Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [15]
Thinking of ways to earn money other than from farming, Mom brought a wooden malt-mold into the shed. She would take the whole wheat she harvested from the fields and crush it and mix it with water and put it in the mold and make malt. When the malt fermented, the entire house smelled of it. Nobody liked that smell, but Mom said it was the smell of money. There was a house in the village where they made tofu, and when she brought them the fermented malt, they sold it to the brewery and gave the money to Mom. Mom put that money in a white bowl, stacked six or seven bowls on top of it, and placed it on top of the cabinets. The bowl was Mom’s bank. She put all her money up there. When you brought home the invoice for tuition, she took money from the bowl, counted it out, and put it in your hand.
Later in the morning, when you again opened your eyes, you discovered that you were lying on the platform in the shed. Where was Mom? She wasn’t there, but you could hear chopping from the kitchen. You got up and went in. Mom was about to slice a large, white radish on the chopping block. The way she held the knife looked precarious. It wasn’t the way she used to julienne radish to make slaw, expertly, without looking down. Mom’s hand holding the knife was unstable, and the knife kept slipping off the radish onto the chopping block. It seemed she would cut her thumb off. “Mom! Wait!” You grabbed the knife from her hand. “I’ll do it, Mom.” You moved to the chopping block. Mom paused but then stepped aside. The steel basket in the sink held the languid, dead octopus. There was a stainless-steel steamer on the gas range. She was going to put a layer of radish on the bottom of the steamer and steam the octopus. You were about to ask, Aren’t you supposed to parboil the octopus, not steam it? But you didn’t. Mom arranged slices of radish on the bottom of the steamer and adjusted a stainless-steel shelf inside. She put the whole octopus in and placed the lid on top. This was the way she usually cooked seafood.
Mom wasn’t used to fish. She didn’t even call fish by their proper names. To Mom, mackerel and pike and scabbard fish were all just fish. But she differentiated between types of beans: kidney beans, soybeans, white beans, black beans. When Mom had fish in her kitchen, she never made sashimi or broiled or braised it, but always salted and steamed it. Even for mackerel or scabbard fish, she made a soy-based sauce with red-pepper flakes, garlic, and pepper and steamed it on a plate over rice that was cooking. Mom never put sashimi in her mouth. When she saw people eating raw fish, she looked at them with a distasteful expression that said, What are they doing? Mom, who had steamed skate from the time she was seventeen years old, wanted to steam octopus, too. Soon the kitchen was filled with the smell of radish and octopus. As you watched Mom steaming octopus in the kitchen, you thought of skate.
People from Mom’s region always put skate on their ancestral-rite table. Mom’s year was structured around the ancestral rites she held, once in spring and twice each in summer and winter. Mom had to sit next to a well and clean seven skates each year, if one counted New Year’s and Full Moon Harvest. Usually the skate Mom bought was as big as a cauldron lid. When your mom went to the market and bought a red skate and dropped it next to the well, this meant that an ancestral rite was approaching. It was hard work to clean skate for the winter ancestral rites, in weather that instantly turned water into ice. Your hands were small, and Mom’s were thickened from labor. When Mom made a