The names have been changed to protect the innocent

You meet a lot of interesting people when you’ve been living overseas for as long as I have, which if you count this month is now 20 years and five months, not counting the two years I was stationed in Panama and subtracting the two months I was back in the States in 2006.

You meet people from all walks of life, some with colorful personalities others with a checkered past hoping to escape whatever ghosts or neuroses are after them. By and large though, most the people I have met, worked with, partied with and traveled with have been some genuine folks that I was glad to make their acquaintance.

Without question, many of the people we meet when we are living and working in another country oftentimes define who we are; other times these individuals make up the rich tapestry of this shared experience.

I first met Mike M. not long after I had arrived in Korea to teach English at what was then, back in 1990, one of the three top English language institutes in Seoul. I had been in country since early December and Mike arrived shortly thereafter. The school had four-week terms so there was always someone rotating in and rotating out. There were peak periods in winter and summer when university students were on vacation and had nothing better to do than spend those vacation days studying English. The rest of the year was relatively quiet, enrollment-wise and that’s when Mike arrived.

There were two teacher’s offices on the second floor and Mike ended up in the office I shared with around 15 other teachers. It was a bit cramped, especially before morning and evening conversation classes with everyone hustling to get lesson plans done and copies made before those classes started and all the more hectic during the last week of the term. That’s when I met Mike, during the last hectic week of the term while I was getting ready to go to class. All new teachers had a week of orientation before they started teaching and Mike was waiting for a teacher to observe that teacher’s class.

We didn’t have much time to talk then, but when we had the chance later, I found out he was an Asian old hat courtesy of Uncle Sam and the draft that sent him to Vietnam in the late 60s. After his tour of duty in Nam, he bounced around Asia for awhile, went back to the States got a college degree and bounced right back to Asia teaching English in Taiwan, Thailand, and eventually Korea.