The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley Page B

the infamous napping pillows—demonstrating how they slipped over the wrist for effortless comfort.
    “I adapt really well to places,” he told me. He had diligently worked on his Korean and could now navigate gracefully through restaurants and casual conversations. He ordered sweet-potato pizza for both of us. By this time, he’d spent a night at a Buddhist temple high in the mountains; he’d learned Taekwondo; on one harrowing evening at a fish market, he’d even forced himself to eat a live baby octopus, wrapped around his chopstick.
    Eric appreciated the weirdness of Korea and the warmth of Koreans. Really, the only problem was school. He had tried to keep his mind open, but he dreaded those days at Namsan, sitting for six hours with students too stressed—or exhausted—to talk for more than five minutes between classes, then taking the bus home alone.
    It wasn’t that Eric couldn’t be alone. In fact, he had a lot of experience with isolation. He’d spent years as a closeted gay teenager in America. He knew about loneliness.
    But he had discovered that the pressure to conform extended well beyond sexuality in Korea. Teenagers were in all kinds of closets, sometimes literally, locked into small, airless spaces, studying for the test. “The students I’ve talked to despise the system,” he said, shaking his head. “They absolutely loathe it.”
    Eric admired one part of the Korean system—the high expectations that everyone had for what kids could do. He was curious about the hagwons, where his classmates said they learned so much. However, he was learning that the top of the world could be a lonely place, and the important question was not just which kids lived there, but what they had gone through to get there.

chapter 4
a math problem

    From Pennsylvania to Poland: Tom outside his high school in Wroc ł aw.
    Five thousand miles away, Tom’s teacher asked him a question.
    It was his first day of school in Poland. He’d sat quietly in the back, trying to make himself small and unremarkable. But now she stared back at him, waiting. So he repeated the one sentence he knew by heart:
    Nie mówię po polsku. I don’t speak Polish.
    Then he smiled, the clueless exchange student. This tactic had worked well for him so far.
    Tom would turn eighteen in two weeks. He had a perpetual five o’clock shadow and dark eyes, the face of a young man hovering precariously atop a boy’s body. When he smiled, flashing the dimples he’d inherited from his mother, he looked at least three years younger. American teachers had accepted Tom’s excuses, generally speaking.
    Yet this teacher spoke back to him, repeating the question in English.
    “Could you please solve the problem?” She held out a piece ofchalk and motioned for Tom to come to the front of the room. It was math class, and she’d written a polynomial problem on the board.
    Tom got up, heart surging, and walked slowly to the board. The other twenty-two Polish students watched the American, wondering what would happen.
    The story of Poland, a symphony of suffering and redemption, will come later in this book. But, for now, suffice to say that Tom found himself in a brooding country with a complicated past, which was precisely why he’d wanted to live there.
    In America, Tom had lived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the bloodiest battle in the American Civil War. Some fifty-one thousand men were wounded or killed on the hills of Tom’s hometown. Thousands of tourists stalked the empty, silent battlefields each year, looking for relics or ghosts or a lingering sensation of some kind.
    However, since the 1800s, Gettysburg had become much less interesting, in Tom’s opinion. It was a rural village two hours and a world away from Washington, D.C. As a little boy, Tom had no interest in Union or Confederate toy soldiers, the kind sold by the sackful in the town souvenir shops. He played with World War II soldiers instead.
    As a teenager, Tom played the