Please Look After Mom

by Kyung-Sook Shin

  A few days later, Mom called. “You weren’t like this before, but you’ve become cold. If your mother hangs up like that, you’re supposed to call her back. How could you dig in your heels?”

  It wasn’t that you had been stubborn; you hadn’t had time to think about it for that long. You would remember how Mom had hung up, angry, and think, I should give her a call, but because of one thing or another you would push calling her to the end of your list.

  “Are all educated people like this?” Mom snapped, and hung up.

  Around Full Moon Harvest, you went to your parents’ house and saw that there was a big doghouse next to the shed. On the floor of the doghouse was a soft layer of hay.

  Standing next to you on the hill, your mom started talking. “In October, while I was washing rice at the sink to make breakfast, someone kept tapping me on the back. When I looked around, nobody was there. It was like that for three whole days: I felt something tapping me, as if they were calling me, but nobody was there when I looked. It must have been the fourth day; as soon as I woke up, I went to the bathroom, and the dog was lying in front of the toilet. You got angry with me last year, saying that I was abusing the dog, but that dog had been wandering around the railroad tracks, covered with mange. I felt bad for him, so I brought him home and tied him up and gave him food. If you don’t tie him up, you don’t know where he’ll go, or whether someone’s going to catch him and eat him.… That day, he didn’t move. At first I thought he was sleeping. He didn’t move even when I nudged him. He was dead. He’d been eating well and wagging his tail the day before, but he was dead, and he looked peaceful. I don’t know how he got loose from the chain. At first he was all bones. He’d fattened up, and his coat was getting shiny. And he was so smart. He would catch moles.” Mom paused to sigh. “They say that if you take in a person he will betray you, and if you take in a dog he will pay you back. I think the dog went in my place.”

  This time you sighed.

  “Last spring, I donated money to a passing monk and he said that this year one member in our family would be gone. When I heard that, I was anxious. For an entire year I thought of that. I think death came to fetch me, but because I was washing rice to cook for myself every time, he took the dog instead.”

  “Mom, what are you talking about? How can you believe that, when you go to church?” You thought of the empty doghouse next to the shed, and the chain on the ground. You put an arm around Mom’s waist.

  “I dug a deep grave in the yard and buried him.”

  Your mom always did tell imaginative stories. On the night of an ancestral rite, Father’s sister and other aunts would come over with bowls of rice. It was when food was scarce, so they would all contribute. After the ancestral rites, your mom would fill the relatives’ bowls with food for them to take home. During the rites, the bowls of rice sat in a row nearby; afterward, Mom said that birds had flown in and perched on the rice, then left. If you didn’t believe her, she’d say, “I saw them! There were six birds. The birds are our ancestors, who came to eat!” The others laughed, but you thought you could see their footprints in the white rice. Once, Mom went to the fields in the early morning, bringing along a snack for later, but someone was there already, bent over and pulling weeds. When she asked who he was, he said he was passing by and stopped to pull weeds because there were so many. Mom and the stranger weeded together. She was grateful, so she shared the snack she had brought. They talked about this and that and weeded the field and went their separate ways when it got dark. When she came back from the field and told Father’s sister that she had weeded with the stranger, Father’s sister stiffened and asked what he looked like. “That used to be the owner of that field. He died of sunstroke one day while he was weeding the field.” You asked, “Mom, weren’t you scared to be in the field with a dead person all day?” But your mom replied nonchalantly, “I wasn’t scared. If I’d had to weed that field all by myself, it would have taken two or three days. So I’m just grateful he helped me.”

  After your visit, you noticed how your mom’s headaches seemed to be eating away at her. She quickly lost her outgoing personality and vivacity, and started to lie down more often. Your mom couldn’t even concentrate on card games with hundred-won bets, which were among the few joys in her life. And her senses became dull. One day, after she put a pot of rags on the gas range to bleach them, your mom crumpled on the floor of the kitchen and couldn’t get back up. All the water evaporated, the rags began to burn, and the kitchen was enveloped in smoke, but your mom couldn’t snap out of it. The house might have gone up in flames if a neighbor hadn’t come in to see what was going on, after catching a glimpse of the column of smoke in the air.

  Your sister, who has three kids, once asked you a question about your mom and her constant headaches: “Do you think Mom liked being in the kitchen?” Her voice was low, serious.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Somehow I don’t think she did.”

  Your sister, who was a pharmacist, opened her pharmacy while pregnant with her first child. Your sister-in-law babysat for the infant, but she lived far from the pharmacy. The baby lived with your sister-in-law for a while. Your sister, who’d always loved children, ran the pharmacy even though she could see her baby only once a week. It was wrenching to watch her part with her baby. There couldn’t have been a farewell as sorrowful as that. But your sister seemed to have more trouble with the situation than the baby. While he adapted to his life away from his mother fairly well, she drove him back to your sister-in-law’s at the end of each weekend crying, her tears drenching her hands as they gripped the steering wheel on the way home, and on Monday she stood in her pharmacy with her eyes swollen from weeping. It was so bad that you would say, “Do you really need to go to such lengths to run a pharmacy?” When your sister’s husband was to go to the United States for two years of training, your sister closed the pharmacy, which she had continued to run even after she had her second child. She said she thought living in America would be a good experience for the kids, and you thought, Yes, please take it easy and take some time off. She had never once taken time off after she got married. She had her third baby in the States and then returned. Now she had to cook for a family of five. Your sister said that once they ate two hundred croakers in one month.

  “Two hundred in one month? Did you only eat croakers?” you asked, and she said they had.

  This was before their things had arrived from America, and she wasn’t used to the new house yet, and the newborn was still breastfeeding, so there wasn’t time to go to the market. Her mother-in-law sent a chest of baby croakers, salted and gently dried, and they ate the whole thing in ten days. Your sister laughed and said, “I would make bean-sprout soup and broil a couple of fish, then make zucchini soup and fish.” When she asked her mother-in-law where she could get more, she found out that she could order them online. Because they had eaten through the first batch so quickly, she ordered two.

  “When the croakers came, I washed them and counted; there were two hundred. I was washing the fish so that I could wrap four or five of them in plastic and put them in the freezer, to make them easier to cook, and all of a sudden I wanted to fling them all on the floor,” your sister said calmly. “And I thought of Mom. I wondered, How did Mom feel all those years in that old-fashioned kitchen, cooking for our big family? Remember how much we ate? We had two small tables filled with food. Remember how big our rice pot was? And she had to pack all of our lunches, including the side dishes she made with whatever she could get in the countryside.… How did Mom get through it every day? Since Father was the eldest, there was always a relative or two staying with us. I don’t think Mom could have liked being in the kitchen at all.”

  You were caught off guard. You had never thought of Mom as separate from the kitchen. Mom was the kitchen and the kitchen was Mom. You never wondered, Did Mom like being in the kitchen?

  To earn money, your mom bred silkworms and brewed malt and helped make tofu. The
best way to make money was not to use it. Mom saved everything. Sometimes she would sell a ratty lamp, a worn ironing stone, or an old jar to people from out of town. They wanted the antiques that Mom was using, and even though she wasn’t attached to any of those things, she haggled with people over the price as if she had become a vendor. At first it would seem your mom was losing, but then she would get her way. After listening to them quietly, she’d say, “Then just give me this amount,” and they would scoff, “Who would buy that useless thing for so much?” Mom would retort, “Then why do you go around buying this stuff?” and take the lamp back. They would grumble, “You’d make a good merchant,” and give Mom what she asked for.

  Your mom never paid full price for anything. Most things she did herself, so her hands were always busy. She sewed and knitted, and she tilled the fields without rest. Mom’s fields were never empty. In the spring she planted potato seeds in furrows and planted lettuce and crown daisies and mallow and garlic chives and peppers and corn. Under the fence around the house she dug holes for zucchini, and in the field she planted beans. Mom was always growing sesame and mulberry leaves and cucumbers. She was either in the kitchen or in the fields or in the paddies. She plucked potatoes and yams and zucchini, and pulled cabbages and radishes from the ground. Mom’s labor showed that nothing would be reaped if the seeds were not sown. She paid only for things that could not be grown from seeds: ducklings or chicks that ran around in the yard in the spring, piglets that lived in the sty.

  One year the dog gave birth to nine puppies. After a month passed, Mom left two behind and put six in a basket and, because the basket was full, put the last one in your arms. “Follow me,” she said. The bus you and Mom rode was crowded with people who were going into town to sell things: sacks of dried pepper and sesame and black beans; baskets weighed down with just a few cabbages and radishes. Everyone huddled in a row at the township bus stop, and passersby stopped to strike a deal. You slipped the warm puppy you were holding into the basket with the other squirming puppies, squatted next to Mom, and waited for them to be sold. The puppies, which Mom had taken care of for a month, were plump and healthy, gentle, without any suspicion or hostility toward people. They wagged their tails at the people who gathered around the basket and licked their hands. Mom’s puppies sold faster than the radishes or the cabbages or the beans. When she sold the last one, she stood up and asked, “What do you want?” You held on to her hand and stared at her, your mom, who had rarely asked you such a thing.

  “I said, what do you want?”

  “A book!”

  “A book?”

  “Yeah, a book!”

  Mom acted as if she didn’t know what to do. She looked down at you for a minute and asked where they sold books. You took the lead and guided Mom to the bookstore at the entrance of the market, where five roads met. Mom didn’t go in. “Pick out just one,” she said, “and ask how much it is and come tell me.” Even when she bought rubber shoes, she made you try on each one, and always ended up paying less than what the shopkeeper wanted; but for a book she told you to pick one, as if she wasn’t going to haggle over the price. The bookstore suddenly felt like a prairie to you. You had no idea which book to choose. The reason you wanted a book was that you would read books your brothers brought home from school, but they always took the books away from you before you read them to the end. The school library had different books from the ones that Hyong-chol brought home. Books like Mrs. Sa Goes to the South or Biography of Shin Yun-bok. The book you chose, while Mom stood outside the bookstore, was Human, All Too Human. Mom, about to pay for a book that wasn’t a textbook for the first time in her life, looked down at the book you’d picked out.

  “Is this a book you need?”

  You nodded quickly, worried that she would change her mind. Actually, you didn’t know what this book was. It said that it was written by Nietzsche, but you didn’t know who that was. You’d just picked it because you liked the way the title sounded. Mom gave you the money for the book, the full price. On the bus, clasping the book against your chest instead of the puppy, you gazed out the window. You saw an old, stooped woman looking at passersby desperately, trying to sell the bowlful of sticky rice that remained in her rubber bin.

  On the mountain path where you could see your grandparents’ old village, your mom told you that her father, who drifted from town to town, digging for gold and coal, came home when she was three years old. He went to work at a construction site for a new train station and got in an accident. Villagers who came to tell Grandmother about the accident looked at Mom, running and playing in the yard, and said, “You’re laughing even though your father has died, you silly child.”

  “You remember that from when you were three?”

  “I do.”

  Your mom said she was sometimes resentful of her mom, your grandmother. “I’m sure she had to do everything herself as a widow, but she should have sent me to school. My brother went to a Japanese-run school, and my sister did, too, so why did she keep me at home? I lived in darkness, with no light, my entire life.…”

  Your mom finally agreed to come to Seoul with you if you promised not to tell Hyong-chol. Even when she left the house with you, she kept asking you to promise this.

  As you went from hospital to hospital to find the source of Mom’s headaches, a doctor told you something surprising: your mom had had a stroke a long time ago. A stroke? You said that had never happened. The doctor pointed at a spot on her brain scan and said it was evidence of a stroke. “How could she have had a stroke without even knowing about it?” The doctor said your mom would have known. Given how the blood was pooled there, she would have felt the shock. The doctor said Mom was in constant pain. That Mom’s body was in constant pain.

  “What do you mean, in constant pain? Mom has always been pretty healthy.”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s true,” the doctor said.

  You felt as if a nail hidden in your pocket had leaped out and ambushed you, stabbing the back of your hand. The doctor drained the blood pooled in Mom’s brain, but her headaches didn’t get better. One minute Mom would be talking, and the next minute she would be holding her head gingerly, as if it were a glass jar about to break, and she would have to go home and lie down on the wooden platform in the shed.

  “Mom, do you like being in the kitchen?” When you asked this once, your mom didn’t understand what you meant.

  “Did you like being in the kitchen? Did you like to cook?”

  Mom’s eyes held yours for a moment. “I don’t like or dislike the kitchen. I cooked because I had to. I had to stay in the kitchen so you could all eat and go to school. How could you only do what you like? There are things you have to do whether you like it or not.” Mom’s expression asked, What kind of question is that? And then she murmured, “If you only do what you like, who’s going to do what you don’t like?”

  “So—what—you liked it or not?”

  Mom looked around, as if she was going to tell you a secret, and whispered, “I broke jar lids several times.”

  “You broke jar lids?”

  “I couldn’t see an end to it. At least with farming, if you plant seeds in the spring you harvest them in the fall. If you plant spinach seeds, there is spinach; where you plant corn, there’s corn.… But there’s no beginning or end to kitchen work. You eat breakfast, then it’s lunch, and then it’s dinner, and when it’s bright again it’s breakfast again.… It might have been better if I could have made different side dishes, but since the same things were planted in the fields, I always made the same panchan. If you do that over and over, there are times when you get so sick of it. When the kitchen felt like a prison, I went out to the back and picked up the most misshapen jar lid and threw it as hard as I could at the wall. Aunt doesn’t know that I did that. If she did, she would say I was crazy, throwing jar lids around.”

  Your mom told you that she would buy a new lid within a few days to replace the one she broke. “So I wasted s
ome money. When I went to get the new lid, I thought it was so wasteful and felt terrible, but I couldn’t stop. The sound of the lid breaking was medicine to me. I felt free.” Your mom put a finger to her lips and said, “Shh,” in case someone could hear. “It’s the first time I’m telling this to anyone!” A mischievous grin hovered on her face. “If you don’t want to cook, you should try throwing a dish. Even if you’re thinking, Oh, what a waste, you’re going to feel so light. Of course, since you’re not married, you wouldn’t feel that way anyway.”

  Your mom let out a deep sigh. “But it was nice when you kids were growing up. Even when I was so busy that I didn’t have time to retie the towel on my head, when I watched you sitting around the table, eating, with your spoons making a racket in the bowls, I felt like there was nothing else I wanted in the world. You were all so easy. You dug in happily when I made a simple zucchini-and-bean-paste soup, and your faces lit up if I steamed some fish once in a while.… You were all such good eaters that when you were growing I was sometimes afraid. If I left a pot filled with boiled potatoes for your after-school snack, the pot would be empty when I came home. And there were days when I could see the rice in the jar in the cellar disappearing day by day, and times when the jar would be empty. When I went to the cellar to get some rice for dinner and my scoop scraped the bottom of the rice jar, my heart would sink: What am I going to feed my babies tomorrow morning? So in those days it wasn’t about whether I liked to be in the kitchen or not. If I made a big pot of rice and a smaller pot of soup, I didn’t think of how tired I was. I felt good that these were going into my babies’ mouths. Now, you probably can’t even imagine it, but in those days we were always worried that we would run out of food. We were all like that. The most important thing was eating and surviving.” Smiling, your mom told you that those days were the happiest in her life.