui as I sat there with my head bowed over the textbook, secretly engrossed in novels that I’d borrowed from the school library or saved up my pocket money to buy. After several rereads of the romance novels that all schoolgirls read at least once, like Louise Lynch, Jane Eyre, and the Anne of Green Gables series, I moved on to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. These were followed by Thomas Mann and Heinrich Böll, Hemingway and Sartre, Kafka, Camus, but I can’t really say that I genuinely read any of the books from that time; rather, they were simply something for my anxiety to worry away at. Besides, my reading list was determined by whichever old woodblock-printed editions I could get from the library. It made little difference to me whether I was poring over the minute type of Proust’s À la recherche , some cheap romance novel, a graphic novel, Judgment , which had left me completely baffled, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They were all just something to fill the time until the lesson was over. Because I couldn’t concentrate on what was being said, because even the teacher’s voice itself was nothing more than a string of meaningless sounds, I never understood a single thing, and