Kids Gotta Learn

(that the whale dies)

For 2025, Melanie Jennings and I are letting readers eavesdrop on our bookish correspondence. For May, I tell her about how I traumatized a bunch of five-year-olds.

Dear Melanie,

A truth: When I was twenty-three, I couldn’t find a job. I was dogged by the same flatlined economy that I first met as a teenager.

A second truth: When I was twenty-three, I was free. I moved to South Korea with $200 and a backpack full of journals and books, including the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges and The Art of Fielding, a homoerotic college baseball story that no one talks about nowadays, but that I liked very much. Hot tubs and the yips. Also, whales and Herman Melville.

It was a lonely, jet-lagged first week. The Korean families had gone on holiday to their ancestral homes; the foreign teachers were vacationing in Thailand. I survived on plums, banana milk, and dried seaweed from 7/11. For several days in a row, I called my parents on Skype and cried.

But twenty-three year olds are like cats. I landed on my feet. I found friends and favorite restaurants. I wandered my neighborhood for hours on foot, writing down landmarks in a tiny blue notebook so I could find my way home again. I taught kindergarten, and I’d never earned so much money in my life. Plus, I loved my students and they loved me. When I walked past their chair, they would grab and kiss my hands.

As a teacher, my strategy was mainly to share things I liked. I was getting into opera, aka listening to Turandot over and over. So, I made a project based around a short movie that I only dimly remembered. “Willie the Operatic Whale.” We watched a few minutes every day and my students would write about it and draw pictures in hand-made books. It took us about two weeks and 90% of the movie for me to be struck by a nagging feeling . . .

The main character was a whale. A rare, magnificent, innocent creature – and he could sing like the dickens. According to the laws of fiction, such a creature is doomed. Think of the Forest Spirit in Princess Mononoke, or Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. It’s been a long time since I read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but Prince Myshkin is of this type, and so is Edward in Edward Scissorhands. Maybe even the natural-born savage John in Brave New World. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Willie the Operatic Whale” opens with rumors in the press. Sailors hear a mysterious singing voice. A whale! The Grand Opera’s Impresario, Tetti-Tatti, becomes convinced that Willie can’t sing at all; that he’s swallowed an opera singer instead. He takes a boat and a team of harpoon-wielding sailors out to sea.

When Whitey the seagull reads about Tetti-Tatti’s search, he tells Willie straight away. To his adoring audience of pelicans and seals, Willie sings, “Goodbye, my friends! I’m off to be discovered!”

Willie rolls up on Tetti-Tatti’s boat. Soon, very soon, he could be singing to the whole world! He launches into an aria. “Figaro, figaro, figaro!” The sailors tap their toes, bounce along to the melody, and yell, Bravo!

Willie’s cooking with gas. The sailors and Whitey the seagull cheer him on. The fantastic future unscrolls: on stage, Willie becomes Pagliacci in white-face makeup, the lover of a tiny human woman in Tristan und Isolde, and the mustachioed devil Mefistofele himself.

The sailors are enchanted. Transported. They don’t see Tetti-Tatti take aim with the harpoon until it’s too late.

Willie, singing his heart out, is pierced.

The sky turns red and stormy. Terrified and in pain, Willie leaps and dives, leaps and dives . . .

My kindergartners’ jaws fall to the floor.

The water stills. The rattling, rushing wind exhales. The red sky turns blue.

The children are dead silent.

The film’s narrator pipes up, telling us:

Now, Willie will never sing at the Met.

Whitey the seagull stands alone, his head bowed low. It’s all his fault. The narrator goes on:

And you, faithful little friend, don’t be too sad. Because miracles never really die. . . .

I click off the classroom television. My student Alice is first to break the silence. “Liz Teacher?”

“Yes?”

“Willie not really die? Not really?”

“No,” I say. “He really die.”

“Really?” Alice quizzes. She’s not sure she wants to let me get away with this.

“Really,” I say.

Two girls start to cry, but not Alice. She blinks at me, assessing me.

“Let’s write and draw in our opera books,” I say. I walk around the tables where my tiny students sit in their tiny chairs. One girl, Lucy, is an amazing artist. The Muse is upon her now. Crayon in chubby hand, she draws Willie in his death throes. Her fingers go white at the knuckles. She’s capturing it all, in violent color: love, murder, passion, OPERA! What the animation implies by panning from red water to blue sky, she portrays with the fearlessness of a Russian dissident. Willie floats flat on his back, with big Xs for eyes.

“Liz Teacher,” asks one of the boys. “How do you spell ‘killed’?”

One of my fellow foreign teachers in Korea was a blonde-and-blue-eyed Canadian named Alison. She’d annoyed Robert Munsch at a reading by dressing up as the Paper Bag Princess, stealing the kids’ hearts and Munsch’s thunder in one fell swoop. When things went wrong, Alison would shrug and say, “Kids gotta learn.”

Last night, I finished How Do You Live?, a Japanese children’s novel of ethics and philosophy. It’s the book that inspired Hayao Miyazaki’s last film, The Boy and the Heron. Miyazaki loves so many things that I love – birds, rocks, journeys through time, pregnant women; I was curious to meet this novel that had shaped his whole way of being.

The book’s plot is slight, but its waters run deep. A boy named Copper writes letters back and forth with his uncle. They talk through science, philosophy, ethics, and how to deal with regret. (I learned a great deal about gravity and Napoleon.) The most painful part of reading How Do You Live? was foreknowledge. I’m in 2025; Copper and his uncle are in 1935. When Copper realizes that all people across the world are tied together in the same web, he’s ecstatic, but I know that in five years, Japan will bomb Pearl Harbor. Cooper, his uncle, his friends, the bold neighborhood girl who wears trousers – the war is waiting to devour them.

It’s like in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. Every page we turn, we bring the fateful end closer. By reading, we make the beheading happen. If I hadn’t realized Willie the Operatic Whale was going to die, a few moments before he did die, in front of all my Korean kindergartners . . . maybe he wouldn’t have? Maybe I could have lived in such a way that I witnessed the miracle without seeing its defeat. Kids gotta learn that their American teacher does not have a good explanation for people like Tetti-Tatti.

I read a George Saunders story ages ago where the main character, a mom, sends a loving, healing beam of light out from her chest. I think about this story when I’m watching basketball. I’m a Knicks fan. It connects me to the city, and also to the bros, whose companionship I relish. Men on the street give me dabs when I wear my jersey, and I in turn share my unfounded opinions on Coach Thibs’s love life.

Mel, you may not know this, being that you’re in Portugal eating local cheese and taking long walks amongst the dappled wildflowers, but we’re smack dab in the NBA playoffs. The Knicks haven’t won a championship since 1973, and we had a rocky start, trading wins and losses with the Detroit Pistons until Game 6. It went like this:

We were losing by two points.

10 seconds left.

Our captain Jalen Brunson gets the ball.

4.3 seconds.

I send out my beam of light.

Jalen shoots from the three-point line.

Swish!

On Monday, we’re playing the Celtics on our home turf. I’ll be there at Madison Square Garden, feeling like my heart is about to explode whenever Jalen hits the three.

People are happy to teach kids disappointment. Don’t aim too high. Be modest. Do what you love as a hobby, but don’t believe in yourself too hard, or that makes you a fool. I learned that lesson well – but now I’ve unlearned it. I feel like, I’m back, baby! Back to believing. Back to the beam of light!

Having to be Tetti-Tatti the skeptical beauty-killer is a drag, but being the sailors is a gift. They met someone miraculous at sea, and had the sense to drop everything and witness. I know how an opera ends, which is, perhaps, why Willie had to die . . . but I’m still learning about basketball. And myself, and my family. And you!

Anything can happen.

Happy May, happy miracle, and LET’S GO KNICKS!

Love,

Liz

Do you know someone victimized by opera? Or someone who inflicts opera upon others, as I do? Please share, subscribe, comment, or buy me a coffee!