Mr. Simon and Mrs. Huang's professional relationship was checkered, increasingly marred by her fondness for the thing Mr. Simon did not wish to discuss and her dislike of letting him do his own business exactly how he liked. It had not started well, in any case—some years ago, long before the C.R.A.P. committee had commandeered Mr. Simon's free time and faux-communism reigned supreme, Mrs. Huang had dropped a slice of chocolate cake on Mr. Simon's shoe. She apologized copiously, but left Mr. Simon to scrub off buttercream with a damp paper towel.

The slice of chocolate cake Mrs. Huang wielded today was fortunately nested securely on her plate and in no danger of slipping, even as she enthusiastically chattered to an increasingly bored Mr. Simon:

"Paul," she began (Mr. Simon hated being called by his first name because of the Simon & Garfunkel jokes), "you should have gone to homecoming last week! You miss out on all the fun, no wonder why you're so grumpy all the time. Seeing Frank and Juliet dance that beautiful tango would have cheered you up—don't worry, I already sent you a link."

"Cindy," Mr. Simon said, returning the favor, "has it ever occurred to you that maybe I just don't care too much about my students' personal lives? There are some I'm partial to, I'll admit. I ask them about their tennis games, I congratulate them on winning awards, I even played chess against one of my kids to see how badly I'd lose. At some point you seem to have adopted the notion that caring about students means you need to infiltrate every tiny facet of their personalities to see what makes them tick. That's weird, you know. They're none of my business, just like what I do for fun is none of theirs."

"How do I put this? You are a disappointment. No, that's not the right word—you're depressed."

"Still not the right word, Cindy, but I appreciate your considering my feelings," Mr. Simon said pensively, stabbing his cake repeatedly with his fork.

"You know what I mean, Paul. Has it ever occurred to you that you can derive pleasure from the same things your students do? Small things you see outside to cheer you up a little. I saw a cute bird, the other day, maybe a starling that was hopping along the concrete outside our rooms. An innocent starling, who knows it shouldn't be there and should be in the woods with its other starling friends, but still is having a fun time sightseeing in what must appear to be a very strange, unnatural place. That was good for a day. The tango was one of those things as well—some of my appreciation was certainly pride, I admit, but seeing that talent, that honed drive, that beauty, was nice too. Just because we're older than them doesn't make us any less human."

"What has the world come to, Cindy, where the highlight of going to work is seeing a little bird outside? All around us there's oppression. The caste system sucks, foremost, and all I see is that the students who were already doing just fine keep doing exactly what they're doing while those who struggle either crawl themselves out of their pit or give up. We're on top, you see? We're the ones who have the luxury of laughing at songs and dances, or eating nice food, or doing whatever else. It doesn't matter if for 90% of students their daily lives are about the same if they're being forced into it. You should know this, right? Communism? Mao Zedong? Do those ring a bell?"

"My parents shoveled manure in Mongolia because of Mao Zedong. You will have to forgive my bluntness, but this is nothing in comparison. We have it easy. Students show up at 8:00, leave at 3:15, and for all those other hours live happy lives. Nobody is being woken up in the middle of the night and pulled onto a train simply because they taught literature or owned a microscope."

"First they came for the—"

"Yeah, I know, I know," Mrs. Huang interrupted with a rarely visible tinge of irritation.

"While your standards may be lower for what constitutes a gross betrayal of trust or a violation of First Amendment rights, mine rest squarely in the realm of the sane. And that tells me that I'm perfectly entitled to be a sourpuss and not do all these fun things out of principle." Mr. Simon stalked off in search of a more welcoming ear, leaving Mrs. Huang to stare at the clock and eat her cake in silence. Perhaps this was the ideological suppression Mr. Simon was complaining about, losing the right to be happy, but in that case, wasn't he the perpetrator? She'd have to ask Juliet after class; no matter how frustrating her coworkers could be, she could always trust her students to do the right thing.

Discussion Questions:

Mrs. Huang and Mr. Simon are invested in their students in different ways, Mr. Simon mentoring Madeline and Mrs. Huang trying to set up Frank and Juliet; given what we've seen at Heller, is students' behavior really none of their business?

Is Mrs. Huang a hypocrite talking about her parents' history and still backing up Frank and Juliet?

What cases have there been of students doing the right thing, as Mrs. Huang claims?