“Caleb!” My co-teacher strolled into the teacher’s office, not surprised to find me nose deep in my kindle. “You should stop reading so much.”

I turned my head, reshuffled my now-asleep feet that were resting on the computer hard drive under my desk, and smiled.

“No thanks.”

And dove back into the pool of words.

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I used to do the same in the backseat of the blue Volvo station wagon before it got totaled on Huntington Drive: dive into oceans of words. Calvin and Hobbes, Magic Tree House, Encyclopedia Brown, Baseball’s Weirdest Facts, The Bill James Abstract: 2003, all shoved into the backseat pockets, worn and torn from the unceremonious re-shoving into the pocket at the end of the ride to school or Taekwondo class.

The best ones, however, were the middle sections of the tongue-in-cheekly titled Everything Your [Second/Third/Fourth] Grader Needs to Know, a book whose contents seemed to suggest that the average elementary school student already knew more than the average college grad. I’d skip right over the math and biology section to the “social studies” section, which I knew by then was just a fancier word for “history.” Harvard social studies concentrators—this is where you roll your eyes and stop reading.

I should have been on Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? At least, for that history part. You know, that show where they take 10-year-olds with secret PhD’s in knowing everything and have them demoralize and then demolish full-grown adults in cerebral WWE? Or maybe, secretly, it was Larry Page’s testing ground for Google AI 1.0 implanted into kids, the mirror of Deep Blue schooling Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!

Moving on to middle school, sixth grade English probably hurt more than it helped. Each quarter, every student was required to list at least three (five?) books they’d read, with a parent’s signature sealing the deal. In the midst of discovering the now 20+ book Redwall series, I blew past the minimum, so much so that I resorted to using a pen to draw more lines on the chart and my mother simply signed next to the title of the first book and drew a long red arrow line down and signed next to the last one. Number 18 it was.

“Wow! You really should have saved some for the next semester!” was the teacher’s response. As a budding econ major who didn’t know it yet, it made sense to push literary profits to the next quarter to jumpstart future reading spreadsheets. And so, taking her advice, I read more prudently—but also less than before.

Ms. Dow—or the ‘Dow Cow,’ as some called her, as she was a tad on the heavier side (I only called her that aloud once, after I received an H- (honors minus) instead of the H (honors) I thought a 92.6% deserved, a sixth grade prelude to future petulant emails to college professors)— accidentally blew at the candle of my reading passion, and it flickered. But it didn’t go out.

In fact, I developed a foolproof technique for keeping teachers off my back. Seventh grade book club met once a week, for an hour-and-a-half. Otherwise known as eternity to a prepubescent middle-schooler. It was a brutal and ironic trek—ninety minutes where you got to talk all about the book the class was reading but you weren’t supposed to go on during that time; that was called reading ahead and was pronounced in such a manner that gave it the same weight as cheating and playgarinizing.

“This is baloney,” I thought, or whatever G-rated thought came to my young mind instead of “This is bullshit.” Remember that this was the early 2000s, when late-evening cable still bleeped out most curse words, and our house didn’t even have cable; we stuck aluminum foil around the antenna till it looked like deer antlers in hopes of catching the Dodgers on KCAL 9, one of the analog channel we got.

I was afraid, but there were books I had to read. Plus me and a handful of other vocabulary-advanced classmates were bored of sitting in book club as the teacher would ask, “What do you think will happen next? What is this foreshadowing,” and us few would have to sit there dumbly, as if we hadn’t read the whole thing already like we had. Alternatively, we’d be forced comply with the teacher’s credo that “Curse words shall be read aloud. ALOUD, as the author intended!” causing an innocent girl one class to blush beeter red than a polished tomato and nearly fall out of her chair shaking as she stumbled into the f-word mid-paragraph.

My strategy started with holding open the assigned text—which for some reason I know at one point was a teenage watered-down version of Kerouac’s On the Road that bored me to the point where I swore never to read the actual On the Road when I grew up. Another time it was Haddon’s A Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time, a story of a 15-year-old boy with a combo of Asperger’s and ADHD that was much more palatable. So much so that it was impossible to put down—I still don’t know how the teacher expected us to “Stop at page 181” or wherever when the protagonist himself could never stop what he’d started in the novel.

I don’t know what’s worse: being forbidden to read or being told to stop reading at a certain point before the climax of the plot.

So I’d hold the open book, spine facing the teacher, and then put another smaller book inside that book for my reading pleasure. And if she or he every caught me—which might happen given I was prone to letting the book carry me to a new world while I sat in a class size of 15—well, no kid ever got in real trouble for that offense.

It’s like when your girlfriend gets suspicious of why you’re being so evasive or don’t want to hang out, and so she arrives unannounced at your place to “check on what you’re doing” and…

SURPRISE!!

…it because you were planning a surprise birthday party for her all along.

As in “Surprise!! Teacher, look, I’m not hiding anything really—heck the iPhone won’t come out for another two years and texting isn’t a thing yet for me—I’m reading The Hobbit while I wait for the rest of the class to catch up.”

What teacher can scold you for that kind of duplicitous chicanery? Certainly not the ones who knew that I knew what duplicitous and chicanery meant by that age.

In fact, I gained a silent ally that semester, though she wouldn’t admit it until we became close friends years later. “If you were reading The Hobbit during that dumb class instead of whatever trash we were reading,” she told me, “Then I thought you must not be that lame.” Seeing as she would go on to major in English Lit and still endearingly calls me a dork, I still take that as the top compliment of grades six thru eight.

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I don’t know exactly why I would type all that, so much as to serve as a long tangent to point out that somewhere between middle school and college, thinking “This is baloney” to any reading restrictions became “This is bullshit” to any reading syllabus spanning more than one page. That and/or to actively remind myself that reading—and writing—are only chores if you allow them to metastasize into them.

Someone once aptly wrote that we are prisoners of our own minds—the expectations, beliefs, struggles, and barriers we put in place up there. Yet our mind is the single greatest tool we have full capacity over. To shape into a depository of knowledge, bedrock of self-security, source of inspiration, or even weapon of destruction, if we so choose.

Serving a 10-year prison sentence for grand larceny, in Harvard Square, no less, future activist Malcolm X was struck by how one inmate commanded everyone’s respect in the yard with little more than his words. Starting with the A for Aardvark entry in the dictionary, Malcolm worked his way through a litany of texts from Crusoe to Kant, with “months passing without even thinking about being imprisoned.” Decades later, a writer from England asked him what his alma mater was, to which he responded simply: “Books.”

“I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students,” he would write. “My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America.”

South Korea is no prison and Jeonju no jail cell, and I’m certainly not trying to source an affliction for the Korean race in America. Yet the distance between here and family and friendships across the Pacific carefully cultivated over the years can be psychologically enormous in a way that sidesteps race. It’s well documented that your mindset gravitates towards mirroring the five people closest to you; that you am a product of your immediate surroundings.

That knowledge of what influences you is empowering as much as it is isolating. Desiring to imitate the best and understand the worst of those around me; yet not actively trying not to assimilate into the local community mentality.

Luckily, in that vulnerable moment when other new teachers started to gasp at my 22-hour-a-week classroom teaching timetable that dwarfed their 12-16 hour ones and offer condolences as if I should be complaining, I was reading. Nike founder Phil Knight’s story of 18-hour-a-day hustling and Elon Musk’s 100-plus-hour-week benders gave me a perspective Jeonju teachers do not have (Not to mention all you consultant/banking friends receiving this who would die for anything less than 50-hour weeks).

Admittedly, that’s only a tiny example bordering on the edge of triteness for some, while all too familiar for other Fulbright teachers reading this. There’s a lesson in comparing those reactions, too: that problems are relative to the person. Each is wandering and lost in their own way. “You’re running your own race.”

I wish I had Cheryl Strayed tell me a lot sooner that “the narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are” and Marcus Aurelius that “the best revenge is to not be like that.” It would have saved a lot of heartache and worrying.

I once wrote that I saw life like a video game: where you can level up raw tools like physical strength or mental agility with enough skill points earned over time. In that frame of mind, the game ended with graduating college. Now what?

One thing is for certain: growth does not end with the classroom. While Joyce’s Ulysses still evades comprehension as it did when I first picked it up (at first, to appear smart; now, because I feel dumb), I hope I don’t forget the childhood and now recent joy of losing time engrossed in a story. Now, there is more at stake. As a father once wrote to his son:

“You’ll find that education’s about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it’s about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he’s willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and the screw-driver lost.”

And though I have not yet sat myself down to read his texts in full, the Renaissance thinker Petrarch said, “Books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”

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I’m starting to think that putting this down on screen is going to either be a time capsule entry or a letter to future self. A “Wow, look at how much time Caleb had to read and write hah wish I had that kind of time in the corporate world,” or a “Wow, this really jump-started a lifelong change in behavior.” Is that too meta? To try to predict how I’ll read this in a year or two? Should I warn myself or pat myself on the back in advance? Would doing either doom me to succeed or fail?

Anywho, all you readers out there—what are you reading that I should be too? I’m on a “books that challenge your worldview without making you reach for a dictionary or cliff notes version” binge, but am easily swayed. Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere was a reminder that race and identity are inextricably intertwined, and Mark Batterson’s Chase the Lion showed that I needed “to be around people who make me feel small because their dreams are so big.” Both were recommended by people who receive this newsletter.

What’s next?