Fucking Own teacher

“Teacher,” Sumin said, suddenly. “What is ‘Netflix and chill’?” She looked across the desk at me with an expression of open curiosity.

Caught off guard, I hesitated trying to figure out how to answer this. My gut instinct is to always be honest but I also know that in the classroom there are certain boundaries, even if this was a private lesson and not in an actual classroom. We were sitting in her apartment’s study room with a piano against one wall, bookshelves filled with books along another wall, and her desk with me on one side, and her on the other. Sumin was framed by the large window behind her looking out over a landscape of other high rise apartment buildings. The textbook was open before her and her scratch paper next to it. I had been guiding her through some exercises with de***********ive adjectives when, mid-exercise, she sprung the question on me.

“Well…,” I began slowly. “You know in Korean people say ’would you like to go eat ramen together’?” I said this part in Korean.

Sumin grinned. “I know that.” Good. Bullet dodged. Suggesting to your Korean date to go eat ramen together was essentially do you want to come up and get your freak on.

“It’s like that but in American English. I don’t know if they use it in Australia or England, but we use it in the US. for the same reason. It’s kind of a joke now, I think.”

She pressed on with a little too much interest in her expression. “Did you say to girl before?”

“Eat ramen or the watch Netflix?” I said, cautiously.

”Either one is okay.”

“English, please.” She repeated the correct phrase in English back to me and waited, her expression expectant.

Sumin was a very intelligent young woman. She was not yet out of high school and she excelled in most of her subjects. (She said social studies bored her to tears.) She was planning to go to the US to attend university after she graduated in a couple of years and a lot of our conversations had centered around American culture and what to expect. High school can be brutal in South Korea but Sumin managed to keep in high spirits and genuinely seemed to enjoy learning new things. She was bright and inquisitive.

In addition, she was an exceptionally cute girl. It wasn’t all natural as most young Korean women and many of the men go under the knife for plastic surgery. Image is king in South Korea. And even though she was still in high school, that didn’t stop her or many other students from having a little work done. Many got it as a birthday present, or as a reward for good test grades. Her wide, expressive eyes had been worked on, and her nose was just a little too perfect to have been natural. But she didn’t look too far off from what you might see in a kpop video. Her long black hair cascaded down her shoulders and her perfectly smooth cheeks and slim jawline accentuated a full mouth. She often had on makeup for our classes since she usually met up with friends after we finished, and today was no exception. Her lashes were long around her brown eyes so dark they were almost black, her lips a deep crimson. Most schools in Korean didn’t allow the girls to wear makeup so they tended to go all out on the weekends when they were able to get away from the classroom.

I enjoyed our classes together and we often had good conversations. This was the first time anything remotely sexual had come up beyond some questions about dating American boys in university. It’s not like I’m in the habit of probing about the sex lives of my students, after all. Usually our conversations centered around Korean cultural issues, news topics, or school drama when they weren’t about cultural differences between our two countries.