I graduated from college with a permanent hangover, a degree in English Lit and absolutely no prospects. A child of the solidly upper middle class, my parents encouraged me to follow my dreams and study what I loved, so I found myself two months out of graduation about to move home. I weighed my options carefully. The daily searches were depressing reminders of my ineptitude and the waste of forty thousand dollars of tuition money. The low point came when Kroger wouldn't return my calls. I was a failure. One week before the lease ran out on my apartment a friend called and told me that she was going to Hong Kong to teach English for a year. 'Want to come?' Her chipper voice irked me and was a reminder that I had never really like her in the first place. After getting off the phone, I mulled the idea over. It would look good on my resume and buy me time to decide what I really wanted.
Two weeks later, I was on a flight over the Pacific. My arrival presented new traumas as I attempted to adjust to the triple threat of heat, language and food. The latter two were fairly easily overcome. The former, however, was unrelenting, oppressive and inescapable. After millennia of exposure, the locals had evolved to the point that the sweltering humidity was of no concern. I would duck into frigid shops ever five to ten minutes as I worked my way down the street, hoping for relief, but realizing that as soon as I emerged, it would attack again. The nightlife was vibrant and I found myself immersed the self delusional world of the expat. All failures in their own countries; each had arrived hoping for a new start. British, French, American, Italian; they were all the same and I couldn't remember how many different beds I woke up in, unable to remember the events of the night before.
The work was easy, if unfulfilling. I showed up at 10:30 in the morning, head throbbing from the night before, and left at 5:30, collecting a decent paycheck for my effort. The children were terrible, raised as they were by doting grandparents and nannies who didn't want to lose their jobs. The teenage boys, never having seen any women with actual breasts would inevitably be unable to stand after the slightest flash of cleavage.
Most of my students were in the latter stages of secondary school and planned to attend university in Hong Kong or abroad. They needed me to talk to them, get them used to English the way it was really spoken, not what they learned in textbooks. Often we would sit and converse for an hour, other times we would do some sort of learning exercise; it was up to them. New students were in and out constantly and sometimes, I would barely learn a kids name before they left and were replaced. A boy named William began taking lessons from me during the latter part of his Form 5 term. He was shy and had to be coaxed into speaking, but gradually opened up and I couldn't get him to stop. July rolled around, school ended and he quit for the summer. He told my breasts that he would see me in the fall and shuffled out.
The summer passed quickly as I found myself trying to live outside the drinking scene and enjoy all of the other pleasures that my adopted city had to offer. It was a good decision and I dated a nice banker from Holland for a few months, contemplating domesticity, but dismissing it as a byproduct of my hormones and the constant nagging of my mother to 'settle down'. When September came again, I was ready to start up and greeted the latest round of little learners with excitement. William was there again, but I barely recognized him from the previous spring. It seemed that turning eighteen had changed him overnight. He had gotten taller and the baby fat had drained from his face, revealing an angular beauty. He was happy to see me, or so I assumed from the stray wood he got during the first class. Used to that sort of thing, I dismissed it as an unfortunate byproduct of his age and vowed to resume wearing the high cut shirts and blouses that I had eschewed during the hot months of summer.
The first few weeks of the term progressed normally. He would come to class for an hour every Friday afternoon. I didn't notice the changes until the day he looked into my eyes for the first time. My stomach filled with butterflies and I felt like a schoolgirl instead of the twenty-three year old I was. As dark as coal, they regarded me with intensity and desire instead of the usual schoolboy crush to which I had become accustomed. We sat in silence, eyes locked, until the screaming of a girl next door broke the spell. He had arrived that day in a tight shirt and jeans instead of the usual ill-fitting uniform and I noticed how much more muscular he had become and that he no longer slouched in his seat, betraying a new air of self confidence.
