Karine Couillard had been the administrative and counseling section representative at the Canadian Embassy in South Korea for two years when Adam Zedman walked into her life. She had a variety of responsibilities, one of which included dealing with trainwrecks, those lowly Canadians, as she saw it, who had done something so incomprehensibly stupid and then expected their government to bail them out. Fortunately for these same people, Karine was great at what she did, and so often saved them from withering away in jail cells an ocean away from their families. People around the office would joke that Karine had bigger balls than the ambassador. Colleagues and embassy staffers called her the trainwrecker.
The afternoon Adam Zedman sauntered into the embassy’s foyer, Karine was busy putting together a plea for the courts to have leniency on a teacher who had recently been arrested and charged with drug possession. This was the only part of the job that made Karine feel she had made a mistake joining the Diplomatic Corps. The Canadian men she dealt with, and it was inevitably males whom she assisted in these situations, were often charged with crimes that made her skin crawl: drug trafficking, rape, aggravated assault, and, occasionally, murder. From her standpoint, she was always helping the wrong people.
“Ms. Couillard,” the receptionist, Jenny Kim, said. “You better come out and talk to someone.” Karine was cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder, typing up something on her computer when the call came.
“I’ll be right out,” she replied, knowing that request all too well by now.
She strode out from the second of two vault-like doors and asked the man what she could do for him. She didn’t introduce herself or extend a hand to shake. She was already in trainwrecker mode.
The person who stood in front of her was a tall, lanky young man. He wore a white T-shirt that he had not bothered to tuck into his ripped blue jeans. Even from a few feet away she could detect the faint trace of alcohol on his breath. “Thank freakin’ God it’s someone who can speak English,” the man said after jumping off the red couch. “I’m so bloody tired of dealing with Koreans who can barely put together a single sentence in English at my own bloody embassy.”
This immediately triggered an angry reaction from Karine. She had gone through 18 months of language training in Ottawa upon passing the Foreign Service examination, and knew firsthand how disparate the languages of Korean and English were. Adding to Karine’s irritation was the man’s behaviour. He was wiry, unable to stand still. If not for the past two years’ experience, she probably would have yelled at him by now and taken the risk of being reprimanded by her supervisor.
“What can I do for you, sir?” Karine said bluntly as she folded her arms. With her heels on, she was the same height as the man, so said this while looking him straight in the eye.
The man looked away. “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to speak with someone who’s gonna understand exactly what I say. I’m sure your English is okay, but what I need is a native English speaker.”
Karine bottled the indignation building inside her. “I am fluent in English,” she said, conscious of her slight accent for the first time in ages. “And I suggest you take a different tone before I ask you to leave the premises, sir.”
“Fine. But I need some answers.” Karine looked down and instinctively started tapping a foot. “Actually, I need some legal advice,” the man went on.
“Let me guess,” Karine replied at once. “You were fired from your hagwon and now you want to sue them for wrongful dismissal.”
“Look, my taxes pay your friggin’ salary, okay? I’m just as god damn Canadian as you are, you know.”
Oh, we’re nothing alike, Karine was thinking as she led the man by the elbow to the back area, cordoned off by a sliding door that would give them some privacy. She could tell this man was volatile and had to be sequestered from the others in the waiting area of the embassy. The door slid across with a swoosh. Karine instructed the man to have a seat at the table opposite the stacks of books and DVDs.
“I don’t need to sit,” he protested. “And I don’t need any of your attitude. I’m a Canadian citizen too, so it’d be nice to get some assistance in a situation like—”
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Karine snapped, pulling out a seat for the man to sit on. “I’m only going to consider helping you out if you take a seat and calm down. Is that clear?”
The man reluctantly threw himself into the chair, his legs sprayed out before him like he was tanning on a beach chair.
“Now,” Karine said slowly, placing one hand on the table for support. “What seems to be the problem?” This is his last chance, she told herself. One more blow up or rude remark and I’ll call security.
The man huffed and puffed, then said, “I wanna sue a clinic that performed surgery on me.”
“You want to sue a clinic that performed surgery on you.” Karine repeated each word slowly, in an unbelieving voice. Over the past two years she thought she had heard it all—English teachers arrested for drugs, trying to annul 48-hour marriages, asking for plane fare to return to Canada, begging for a job at the embassy, looking into visas for teaching illegally—but this was yet another first.
The man lifted his T-shirt above his head, turning his body around so Karine could see something on the blade of his shoulder. “You see this?”
“Please,” Karine interrupted, “put your shirt back on. I don’t need to—”
“No,” the man insisted, “you do need to see this. Trust me.”
On the right side of his shoulder blade Karine could vaguely make out two Chinese characters, but the skin around the area was so inflamed that she couldn’t even be sure of that.
The man caught sight of Karine’s reaction and smiled. “You see? Now you understand. Those assholes fucked up my tattoo removal.”
Karine was about to tell the man not to swear when he recanted. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to swear. But the thing is, those god damn Koreans screwed up the surgery so bad I could kill ’em.”
Karine took a deep breath and steadied herself. When the man continued, he explained that he had originally wanted to have two Chinese characters tattooed on his shoulder. They were supposed to mean “one love,” he said, but the person at the tattoo shop had got it wrong. One of the characters was not tattooed correctly, so the meaning of the characters was actually “love hurts.” The man went on to say that he tried to get the tattoo removed at a plastic surgery clinic yesterday and that they had messed that up, nearly tearing open his shoulder. “I’m so sick and tired of the freakin’ incompetence in this country and want to take legal action for once. I’m not getting screwed over here again,” he added with finality.
Karine found the situation amusing. She had to suppress a laugh as she considered the irony of this all. Lifting her chin a fraction, she asked what he thought the embassy could do for him.
“You guys need to find me a friggin’ lawyer,” he responded.
“Mr.—sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Adam Zedman.”
The name rang a bell for Karine, but she could not remember why. “Mr. Zedman, the embassy is not a legal clinic. We provide support for Canadians doing business in this country and assistance that falls under the guidelines as stipulated by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Your case, I’m sorry to say, is not covered by anything that we do here.”
“But those assholes nearly killed me! What, you don’t look out for our citizens anymore? What the hell kind of country am I from anyway?”
“What are you doing in this country by the way, Mr. Zedman?” Karine asked in a diplomatic tone of voice.
“I’m teaching.”
“At a school?”
“Privately. I’m here on a tourist visa.”
“So…you’re working illegally?” Karine let the question hang in the air a second before going on. “Look, I don’t need to tell you that your situation is precarious at best. Suing a Korean company as an illegal worker is only going to land you in more trouble.” The man’s chest heaved. Karine could tell he wanted to say something. “All I’m saying is that you might want to—”
“Why the hell do we pay taxes if we can’t get help when abroad?”
That’s it, Karine thought. The man had become belligerent. She was through with him.
“I tell you what, why don’t you write down your name, address and cell phone number for me here,” she said, sliding over a piece of paper and a pen, “and I’ll see what we can do for you here at the embassy.”
This seemed to mollify some of his fury. “Yeah, fine. Whatever,” he replied as he quickly scribbled down his contact information. Karine told him that she would get back to him as soon as possible.
Back in her office, Karine finished the rest of her coffee and tapped one nail against the glass pane covering her desk. It’s funny, she thought, but this is the one thing they never prepare you for in Ottawa when you sign on to be a diplomat. Sure, they tell you that you’ll be living in exotic locations around the world, even compensate your salary when you’re in “hard living” areas like Korea. But they never tell you that part of your job as an administrative and counseling section representative will be to soothe the errant egos of trainwreck Canadians who happen to be living in the same place you’ve been posted. Karine was trained in languages and in diplomacy, yet nothing had prepared her for the experience of dealing with the misfits of Canadian society who had ended up in Korea at the same time as her.
Karine picked up the piece of paper in her left hand and examined the handwriting on it. Not only does he speak English atrociously and with a brazen attitude, but he can’t even write properly. Not so different from the others, she sighed. What must Koreans think of us after running into people like Adam Zedman day after day? It’s a miracle they continue to allow Canadians into their country.
That is when Karine remembered why the name Adam Zedman rang a bell with her earlier. On two separate occasions in the past year his girlfriend, also a Canadian, had phoned the embassy’s 24-hour emergency service and woken her up. Both times her boyfriend had “disappeared” late at night, only to suddenly reappear the following day when the police had released him from a holding cell for disorderly public conduct.
Struck with an idea she had not considered until then, Karine picked up the phone, dialed information and asked for the Department of Immigration’s number. She remembered a Korean friend once telling her how reporting an illegal worker to Immigration not only got you a cash reward, but ensured the deportation of the person with a swiftness that would impress anyone who had ever worked in government.
A woman’s voice came on the line. “I’d like to report an illegal foreign worker,” Karine said in very passable Korean. “His name is Adam Zedman. He’s a Canadian teaching privately in Seoul.” She took a second to think of the next part in Korean. “He’s been here too long,” she went on a moment later, “and needs to go home. Right away.”
Karine would not attempt to claim the reward money. But for the first time since becoming the Canadian Embassy’s trainwrecker, she had done the right thing. Adam Zedman’s time in Korea was over, as it should have been for so many others like him.