Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [32]
“I’ll become an important person,” Hyong-chol promised.
“What are you going to be?”
“A prosecutor!”
Mom’s eyes sparkled then. “If you want to be a prosecutor, you have to study hard. A lot more than you think you do. I know someone who wanted be a prosecutor and studied night and day and never made it and went crazy.”
“I’ll do it if you come home.…”
Mom looked into his anxious eyes. She smiled. “Yes. You can do it. You were able to say Ma before you were a hundred days old. Even though no one taught you to read, you learned to read as soon as you went to school, and you’re ranked first in your class.” She sighed. “Why would I leave that house when you’re there—why didn’t I think of that? You’re there.”
Mom stared at his calves speckled with blood, then turned around and squatted, telling him to climb on her back. He looked at her. Mom turned her head. “Get on,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
That was how, in the late afternoon, Mom came home that day. She shoved that woman out of the kitchen and cooked. And when the woman and Father went to live in another house in town, Mom rolled up her sleeves, ran over to their house, grabbed the rice pot hanging over their hearth, and sent it rushing down the creek. It seemed as if Mom became a fighter so that she could keep the promise she had made to Hyong-chol, and return home. When Father and the woman, unable to stand Mom’s harassment, left the town altogether, Mom called Hyong-chol to her and sat him down before her, knee to knee. Calmly, she asked Hyong-chol, who was once again frightened that she might leave as well, “How much studying did you do today?” When he pulled out the test he had gotten a perfect score on, Mom’s gloomy eyes regained their fire. She looked at the test, on which his teacher had circled in red every correct answer, and grabbed him in a hug.
“Oh, my baby!”
Mom pampered him while Father was gone. She let him ride Father’s bicycle. She gave him Father’s sleeping mat and covered him with Father’s blanket. She scooped rice for him into the big rice bowl, which only Father had used. She placed the first bowl of soup in front of him. When his siblings started to eat, she would scold, “Your brother hasn’t even picked up his spoon!” When the fruit vendor came by with a rubber bin filled with grapes, she traded a half bowl of sesame seeds drying in the yard for some grapes and saved them for him, telling the other children, “This here is for your brother.” And every time she did that, Mom reminded him, “You have to become a prosecutor.”
He thought he had to become a prosecutor to keep Mom at home.
That fall, Mom harvested rice and hulled it and dried it by herself, without Father. At dawn, she went to the fields and, bent over, cut rice stalks with her scythe, stripped the grain, and spread it on the ground in the sun to dry. She came home when it got dark. When Hyong-chol tried to help, Mom said, “You go study,” and pushed him toward his desk. On warm Sundays after all the rice was harvested, Mom would take his siblings to the field in the hills to dig for sweet potatoes, but she would nudge him toward his desk. They would come back near dusk pushing a wheelbarrow filled with russet sweet potatoes. His brother, who had wanted to stay home to study but had been forced to go with Mom, hunched over the well, scrubbing the dirt from under his fingernails.
“Mom! Is Hyong-chol that important?”
“Yes! He’s that important!” Mom rapped his brother on the head without giving the question a second thought.
“Then you don’t need us?” His brother’s cheeks were flushed from the crisp air.
“No! I don’t need you.”
“Then we’re going to go live with Father!”
“What?” Mom was about to give his brother another rap on the head but stopped. “You’re important, too.