[Student Voices] The Small Gestures that Make a Smile
Published: 16 Jun. 2025, 11:21
Jiwoo Park, North London Collegiate School Jeju
by Jiwoo Park, North London Collegiate School Jeju
When I arrived at Fay School in Southborough, Massachusetts, the air was filled with laughter and shouting, and there were small huddles of students moving around the campus. I was the new kid in a bustling school whose rhythm I did not know. It felt as though everybody had already found their place, and I was still looking for mine.
At my previous school, I had mixed with students from all over the world with different backgrounds and stories to tell. I was accustomed to negotiating conversations with those having different cultures, languages, and experiences. That was why I thought integrating into Fay would not be a problem. Well, Fay was nothing like my international school in Korea. The children at Fay had long known each other. Their friendships ran deep. I felt like the odd piece of a jigsaw puzzle that had been put together long ago.
During the first couple of days, I was invisible wherever I went. At lunch, I would sit alone, watching with envy as groups of friends laughed and teased one another. I tried to introduce myself to a few people, but the conversations were painfully forced.
“Oh, hey… hello? What’s your name?”
“Sorry. I’m busy right now.”
“Oh… okay, it’s fine…”
I was speaking a different language even when we were both using one common tongue. The more my heart cried to enter this school, the harder it became for me to understand how closed those doors were.
I spent a lot of time walking around the dorm, hoping things would soon grow better. The building seemed bitterly cold. The hush of the empty hallway was a painful reminder of my loneliness.
Then, one afternoon, I met Juho. He noticed me sitting alone in the common area and asked if I would like to join him and his friends. It felt like a lifeline in an ocean of faces whose names I didn’t know. As we laughed and told stories about our lives before Fay, I could feel the burden of isolation slowly lifting.
“Hey, if you’re not busy later,” Juho said, “come hang out in my room. Everybody is just chilling and playing games.”
Juho’s small actions made me feel like I belonged here. The next day, he approached me with a warm smile. Another day, he invited me for a casual hangout with his friends. Another time, during a stressful week, he popped in just to ask how I was doing.
These gestures of friendship gave me the strength to start reaching out and meeting other people. I was getting used to this new place more and more each day. Fay’s ambience, once so foreign and intimidating, was slowly feeling like home. I started making more friends, and the people who had once seemed so strange became my classmates and teammates.
Fay taught me that the smallest gestures—like a warm greeting, or an invitation to hang out—can make a world of difference. Sometimes it just takes one small thing to put you in a place where you belong.
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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