Radical

by Michelle Rhee

  OUR HOUSE SCREAMED “FOREIGN” from the moment you crossed the threshold. From the overpowering stench of kimchee (fermented cabbage) and ojinguh (dried squid) to the shoes neatly lined up outside the front door (you could never wear shoes in the house!) to the Asian screen that my mother had custom made for our front entrance, nothing in the Rhee house was normal or familiar to my American friends. You knew from the start that you were about to enter a different world. My friends marveled as they inspected the Korean artifacts that adorned the hallway, the smelly antique Chinese herb chest that was the centerpiece of our living room, and the brush paintings that my aunt had created.

  “Weird!” they’d announce gleefully after thoroughly surveying the lay of the land.

  But even more foreign than the odors and decor was the way my family operated, and specifically, my role in the family unit. We were living in America but trapped in the landscape and mind-set of South Korea circa 1950. That meant that the men ruled the roost and the women served them.

  One memory that has stuck with me was when my little brother, Brian, who was not academically inclined, came home with a bad grade. My mother immediately grounded me. He was allowed to go out; I had to stay in.

  “You’re his older sister,” my mother told me. “It is your responsibility to make sure that he is doing what he needs to do.” “Whaaaa?” I thought. That was crazy talk! In modern-day America that rationale made zero sense, but to my mother, it was perfectly logical.

  Another particularly humiliating experience took place when a friend of mine and I were discussing what back then was dubbed “women’s lib.” We were talking about how wrong it was for men to think women were inferior. I made a comment about how I would tell any man off who tried to keep me down. Thwack! Before I could even get the words out of my mouth my mother had gone upside my head with the back of her hand. “Don’t be disrespectful!” she hissed.

  It was actually kind of comical, and my friend couldn’t pick herself up off the floor from her laughing fit. My mother, however, was unfazed. She was sitting peacefully shucking bean sprouts for dinner one minute and smacking me the next because she didn’t like what I said. She returned to shucking without missing a bean.

  That’s how I grew up.

  My parents were very, very strict, especially my mother. My father was a successful doctor and very popular in the community. Everyone knew my dad. He was the liberal one of the two. But my mother ran the show. She was hard-core and strong willed. As my friends would say, “Mrs. Rhee is no joke.”

  I was allowed out of the house only one night a week and I had to be in by eleven o’clock—no exceptions. I was not allowed to sleep over at friends’ houses.

  When I complained, my mother would retort, “What good can come of a girl sleeping at somebody’s house other than her own?” We ate dinner together around the table every single night. Almost every night it was Korean food.

  I had to wake up every morning and pack lunches for my brothers. I set the table and washed the dishes after every meal, cleaning up after my brothers.

  “This is what girls do,” my mother would say whenever I complained about the unfairness.

  The difference between the culture in our house and the one I lived in at school couldn’t have been starker.

  WHEN I WAS GROWING up in and around Toledo, it was a working-class union town built on manufacturing. After World War II, jobs were plentiful in the Jeep plant and the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company, and the city thrived. Toledo’s population reached its height of 383,818 right around when we moved there in 1971. In his practice, my father treated factory workers and plant managers. My friends were the sons and daughters of union members. I grew up with strong feelings of allegiance to unions and the working class.

  In the second grade, I asked my father what the difference between a Democrat and Republican was. He said, “Republicans care more about what’s happening in other countries. They care about making money. Democrats care more about what’s happening in America. They want to take care of the least among us.” That settled it for me. I was a Democrat.

  LIKE MANY MIDWESTERN MANUFACTURING towns, Toledo went into decline in the 1970s, and continued to struggle into the twenty-first century. It suffered from recessions, plant closings, and white flight to the suburbs.

  Toledo public schools had a proud early history, beginning in 1842, when the city council took the first step of voting to build schoolhouses. The first schools operated only in winter and were heated by potbelly stoves. From those modest beginnings, the public schools grew with the city and reached their zenith in the late 1960s, when the school population topped fifty thousand students, educated in sixty-six buildings.

  But Toledo schools mirrored the growth and decline of the city. Even in their heyday, the schools struggled for funds. The system depended on local levies, which Toledo residents voted on every year. They were not generous. In fact, the schools starved. In a 1976 report required by Ohio legislators, the schools reported that the system had not had an additional operating levy since 1968. Instruction and facilities languished. Teachers went out on strike in 1970 and again in 1978.

  Toledo was hardly an isolated case. The plight of the public schools was the unfortunate norm coast to coast, from inner-city schools to small towns to suburbs. The declining state of public education in the United States during the 1970s and ’80s provoked a reaction from Washington. President Ronald Reagan asked his Department of Education to establish a commission to study public schools. In 1983 the commission published A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.

  “Certainly,” President Reagan said at the commission’s first meeting, “there are few areas of American life as important to our society, to our people, and to our families, as our schools and colleges.”

  For eighteen months, Reagan’s commission held hearings across the country and researched schools. Its conclusion: “We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.

  “What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”

  The commission found that twenty-three million Americans were literally or functionally illiterate. Thirteen percent of all seventeen-year-olds were illiterate; the College Board’s SAT scores had fallen steadily from 1963 to 1980 by 50 points in verbal and 40 in math; business and military leaders complained they were spending millions of dollars on remedial reading, writing, and math skills.

  “The world is indeed one global village,” the report stated, concluding: “America’s position in the world may once have been reasonably secure with only a few exceptionally well-trained men and women. It is no longer.”

  Toledo public schools were not what they once had been. Shang and Inza Rhee didn’t have to read A Nation at Risk to understand that their children might not thrive in public schools and be able to compete with the best. They surveyed their options and evaluated the schools based on their roots in education and the education-crazy country from which they came.

  My parents settled the family in Rossford, about five miles south of Toledo, along the Maumee River. We lived in a neighborhood called the Colony, and it was every bit as exclusive and pretentious as it sounds. The sprawling yards separated neighbors at a comfortable distance, and many of the houses looked like mini castles. Good luck trick-or-treating there—the houses were too far apart and the neighbors too crotchety to lead to a good haul. There weren’t very many children who lived in the neighborhood, so my brothers and I had to venture outside the stone gates in order to play with our friends. With significant trepidation and skepticism, my parents enrolled my brothers and me in the neighborhood public school, Eagle Point Elementar
y.

  THE TEACHERS AT LITTLE MEADOWS nursery school got one thing right: I was an extremely shy and sheltered kid through primary school. My mother was creating a daughter modeled on her upbringing in Seoul. We weren’t Americans. We were Koreans living in America. They were so serious about this that they sent each of us to Korea after sixth grade for a year to be immersed in the culture.

  So in the summer of 1978 they shipped me off to Seoul to live with my aunt and her three children. I couldn’t speak a lick of Korean. What a shock: I was now living in a tiny apartment, sleeping in a cramped room with my two cousins, and waking up to a breakfast of rice and banchan (small plates of seasoned vegetables) every morning.

  The biggest adjustment, though, came when I went to school.

  Students started every day by lining up and standing at attention. Then we did calisthenics. I remember thinking to myself: “Are you serious? Do I really have to do this?”

  I did. Everyone did. I also had to learn Korean, which I nailed down after three months of sitting in class like a dummy. There were seventy kids in my class. They positioned students according to height. Since I was a year older than most of my classmates, I sat in the back. I had no clue what was going on—and I felt like I was a mile away from the teacher.

  I got zero special treatment, because in Korean schools, competition ruled. Every child was ranked by his or her grades, from one to seventy, and the rankings were posted. I couldn’t believe they told everyone how they measured up against one another!

  But rather than damaging the souls of the less accomplished, the rankings focused every family on moving their children up the ladder. The question Koreans asked was “How can I get my kid ahead?” They made their children spend more time in class. They tutored them. If they were seventeenth, they competed to be sixteenth or fifteenth. Every family pushed their child to be closer to number one.

  I saw that it was not only okay but essential to compete. I also started to understand where my mother got her strictness and her discipline. Compared with my American friends’ moms, Inza seemed militaristic. But living with her was a walk in the park compared with these Korean mothers.

  That year in Korea changed me in profound ways. I lived in a society where competition and excellence were rewarded, and attended a school that demanded hard work and dedication from every child. To do well was a symbol of your family’s commitment and accomplishments. To do poorly was a blemish on your family. Everything a kid did was a reflection of his family and nothing was more important than maintaining their honor.

  While all of this was foreign to me, one thing that I relished was the fact that for once in my life, I was in the majority. Having kids tug their eyes up into slits and being taunted with “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these” was commonplace in my life back home. But in Korea, as long as I kept my mouth shut I looked like everyone else. In a strange way, that anonymity was empowering.

  For the first time in my life, I did not feel like an outsider.

  THE NEW SENSIBILITY CHANGED my life at home in Toledo.

  In grade school I had been a hanger-on, someone who attached herself to the popular girls and tried to not look conspicuous. My parents were dissatisfied with that and with our overall experience in public school. They wanted more. They wanted the best.

  When I returned from Korea my parents enrolled me in Maumee Valley Country Day School, a local private school. Established in 1884 as a school for girls, it had stayed small and accepted fewer than five hundred students from grades kindergarten to twelve, though it had become coed. The campus was arrayed over seventy-two wooded acres close to the Maumee River. Most of my classmates were the children of doctors, lawyers, or professors at one of the local colleges.

  At Maumee Valley, I wasn’t the most popular kid at first, but I started to hone my skills as a leader. I was the girl who was in the middle of everything. I knew everyone’s business. I became the fixer.

  When I was in seventh grade, the middle school took its annual trip to Washington, D.C., to see the sights and tour the monuments. After three action-packed days, it was finally time to board the buses back to Ohio. After surveying the scene, I wasn’t happy. There weren’t any seats left on the bus I wanted to ride on, the one with the cool and popular kids. Somehow a small group of nerds had gotten seats on that bus. I sprang into action.

  “Move!” I demanded. They scoffed and looked at me as if to say, “Make us.” I held sway in the school, but I certainly wasn’t the prettiest or most popular girl, so a bat of the eyelashes wasn’t going to help me here. Once I realized the confrontational approach was not going to work, I decided to try a softer one.

  “Hey, don’t you guys want to ride on the other bus with your friends? That would be so much more fun!” I cajoled.

  “No way!” answered back their spokesperson. “If you haven’t noticed, we scored seats on the cool bus.” The task went from difficult to impossible. The nerds hadn’t landed there by accident. They knew exactly what they were doing.

  Looking dead in the eye of the King of the Nerds I said, “I’ll give you twenty dollars for your seat.”

  “What? No way—are you crazy?”

  “Nope,” I replied, “take it or I’ll offer it to someone else.”

  “I’ll take it!” said another nerd.

  “I’ll give you my seat for fifteen dollars!” said another.

  Within minutes I was brokering seats for all of my friends, with money exchanging hands at a frenetic pace. After we were all happily seated and about to take off, the head of the middle school, Laszlo Koltay, stormed onto the bus.

  “Everyone get off now!” he boomed. We knew we were in trouble. Once all of us were assembled in the parking lot he said, “It has come to our attention that people are paying other students for their seats on the bus. This is absolutely unacceptable. I need to know who is involved. Right now.”

  Busted. Mr. Koltay was looking for names. He glared at his prize pupils, me included, assuming one of us would come clean and give up the culprits. None of the faculty would have guessed that I was involved in a million years. I was a Goody Two-shoes. Too nice to be involved in such unsavory acts.

  And everyone knew that. We stood in preteen solidarity with no one uttering a word. When it became apparent that they weren’t going to get anywhere with the inquisition, Mr. Koltay exacted his toll on us. We would be riding back to Toledo seated in alphabetical order by last name. “No one,” he explained, “will be having an enjoyable ride home.”

  This kind of maneuvering became commonplace for me. I would use my reputation as the good girl to my advantage throughout my young adulthood. The sweet-girl facade belied the rebel brewing inside. My friends would say I was always bossing people around and telling them what to do. Whether it was the question of whom to catch a ride with, whom to date, or what to wear to the party, I became the go-to girl in our class. The dynamic became formalized as I ran for and won student council representative each year in school.

  While my social life was improving, at least by preteen standards, one thing I began to realize after my time in Korea was that not everyone lived the sweet life in Rossford, Ohio, and I had it pretty good. My father often said, “You have what you have because you were lucky to be born into this family—not because you are particularly smart or special.”

  In high school I performed a broad range of community service, but I focused most of my volunteer time on children. Every January all students participated in a monthlong study or project outside school called Winterim. I spent my most memorable Winterim at the Child Life Center at the Medical College of Ohio, where I helped care for terminally ill children.

  I remember one little girl I’ll call Rachel, maybe four or five years old, with a beautiful, cherubic little face, and long, wavy blond hair. She had leukemia. My job was to play with her, and every day we would meet in the playroom. I remember she would lie down on the floor and gyrate and make sexual sounds.

  I found it
troubling, and she wouldn’t talk about it. I approached the director of the program.

  “Why does Rachel behave like that?” I asked.

  She explained that Rachel came from a really troubled home, where she had been sexually molested. It was my first exposure to anything like that. I had grown up in such a sheltered, loving home, I could not imagine a child of this age being the victim of sexual abuse, but I could see all the manifestations of it coming out.

  It made me sad, but it also drove home my father’s words. I was lucky by birth.

  I WAS ALSO LUCKY enough to meet Mary Weiss, the mother of my tenth-grade boyfriend, Adam. I didn’t know it at the time, but Mary was my model teacher.

  Mary and her husband, Steve, were the exact opposites of my parents. My parents were tough and strict; the Weisses were liberals, hippies back in the day.

  Their daughter, Sarah, had died when she was in the sixth grade. They had adopted Adam when he was an infant, and in a way, I felt like they had adopted me, too. I would eat dinner at the Weisses’ a few times a week my senior year of high school. We talked politics, business, and music, but mostly Mary talked about the trials and tribulations of the classroom. What I learned and heard at that table formed my sense of an ideal teacher.

  Mary Weiss was born in Buffalo, New York. From an early age, she told me, she wanted to be a teacher. In high school, she taught at a Bible school and wound up getting a history degree at the University of Toledo. She and Steve married in college and settled in Toledo. Mary got a teaching degree and chose to teach at Martin Luther King Elementary, in Toledo’s inner city.

  Mary didn’t have to teach, especially in a rough part of Toledo. For her, teaching was a calling.

  “I want to make a difference in my students’ lives,” she said.