There’s a reason why I think highly of him. It was sometime around June, the last stretch of the monsoon season, in my freshman year. Every school has problems, but our school was rife with bullying. The cliques divided severely. The male and female students were segregated in our school, but the student body was a mix of the rich students from the newly built luxury apartment district and the pre-existing open-market merchants’ children.

One fateful day I was late for school, so I ran into the building with my skirt fluttering behind me. Entering the classroom, I let out the sigh of relief because I didn’t see any hall monitors or student-conduct-enforcement teachers. But the vibe was weird. Everybody was pacing in and out of the classroom, whispering about something.

“What’s going on?”

“Well …” The girl who sat next to me was a well-connected delinquent social butterfly. She said Jo Yonguk, a freshman, killed himself by jumping from an apartment building, and the story was appalling. His classmates liked to bully the introverted Yonguk, ostracizing him from the rest of the class, physically bullying him, until one day they said they would stop bullying him if he performed a task they ordered: shoplifting three bottles of imported liquor from the megamart Yonguk’s mother worked at. Yonguk was caught stealing those bottles and his mother got fired. That night, Yonguk’s sister blamed him and mocked him for the situation. In response, Yonguk stabbed her multiple times with a kitchen knife and proceeded to throw himself off from the top of the apartment building. The school tried to keep it hush-hush and let the whole thing blow over. But my art teacher, Gwangho Lee, made it his personal mission to call out the bullies and to put them through due process. All the students watched from the classroom windows, nearly spilling out, as the parents of those bullies—a businessman with connections to a school board member and a school commissioner were among them—came to get their bratty children. There was a rumor about the art teacher being the only person who touched Yonguk’s dead body. We all knew that two of the bullies who were expelled moved on to another school just fine, but we decided not to tell the art teacher.