Story #3 - How Do You Say it in English?

“So, what did you do last weekend?”

In broken English, one of the students in the ESL class I taught in Los Angeles said he had flown to New York to “hook up with chicks.”

My famous Japanese pop-star student was doing a poor job of concealing his true identity.

Jin Akanishi of KAT-TUN - the Japanese equivalent to boy bands like *NSYNC or Backstreet Boys – took a break from the pop-star life to learn English. Within weeks, Japanese journalists had infiltrated our school, posing as students, for an exclusive story on Jin. Needless to say, his studies were short-lived.

Story #2 - How to Spot a Bad Apple

“It was a bad night,” he said, pacing back and forth across the room.

“I left the party and headed straight for 7-Eleven. I saw a homeless guy outside and bought him a bag of chips to be nice, but he threw it against the wall and said he didn’t need my ‘fucking handout.’

“I was fuming! I screamed that I was going to go home, change and come back to beat him up.

“I went back to the store and couldn’t find the guy. He must’ve been scared. So I tore up his cardboard house so he’d remember me.”

Story #1 - The Afterhours Commitment

It was always a trek to go to Tokyo since it required taking three trains and took two hours. When you went at night, you just knew you’d be going for the long haul since the trains stopped running from midnight to 5 a.m. This time, we went to celebrate our friend’s birthday at a club, but he left us early for a cute girl he met on the train. The DJ invited us over to a gritty afterhours club where the best breakdancers in the city danced to breakbeats and everyone sat in a circle around them until sunrise.