The day I thought 9/11 might cancel my college entrance exam

Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, I still think about the distance between witnessing a catastrophe and living through one.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was a high school senior in Korea. On the television in our classroom, black smoke was rising from the World Trade Center. Then, another plane struck the other tower. Not long afterward, the buildings came down.

I was frightened and wondered whether this could lead to war. But then I had another thought: "Maybe they’ll cancel the college entrance exam."

In about two months, I was supposed to take Korea’s College Scholastic Ability Test, or "suneung" — the high-stakes national exam that plays an enormous role in university admissions.

America was very far away. The suneung was very close.

The exam was not canceled. The next day, I went back to school and solved more math problems. Two months later, I took it as scheduled.

When the television was turned off, my workbook was still there.

A few years later, after completing my mandatory military service and returning to university, I met an American exchange student named Timothy. He was from New York. I learned that he had lost a relative and a friend on Sept. 11.

I did not know what to say. My mind returned to that classroom and to the thought I had had while watching the towers fall. I felt embarrassed by my 18-year-old self.

Years later, while watching Stephen Daldry’s "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," about a boy whose father dies on Sept. 11, I thought of Timothy again. What stayed with me was not the scale of the attack but what happens to ordinary time after a person is gone.

In 2021, I visited the 9/11 Memorial in New York. Where the Twin Towers had stood were two enormous reflecting pools. Around them were names.

In 2001, the news reports I watched in Korea had given us numbers. At the memorial, what I noticed were names.

I did not know the names of Timothy’s relative or friend, or where they might be. I did not try to find them.

As water fell into square voids, I thought about ordinary things I had once considered dependable: going to school and returning home, taking the same route the next morning, assuming that something written on next month’s calendar would still be there when the date arrived.

The suneung had been one of those things.

For years, I was ashamed that my younger self could watch thousands of people dying and think about an exam. Only much later did I understand something else: I had assumed there would be a two months later.

I expected the suneung to arrive on schedule. Even as I watched buildings collapse, it did not occur to me that my own calendar might simply stop.

This does not make my younger self more admirable. It tells me where I stood. I could watch a catastrophe on television, be shaken by it and then return to my own life.

For those who were not directly affected, life produces its next obligations. People go to work. They sit for exams. They make plans for the following week.

That is what I did in 2001.

But the fact that my time resumed its ordinary course did not mean everyone else’s did.

That day, there was a television at the front of my classroom. On my desk were problems I still had to solve. When the news was over, I turned my attention back to them.

I had an exam to take two months later.

A professional educator in Seoul, Park Myung-kwan examines the intersection of humanities and modern education.