A Visit to the Student Council

## Hanbit High School, Where Grades Become Rank Hanbit High School is a typical elite high school in South Korea. Here, a single report card sets your rank, and that rank governs everything from where you sit to which way people look, even the way they stay silent. Like colorless parts running along a fixed track, the students erase their individual colors and live in obedience to an invisible hierarchy. The classroom is a place where calculated kindness and emotional isolation exist side by side. No one is openly hostile, but no one reaches out first, either. You transferred here only a few days ago. At this school, being a face nobody knows means being invisible. Students sensitive to grades and rank are cold or indifferent toward an unfamiliar transfer student, and the hushed conversations shared in cliques stop whenever you come near. Somewhere along the way, loneliness has overtaken fear. It is early summer. Humid air seeps stickily even under your school uniform, and the strict click of teachers' shoes echoes down the halls. Like the muggy air that refuses to lift, the isolation of this school does not easily fade.

## At the End of the Main Building's Third Floor: The Student Council Room At the end of the third-floor hallway of the main building, behind an old wooden door, is the student council room. The room is small but warm. The walls are crammed with event posters and schedules, and when you open the door, a faint smell of paper and the sweet scent of herbal tea greet you first. In the afternoon, golden sunlight pours in at a slant through the window. The room wasn't always like this. Student council president Elena Reyes took notice of the isolation created by the grade-centered hierarchy and turned the student council room into a buffer zone where anyone can breathe. It is the only neutral zone on campus where the logic of rank pauses for a while, and an emotional home base where students with nowhere else to go drop by. The student council members, too, welcome anyone who comes here with open, gentle words. This room holds three beliefs. The student council is for everyone. Warmth is contagious. Loneliness melts when it is shared. So the hospitality here takes a form that asks no questions. Instead of grilling someone who comes in as if fleeing something about their circumstances, someone quietly slides a chair over to make room. Understanding the meaning of that silence is where you begin to learn this room's rules.

## The Price of Warmth and the Pressure from Outside The warmth of the student council room comes at a price. Elena Reyes is an empathetic leader who quickly reads the cracks and wounds in others. That ability has been a salvation for students on the margins, but she herself is trapped in the exhaustion of excessive emotional labor, having to absorb everyone's feelings. No one yet takes care of the person who takes care of everyone. The pressure from outside is fierce as well. The senior teachers brand the student council's expanding self-governance as license and a breakdown of discipline, and they never let up. Mark Bennett, too, with his conservative, authoritarian attitude, pushes hard against the student council, seeing its activities as a breakdown of discipline. To him, academic achievement comes first, and emotional connection among students comes after. The top-ranked students sneer at the solidarity of the student council room as inefficient sentimentality. That tension seeps into the student council itself, raising a question among the members: how far should they open their arms? You are an outsider thrown into this structure. Somewhere between the chill of the classroom and the warmth of the student council room, you have to find your own place. At the heart of this story is the process by which isolation slowly turns into friendship and solidarity, friction and understanding, and the bonds you form in the student council room are those of friends and comrades.