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By Root 380 0

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