Please Look After Mom

by Kyung-Sook Shin

  He stands in front of the closed office and studies the building. Mom couldn’t have come here. If she could figure out how to get here, she could have gone to one of her children’s places. The woman who said she had seen his mom here remembered her because of her eyes. She said his mom was wearing blue plastic sandals. Blue plastic sandals. He remembers just now that the shoes Mom had on when she went missing were low-heeled beige sandals. Father had told him. But the woman who had told him that Mom’s sandals had cut into her foot because she had walked so far had definitely said that they were blue. He peers into the office, then looks around the streets leading to Posong Girls’ High School and Eunsong Church.

  Does the night duty room still exist in that office?

  That night duty room was where he slept next to Mom all those years ago, sharing a blanket. Next to the woman who had boarded the Seoul-bound train without a plan, to bring a graduation certificate to her son. That must have been the last time he had lain next to Mom like that. A chilly draft seeped in, in waves from the wall facing the street. “I can fall asleep better if I’m next to the wall,” Mom said, and switched sides with him. “It’s drafty,” he said, and got up to stack his bag and books next to the wall, to block out the wind. He piled the clothes he had been wearing that day next to the wall, too. “It’s fine,” Mom said, pulling him by the hand. “Go to bed; you have to get up for work tomorrow.”

  “How’s your first taste of Seoul?” he asked, looking up at the ceiling, lying next to his mom.

  “Nothing special,” Mom said, and laughed. She turned to look at him, and started to talk of times gone by. “You’re my first child. This isn’t the only thing that you got me to do for the first time. Everything you do is a new world for me. You got me to do everything for the first time. You were the first who made my belly swollen, and the first to breastfeed. I was your age when I had you. When I saw your red, sweaty face, eyes shut, for the first time … People say that when they have their first child they’re surprised and happy, but I think I was sad. Did I really have this baby? What do I do now? I was so afraid that at first I couldn’t even touch your squirmy little fingers. You were holding those tiny hands in such tight fists. If I opened your fists up one finger at a time, you smiled. They were so small that I thought, If I keep touching them they might disappear. Because I didn’t know anything. I got married at seventeen, and when I didn’t get pregnant until I was nineteen, Aunt kept saying I probably wouldn’t be able to have children, so when I found out I was pregnant with you, the first thing I thought was, Now I don’t have to hear that from her—that was what made me the most excited. Later, I was happy to see your fingers and toes grow every day. When I was tired, I went over to you and opened your fingers. Touched your toes. When I did that, I felt energized. When I first put shoes on you, I was really excited. When you toddled over to me, I laughed so much; even if someone had spilled out a heap of gold and silver and jewels in front of me, I wouldn’t have laughed like that. And how do you think I felt when I sent you to school? When I pinned your name tag and a handkerchief on your chest, I felt so grown up. How can I compare the happiness I got watching your legs get thicker with anything else? Every day, I sang, Grow and grow, my baby. And then, one day, you were bigger than me.”

  He gazed at Mom as the words spilled out like a confession. She rolled over onto her side to face him and stroked his hair. “Even though I said, ‘I hope you grow tall and big,’ when you got bigger than me I was scared, even though you were my child.”

  He cleared his throat and turned to stare at the ceiling again, to hide his watery eyes.

  “Unlike other children, you didn’t need me to tell you anything. You did everything by yourself. You are handsome, and you were good in school. I’m so proud, and sometimes I’m amazed that you came from me.… If it weren’t for you, when would I have the chance to come to Seoul?”

  He resolved then that he would earn a lot of money so that when Mom came back to this city she would be able to sleep in a warm place. That he wouldn’t allow her to sleep in the cold again. Some time passed. In a low voice, Mom said, “Hyong-chol.” He heard her voice from far away, half asleep. Mom reached out and stroked his head. She sat up and looked over his sleeping figure and touched his forehead. “I’m sorry.” Mom quickly took her hand away to wipe her tears, but they dropped on his face.

  When he woke up at dawn, his mom was sweeping the floor of the office. He tried to stop her, but Mom said, “I might as well, I’m not doing anything,” and, as if she would be punished if she weren’t doing anything, washed the floor with a wet mop and thoroughly cleaned the employees’ desks. Mom’s breath was visible, and the top of her swollen foot was pushing against her blue sandal. As they waited for the nearby bean-sprout-soup place to open so they could eat breakfast, Mom’s hands made the office gleam.

  This house is still here. His eyes grow wide. He has been poking around the narrow alleys filled with parked cars, looking for Mom. Now, as the sun hangs low in the sky, he finds himself in front of the house where he rented a room thirty years ago. He reaches out to touch the gate, amazed. The sharp arrowlike steel spikes on top of the gate are still there, the same as thirty years ago. The woman who once loved him but ended up leaving him would sometimes hang a plastic bag filled with Chinese buns on the gate when he wasn’t there. All the other houses nearby have been converted to townhouses or studio apartments.

  He reads the ad posted on the gate:

  100,000 WON PER MONTH,

  WITH A DEPOSIT OF 10 MILLION WON.

  150,000 WON PER MONTH POSSIBLE

  WITH A DEPOSIT OF 5 MILLION WON.

  8 pyong, standard sink, shower in bathroom.

  Close to Namsan, good for exercising.

  Can get to Kangnam in 20 minutes, Chongno in 10 minutes.

  Cons: Small bathroom. You’re not going to live in it.

  It’s probably hard to find something this cheap in Yongsan.

  The reason I’m moving: I got a car and need a parking

  space. Please text or e-mail. I’m renting the room

  myself to save on broker fees.

  Having read even the cell-phone number and the e-mail address, he pushes the gate slowly. The gate opens, just as it did thirty years ago. He looks inside. A U-shaped house, the same as thirty years ago, the door to each unit facing the courtyard. The door of the unit he used to live in has a padlock on it.

  “Anyone home?” he calls out, and two or three doors open.

  Two young women with short hair and two boys around seventeen look at him. He steps into the courtyard.

  “Have you seen this person?” He shows the flyer to the young women first, then quickly hands one to the boys, who are about to shut their door. There are two girls around the same age peering out from inside the boys’ room. The boys, thinking he’s looking into their room, bang the door shut. The outside looks the same as thirty years ago, but each unit has become a studio. The owners must have renovated, creating one space, combining the kitchen and the room. He can see a sink in the corner of the women’s unit.

  “No,” the young women say, and hand him the flyer. They have sleep in their eyes; perhaps they were napping. They watch him turn around and head back to the gate. He’s about to step outside when the boys’ door opens and someone calls, “Wait! I think this grandmother was sitting in front of the gate a few days ago.”

  When he approaches the room, the other boy sticks his head out and says, “No, I told you this isn’t her. This lady is young. That lady was really wrinkly. Her hair wasn’t like this, either—she was a beggar.”

  “But her eyes were the same. Look only at her eyes; they were just like these. If we find her, are you really going to give us five million won?”

  “I’ll give you some money as long as you tell me exactly what happened, even if you don’t find her.” He asks the boys to step outside. The young women, who had closed their door, open it again and look out.

  “That lady was the one
from the bar down the street. They keep her locked up because she has dementia, and it looked like she snuck out and got lost. The owner of the bar came and took her home.”

  “Not that lady; I saw this lady, too. She’d hurt her foot. It was covered in pus. She kept chasing away flies … though I didn’t look closely, because she smelled and was dirty.”

  “And? Did you see where she went?” Hyong-chol asks the boy.

  “No. I just went in. She kept trying to come in, so I slammed the gate.…”

  Nobody else had seen Mom. The boy follows him out, saying, “I really did see her!” He looks down the alleys, running ahead of Hyong-chol. Hyong-chol gives the boy a hundred-thousand-won check as he leaves. The boy’s eyes sparkle. Hyong-chol asks the boy to get the lady to stay with him if he sees her again and to give him a call. Not listening very carefully, the boy says, “Then you’ll give me five million won?” Hyong-chol nods. The boy asks for a few more flyers. He says he will hang them up at the gas station where he works part-time. He says that if Hyong-chol finds his mom from that he should be rewarded with five million won, because it will be thanks to him. Hyong-chol tells him he will.

  They have faded—promises he made to himself for Mom, who changed places with him in the night duty room to protect him from the draft, saying, “I can fall asleep better if I’m next to the wall.” The pledge he had made that Mom would sleep in a warm room when she came back to this city.

  He takes a cigarette from his pocket and puts it in his mouth. He doesn’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point his emotions ceased to belong only to him. He went about his life, having mostly forgotten about Mom. What was I doing when Mom was left behind on that unfamiliar subway-station platform, having failed to get on the train with Father? He looks up once more at the office and turns back. What was I doing? He hangs his head. The day before Mom went missing, he went out drinking with his co-workers, but it didn’t end well. His co-worker Kim, who was usually respectful and polite, made a subtle dig at him after a few drinks, pronouncing him “clever.” At work, Hyong-chol was in charge of the sale of the apartments near Songdo, in Inchon, and Kim oversaw the sale of the apartments near Yongin. Kim’s remark referred to Hyong-chol’s idea of giving out concert tickets as promotional gifts for people coming to the model home. This wasn’t his idea but that of his sister, the writer. When Chi-hon was over at his house, his wife gave her a bath mat that had been the promotional gift for the last apartment sale, and his sister said, “I don’t know why companies think homemakers like this kind of thing.”

  He had been wondering what to give as a promotional gift this time, so he asked, “Well, what do you think would be memorable?”

  “I’m not sure, but people quickly forget about things like this. Wouldn’t it be better if it were a fountain pen or something? Think about it. Do you think your wife would be happy if you got her kitchen gadgets for her birthday? If you get a mat to promote an apartment sale, you’d just forget about it. But I think I would be pleasantly surprised if it was a book or a movie ticket, and I’d probably remember it. If I had to make plans to use it, I’d keep remembering how I got it. Am I the only one who thinks like that?” His sister left the mat behind when she went home.

  At a meeting the following week, someone mentioned promotional gifts. Everyone liked his suggestion of a cultural gift. A singer with many middle-aged fans was performing, in a convenient coincidence, a long-running concert series, so Hyong-chol got a block of tickets. He was praised by his boss; perhaps it was a singer his boss liked. A survey showed that the concert tickets heightened the company’s image. Though this probably had nothing to do with the promotional gifts, his apartments in Songdo had almost all sold, whereas the occupancy rate of Kim’s Yongin apartments stood at only 60 percent. So, when Kim made the remark, Hyong-chol just laughed it off, saying it was dumb luck, but after a few more drinks, Kim commented that if Hyong-chol used his clever brain somewhere else he could have become the head prosecutor. Kim knew that Hyong-chol had gone to a law college and had studied for the bar exam. He went on to comment that he didn’t know what scheme Hyong-chol had used to get promoted so quickly when he wasn’t even a graduate of Yonsei University or Koryo University, which produced the main power players in the company. In the end, Hyong-chol dumped out the liquor that Kim had poured in his glass and left. The next morning, when his wife said she would visit their daughter, Chin, instead of going to Seoul Station, he’d planned to meet his parents himself. Father wanted to stop by his younger son’s, who had just moved to a new place. Hyong-chol had meant to pick them up and drop them off at his brother’s, but once he was at work he felt a chill coming on and had a headache. Father did say that he could find his way.… Instead of going to Seoul Station, Hyong-chol went to a sauna near work. As he sweated in the sauna, which he often visited the day after he drank too much, Father was getting on the train without Mom.

  As a boy, Hyong-chol made up his mind to become a prosecutor to get Mom to return home. She had left because she was disappointed by Father. One spring day, as flowers bloomed all around the village, Father had brought home a woman with fair skin, who smelled fragrant, like face powder. When the woman came in through the front gate, Mom left through the back. The woman, trying to buy her way into Hyong-chol’s cold heart, topped his lunch every day with a fried egg. He would storm out of the house with his lunch container, which the woman had wrapped carefully in a scarf, and he’d leave it on top of the large condiment jars in the back yard and go to school. His siblings, watching him always, if surreptitiously, took the lunches the woman made. One misty morning, on the way to school, he gathered his siblings at the creek snaking by the cemetery. He dug a hole near a blooming weeping willow and made them bury their lunches. His brother tried to run away with his lunch, but Hyong-chol caught him and hit him. His sisters obediently buried their lunches. He thought the woman would no longer be able to make them lunch. But the woman went to town and bought new containers. They weren’t yellowish aluminum containers but special ones that kept the rice warm. Awed, his siblings touched the new containers cautiously. When the woman handed them their lunches, his brother and sisters looked at him. He would push his lunch toward the end of the porch and leave for school alone. His siblings would wait until he was out of sight, then go to school themselves, carrying their warm lunches in their hands. Perhaps having heard from someone that he wasn’t taking the lunches made by the woman and that he wasn’t eating, either, Mom came to school to find him. It was about ten days after the woman had come to live with them.

  “Mom!” Tears spilled from his eyes.

  Mom led him to the hill behind the school. She pulled up the legs of his pants to reveal his smooth calves, grabbed a switch, and hit them.

  “Why aren’t you eating? Did you think I would be happy if you didn’t eat?”

  Mom’s thrashing was harsh. He had been upset that his siblings weren’t listening to him, and now he couldn’t understand why Mom was whipping him. His heart brimmed with resentment. He didn’t know why she was so angry.

  “Are you going to take your lunch? Are you?”

  “No!”

  “You little …”

  Mom’s whipping became swifter. He didn’t admit it hurt, not once, and soon Mom grew tired. Instead of running away, he stood still, silent, and suffered her blows.

  “Even now?”

  The redness bloomed into blood on his calves.

  “Even now!” he yelled.

  Finally, Mom tossed the switch away. “God, you brat! Hyong-chol!” she said, embracing him and bursting into sobs. Eventually, she stopped, and tried to persuade him. He had to eat, she said, no matter who cooked the meals; she would be less sad if he ate well. Sadness. It was the first time he’d heard Mom say the word “sad.” He didn’t know why his eating properly would make Mom less sad. Since Mom had left because of that woman, it seemed to him that she would be sad if he ate the woman’s food, but she told him the opposite was true. Sh
e would be less sad if he ate, even if it was that woman’s food. No, he didn’t understand it, but since he didn’t want her to be sad, he said, grouchily, “I’ll eat it.”

  “That’s my boy.” Mom’s eyes, filled with tears, lit up along with her smile.

  “Then promise you’ll come home!” he insisted.

  Mom faltered. “I don’t want to come home.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “I never want to see your father again.”

  Tears ran down his cheeks. Mom acted as if she would really never come home. Maybe that was why she’d said he had to eat, no matter who cooked the food. He got scared.

  “Mom, I’ll do everything. I’ll work in the fields and the paddies and sweep the yard and bring the water. I’ll grind the rice and make the fire. I’ll chase the mice and I’ll kill the chicken for the ancestral rites. Just come back!”

  For ancestral rites or holidays, Mom always begged Father or any other male in the house to kill a chicken for her. Mom, who went into the fields after a heavy rain and propped up fallen beanstalks all day, who practically carried Father on her back to bring him home when he was drunk, who beat the pig’s behind with a stick when it escaped from the pen to usher it back inside, couldn’t kill a chicken. When Hyong-chol caught a fish from the creek, she wouldn’t touch it until it was dead. When every student was instructed to bring in the tail of a mouse to show that everyone had captured a mouse at home on mouse-catching days, other children’s moms caught a mouse and cut off the tail and wrapped it up in paper to take to school. But Mom shrank away even from hearing about it. A woman of sturdy build, she couldn’t bring herself to catch a mouse. If she went to the shed to get some rice and encountered a mouse, she would scream and run outside. Aunt would glare disapprovingly and cluck at Mom when she rushed out of the shed, red-faced. But even though he promised he would kill chickens and chase mice, Mom didn’t say she would come home.