The Woman Who Slept Through Every Class and Still Got Her Cosmetology License — Don't Ask How" How North Koreans in America Make a Living — Real Stories, Part 4
Let me be very clear about something before we begin.
Jisun slept through most of cosmetology school. Her instructor gave her a nickname. Not "most improved." Not "most determined." The nickname was Sleeping Princess. As in — not the beautiful kind. As in — you are the single greatest sleeping champion this classroom has ever produced.
And yet.
She got the license.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let's back up.
Why Cosmetology? Why Not Just Go to Community College?
Jisun was thirty-one years old when she made the decision. Thirty-one, running on restaurant fumes, her body flashing red lights like a car that had been driven across the country without an oil change. She knew something had to change. The question was what.
I asked her the obvious question. "You could have gone to community college. You could have done so many things. Why cosmetology school specifically?"
She answered without hesitation, like she had thought about it a thousand times already.
"If I open my own salon, I can manage it completely by myself. No partners I have to depend on. No family members I need to bring in. And no inventory headaches — in a restaurant, the menu changes, the food changes, the suppliers change. In a salon? You buy your scissors. You buy your products. You do the work. It's yours."
It was, honestly, one of the clearest pieces of business logic I had ever heard from someone sitting across a coffee table in Massachusetts. This woman had been in America for just a couple of years, working double shifts in two restaurants, and she had already figured out her five-year plan.
The Schedule That Would Break a Normal Person
California requires 1,600 hours of cosmetology school to qualify for a license. Most people stretch that over two to three years.
Jisun did it in one year and three months.
Here is how her daily schedule looked during that period, and I want you to read this slowly so it fully lands:
8 AM to 4 PM — cosmetology school, six days a week. 5 PM to 2 AM — Korean BBQ restaurant, full shift.
Every single day. For over a year.
"Were you tired?" I asked.
She looked at me like I had just asked whether water was wet.
Welcome to American School, Where the Teachers Are Human
Cosmetology school was Jisun's first experience inside an American classroom. And it was, by her own description, a complete cultural earthquake.
In North Korea, she had gone through elementary school, middle school, high school, and two years of college. She knew exactly what school felt like. You stood up straight. You did not make mistakes. You brought your textbook every single day because forgetting it was not an option. You respected your teachers because your teachers were always right — not because anyone told you this explicitly, but because the air itself seemed to communicate it the moment you walked through the door.
"Every time I stood in front of a teacher," she told me, "I was already counting in my head. What did I do wrong? Did I misbehave? Did I forget something? I never once thought that a teacher could make a mistake. They were teachers. Of course they were right."
Then she walked into an American cosmetology school and watched a student crack a joke at the instructor.
And the instructor laughed.
"I realized," she said quietly, "this is what a freedom country actually feels like. Not in a big political way. Just — in a classroom. A student makes a joke. The teacher laughs. Nobody gets in trouble. That was freedom to me."
She could choose her own schedule. Come three days a week or five days a week — entirely up to her. No one controlled her time. No one was watching to make sure she conformed.
It was, she said, the first time in her life that school felt like something that belonged to her.
The Sleeping Princess of Room Whatever
There was, however, one small problem.
The English.
Jisun walked into that classroom with restaurant English. Napkin. Refill. To go. Medium rare. That was her entire vocabulary.
Cosmetology school, it turns out, does not care about any of those words. Cosmetology school wants to talk about fungus. Skin conditions. The scientific names of things that live on your scalp. Medical terminology that made her feel like she had accidentally enrolled in nursing school.
"The first time my instructor started talking," she said, "it sounded like a nurse at a hospital. I had no idea what any of it meant."
So she did the only reasonable thing available to her.
She went to sleep.
Not intentionally, at first. Just — the words stopped making sense, her brain stopped trying, and her body, which was running on approximately four hours of sleep per night, made an executive decision. Her instructor noticed. The whole class noticed. And thus was born the legend of the Sleeping Princess — not beautiful, but undefeated in the art of classroom napping.
"I probably learned nothing in that class," she admitted, with the particular laugh of someone who has made peace with an absurd memory.
And yet — somehow, eventually — 1,600 hours passed. Because time, unlike state board exams, does not care whether you are awake or asleep.
The Exam Situation: A Comedy in Three Acts
With 1,600 hours completed, Jisun now needed to pass the school's certificate exam.
First attempt: failed. Second attempt: barely. Third attempt: passed. Certificate obtained.
One mountain down. One enormous mountain remaining — the California State Board Exam. The one that actually gives you the license. The one that, she was told, even native English speakers find brutally difficult.
She went to Starbucks.
Every single morning, from 7 AM to 4 PM, before her evening restaurant shift. Two exam prep books, each half an inch thick, entirely in English. She tried using a translator app — this was 2012, no AI, just early translation technology that turned her Korean into something that resembled Korean the way a bad photocopy resembles the original. Technically related. Practically useless.
"Korean and English grammar are completely reversed," she explained. "The translator was as confused as I was."
So she made the decision that was either very brave or slightly unhinged, and possibly both.
She threw the translator away.
She sat at Starbucks every morning and read those two books over and over again in English. Pure English. Without understanding most of it. Just reading the words, letting them wash over her, trusting that somewhere in her brain something was being absorbed even when nothing felt like it was.
First state board attempt: failed.
She was not surprised. She was not devastated. She simply went back to Starbucks.
Back to Starbucks.
The Morning Everything Changed
The night before her second state board exam, Jisun didn't finish her restaurant shift until 3 AM. She went home, washed her face, looked in the mirror, and made a decision."
No makeup.
Not as a statement. Not as some act of radical self-confidence. Simply because — she told me, completely straight-faced — she was almost certain she was going to fail again, and she would just be coming straight back to Starbucks afterward anyway. Why waste the mascara?
She walked into the exam room 9am. The California cosmetology state board exam has 110 questions. You get exactly two hours. You need 70% to pass in 2012. Jisun had to answer all of it in English — a language she had learned one restaurant word at a time."She answered the questions in English she wasn't sure she understood. She walked out. She stood in front of the front desk.
The person behind the desk looked up and said she had passed.
"I need to take your photo for the license."
Jisun froze.
No makeup. Hair undone. Three hours of sleep. Fresh off a restaurant shift. And now — a photo. For an official government document. That she would display at her salon station for years.
"It was too late," she said, laughing so hard she could barely finish the sentence. "They just took it. That photo is on my license. Messy hair, no makeup, completely shocked face. That's the photo I show my clients every day at work."
She went back to the school to return her exam prep books to her instructor Julia.
Julia did not believe her.
"Even people who grew up speaking English struggle with that exam," Jisun told me. "And I passed it. The woman who slept through every class. The woman who didn't understand the English in the books she was reading. I passed it in two months."
She paused.
"Julia still looked shocked when I told her."
Honestly, Julia? Same.
Part 5 — Jisun finally opens her own salon. The dream she planned in a restaurant at 2 AM is about to become real. Coming soon — and trust me, you don't want to miss this one.
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