“Mom, how do you tie a tie?” I asked, staring down at my new uniform blankly. We didn’t do the whole school uniforms thing in Canada. But in South Korea, apparently all the students did it. I was in need of a serious lesson.

My mother turned around. “I don’t know.” She shrugged at me and turned back to the pile of boxes on her bed, still in need of unpacking.

“Why not?” I asked. I wasn’t meaning to sound like a brat, but I was frustrated at the fact that I hadn’t even gone to school yet and I was already feeling like a failure. “Didn’t you ever do that romantic thing to dad where you straightened his tie before work?”

“What is this, the 1950s?” Mom chuckled, pulling out the blouse she’d been looking so diligently for. She sighed contentedly, even though half the contents of her closet were strewn haphazardly across the room. “I was the one who always went to work, anyhow. Your father was more the stay-at-home type, until he got so involved with his art.”

My father would be moving to Korea along with us, shortly. He owned an art gallery of sorts back in Canada, and he was now finishing up selling the last of the art, and renting out the property to some other budding, local company. We weren’t sure how long he’d be staying behind, but my mother didn’t seem to worried about it. As long as he arrived eventually, she’d remarked once before.

The more pressing issue at the moment, at least to me, was how to put on my uniform. “Could you help me Google it at least? Come on, mom, all these students have spent the majority of their lives in uniform. Do you know how embarrassing it’ll be to not only be the new foreign girl, but also be the girl who can’t dress herself?”

My mom sighed. “You’re not the only one broaching foreign territory today, Hannah. New job, remember?” She smoothed out the wrinkles of her blouse, and then opened up yet another box in search of some other clothing item. “You’re seventeen, can’t you figure it out yourself? Find yourself a nice guide on the Internet. Ooh, maybe there will be a guide with pictures.”

Deep down, I knew my mother was being perfectly reasonable, and I was being perfectly unreasonable. However, dealing with a new school was a high stress situation. And I do not deal very well with high stress situations. When I was five, I peed myself on stage in front of my whole class when we sang at our kindergarten graduation.

Unfortunately, peeing myself wouldn’t be so forgivable at my new school as it was at my old one.

I pulled up Google on my phone and sighed, typing in “how to tie a tie with pictures”. This year was the year of learning new things, starting with how to put on my uniform.

                                                                               ***********

“Class, we have a new student joining us today from Canada. Please introduce yourself,” my teacher, Miss Park, announced at the beginning of class. I waved from the front of the classroom, staring back at a not-so-amused audience. I wasn’t so disappointed, however, seeing as I wouldn’t have been so pumped, either. We were all at school, after all.

“Hello, everyone, I’m Hannah Lee, and I’m new here. I hope we can all do well this school year!” I greeted, wishing I was truly as enthusiastic as I sounded.

Mrs. Park nodded and directed me to my seat. The desks in the classroom were paired up in twos, and I was sat next to a very pretty girl who gave me a shy smile. Her name tag read “Sooyoung”.

“Hi,” I leaned over and whispered as the teacher continued on with her morning announcements. “I’m Hannah.”

The girl looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “Why do you speak Korean if you’re a foreigner?” she asked.

I crinkled my eyebrows together. “I am Korean,” I told her. Did the fact that I had an obviously Asian appearance not give it away? “My family speaks it in the home.”

“Can you read and write?” Sooyoung asked. “Sorry, I’ve never really spoken that much to foreigners before. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

Everything inside me yearned to judge this girl right off the bat, but I decided I had to play nice for the sake of it being my first day, and me not having any friends. “No, no, it’s cool. Yeah, I can read and write. My parents made sure that I’d never forget my heritage or whatever. That’s how come I got enrolled here and not in like, some foreigner school.”

Sooyoung shrugged. “Oh, yeah, okay.” She seemed unimpressed with me now that I was no longer some mysterious foreigner, and just some person with Korean parents, like everyone else in the room. “You’re not even mixed?”

“No,” I admitted. Talking to this girl automatically made me feel a lot less of a big deal already. Not that I was a big deal to begin with. She was really good for my Big Hannah Ego, actually. “Full Korean.”

“Me, too, but my parents gave me an informal English name, just in case I ever want to go abroad,” Sooyoung shared. “Joy.”

In Canada, Joy is usually a name used for little old ladies, but I wasn’t about to burst her bubble, especially because it looked like I would be spending the rest of my school year sitting next to this girl. “Cute,” I smiled, and turned back towards the teacher.

“Yeah,” Sooyoung said under her breath. She was still looking at me. “I agree.”

I snuck a second glance over at her from the corner of my eye and the corner of my mouth turned up. Maybe this girl was a lot more interesting than I had originally given her credit for.