I have sex with my student.
It sounds terrible if you say it like that. It’s the kind of statement that can get a man fired, hated and ostracised; the kind of statement that strips away all the complications of life, all the reasons and explanations, leaving your actions naked and exposed for all to judge unfairly. It’s the kind of statement that boils away all the colour and life of the experience until all you have left are those crude words. No blossoming feelings, no rush of emotion. No heart, no soul. No caring, no holding, no kissing, no cuddling, no whispers of promises nor vows of dreams.
No love. Just sex with a student.
I’m not a monster. I want you to understand that. More importantly, I want you to believe it. I’m not a rapist and I’m not a paedophile. I teach at a university and my students are adult women, free in their choices, freer than I am. I’m not a criminal. Admittedly, I am forty-two years old while the students are eighteen, I am a tenure-track professor living in a foreign country and, strictly speaking, I am married. So, yes, I probably should know better. However, I still think that it doesn’t make me a terrible person.
The wife may have disagreed on this point, of course, if she had ever known.
I was thirty-four when the wife and I first moved from the spacious, Shropshire cottage that was our first marital home to a tiny two-room flat in Noryangjin, a depressing little area on the edge of Seoul in South Korea that didn’t even have the right to call itself a neighbourhood, lacking as it was in all things neighbourly. I found I quickly missed the wasteful amounts of greenery that exist in English; gentle fields that stretched out for miles, hushed woods with sprinkles of sunlight and row after row of noble, stoic hedges – I missed hedges the most. I never thought I could miss a hedge until I stood under the harsh neon lights of countless bars, karaoke rooms, clubs and brothels disguised as all of the above.
I suppose for some people, mainly the kids straight out of college who went to Korea to teach English because they couldn’t think of anything better to do. life in Korea must have been pretty good. Lots of fun to be had, I guess. For me, however, I didn’t have any part in that. For years I just worked, went home to the wife and thought about hedges.
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