Red Mask Lady

All of the adults were late today. It continues to get more and more annoying when they don't try, especially when they waste my time! Grace talked about being "under the weather"—she knows a lot of idioms but always uses them slightly wrong. Then she said that being with us young people gives her energy. That's sort of pitiful.

I went to the bank to make sure I'd gotten paid—yes, but some strange amount about $150 less than I think it should have been. Mr. Kim wasn't in a good mood today, what with having gone to a funeral and dealing with communicating with the new teachers, so it's best to wait to talk to him about it. Don't they keep records?!

Today all the kids were talking about the "Red Mask Lady." Apparently it's a rumor going around their school. The 2 PM littlest kids didn't say anything to me, but at 3 they were discussing it, and tried to explain it to me. I didn't understand much, so when Cindy suddenly started to cry, I was confused. She seemed genuinely terrified. At that point I told Jenny (who was leading most of it) to not say another word about it, especially as Ally (rather more vocal than Cindy) told me, "Teacher, I'm scared" and looked like she might start crying, too. I spent a few minutes trying to explain that it was just a story and not real. Jenny tried to get it started again, but I wouldn't let her. It was like she got some perverse pleasure out of terrifying the other children.

After that class I asked Sandra if she knew what was up with the Red Mask Lady story. She knew a little more than me, but still didn't completely understand. Her students had been obsessed with it, too. She asked Jane about the story, and Jane asked another teacher (in Korean) about it, heard a response, but COMPLETELY IGNORED US. Sandra asked her again, and she WALKED AWAY WITHOUT ANSWERING. I must say, that's one teacher that I wouldn't mind if she left--if she doesn't have the English ability to talk with us, then she SHOULDN'T BE TEACHING ENGLISH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, the story, told to Sandra by one of her advanced classes, then she told to me: the Red Mask Lady is Japanese. She had plastic surgery to make her mouth wider but it went horribly wrong and she ended up looking bad. Shortly afterwards she died, and now her ghost roams the earth. She's 3 meters (nearly 10 feet) tall yet oddly is afraid of heights. She wears a mask soaked red with her blood to hide her distorted face. She only visits girls who live on the 1st or 2nd floors in the 2nd or 4th apartments on that floor. She asks "Am I beautiful?" and if the person says yes, she kills them, if they say no, she kills them (both after cutting their mouths wider--different answers mean she cuts it just a little bit or from ear to ear). The only way to stay alive is to say, "You're neither beautiful or ugly." We weren't sure if she would then still cut the person's mouth wider while leaving them alive, or leave them without doing anything. May 4 is supposedly her birthday. The kids swear that a couple of girls have already been killed and that it has even been on the news.