The Lost Girl From Cincinatti

The bright lights force me to squint. They are hot, like the celebrities always say. I have spent the last hour in hair and makeup. I can’t decide who or what they want me to be. This skintight outfit covered in sequins is suffocating, but it does shimmer in the bright lights. I make a pouty face because the director keeps making hand motions like fish gills and I’m assuming that’s what he wants. I don’t speak Korean and he doesn’t speak English. I motion to my translator, but he just laughs. I don’t think he knows what the director wants either. Eventually, the translator tells me to “sparkle.” How am I supposed to do that? I suck in my stomach, flip my hair, and smile awkwardly at the camera. I do my best to appear sexy or strong anything but shy. Am I sparkling yet?

Three weeks ago, I came to Korea to teach what I thought was going to be high school American literature to an academy located in the wealthier part of Seoul. After a week of a lot of smiling and nodding, I found myself teaching “Mary had a little lamb” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to a group of rambunctious, adorable six year olds. While I do love little children, I have absolutely no training in teaching basic English lessons nor did I envision being a part of the elementary education system. I thought I would be leading thought provoking discussions on Hemingway, Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Having flown halfway across the world, sold all my belongings, and enrolled in an expensive accelerated Korean class; I figured there’s no turning back.

I wanted to see the world; Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, but I didn’t have the money for it. This girl I went to high school with was teaching English in Bangkok and she was always posting these cool pictures. Oh look, there’s Erin snorkeling. There she is at the peak of some mountain. Now Erin’s bathing an elephant. It wasn’t Europe, but it looked a whole hell of a lot more exciting than Cincinnati. So I signed up for the first place available, South Korea.

I didn’t know a word of Korean, so when I arrived I started copying the characters of different words into my little black notebook with a drawing next to them. I only wrote down things on signs that had pictures next to them so I knew I was interpreting the signs correctly. So far, all I had was words for different types of food, oh and the bathroom.

The recruiter I spoke with assured me lots of people spoke English and I’d have no problem navigating life in Seoul. I should’ve known when I arrived, by the fact that they hired a translator to help me do my paperwork, that there definitely weren’t as many people who could speak English in my new neighborhood as they had claimed.

For the most part, the first two weeks I lived in Korea I walked from my apartment to the school and back, with my big outing being a stop at the 7-Eleven where luckily I had found frozen pizza. It was on one of these strolls home that I was basically accosted by what looked to be a pair of 15-year-old schoolgirls in plaid uniforms. They were jumping up and down and trying to get my attention. I pulled one of those comical look-behind-me-to-see-who-they-were-looking-at moves before I realized they were pointing at me. At first, I just sighed because being five foot eleven and a redhead in Korea came with a lot of pointing and staring, but this seemed above and beyond the usual gawking. I gestured to the girls in a manner that gave them permission to come closer, which I assumed would end with a harmless selfie. Instead the girl with two pigtails pulled out a manga from her backpack. I looked at it and my mouth fell open. The hero on the cover looked just like me! I took out my little black book and asked her to write down the title. If I was going to have a manga doppelganger, I felt I should at least know how to pronounce and write the name of it. She did so happily and then motioned for a selfie. We took five or six together, and then she and her friend ran off with the most stereotypical schoolgirl giggles I had ever heard. I walked home quickly and immediately started googling. I’m not really into manga or anime, but I felt the need to at least know what kind of character inhabited an exaggerated version of me. Could I imagine myself walking a mile in her platform shoes?

When I woke the next morning, my phone was filled with whatsapp messages. I scrolled through and recognized none of the names, most were in Korean until I found one from my old roommate Deanne in which it said “holy sh*t your a comic book hero?” I opened the whatsapp link and saw my face plastered on an instagram post with over 130,00 hearts. It’s like I was an instant cosplay celebrity. As I walked into school, a fellow teacher stopped me and said in broken English, “I saw you instagram, you look like superhero.” I laughed and said, “I know. I know. Funny right?”

A couple of days later as I was walking into 7-Eleven again to restock my supply of frozen pizza, I was approached by a Korean man in a suit. He said to me in perfect English, “Are you Lisa Mcgee? The girl that took the picture here three days ago?” “Um, yes, that's me.” I said with a confused look. He said “I have an offer for you. Do you have a few minutes?”

That offer was two weeks ago, and since then I have been on three magazine cover shoots, a Facebook ad, and I signed a modeling contract that is estimated at $20,000. Next week, I’m supposed to dance with a famous K-pop band on stage, and I use the term “dance” loosely. I will probably sway back and forth, wave, and smile. I still feel like a lost girl from Cincinnati. The one thing keeping me grounded is my little black notebook. I now have the characters for pouty face, red hair, and sparkle in bold on the third page. Am I sparkling yet?