Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [33]
It’s not clear exactly when, but Mom stopped locking the gate at night. Soon after, when she scooped rice for everyone in the morning, she started to put some in Father’s rice bowl and leave it under a blanket in the warmest part of the room. Hyong-chol studied even harder while Father was gone. Mom continued to refuse to let him help in the fields. Even when she was yelling at her other children that they had left the peppers spread out in the yard in the rain, she lowered her voice if she thought he was studying. In those days, Mom’s face was always crumpled with fatigue and worry, but when he studied by reading out loud, the flesh around her eyes became brighter, as if she had dabbed on powder. Mom opened and closed the door to his room quietly. She silently slid a plate of boiled sweet potatoes or persimmons into the room, then gently closed the door. One winter night when the snow drifted onto the porch, Father walked in the open gate, cleared his throat, took his shoes and smacked them against the wall to get the snow off, and opened the door. It was so cold that everyone was sleeping together. Through half-open eyes, Hyong-chol watched Father touch everyone’s head and gaze down at them all. He saw Mom placing on the table the rice bowl she’d kept in the warmest part of the room, saw her bringing sheets of seaweed toasted with perilla oil and putting them next to the rice bowl, and watched as she placed a bowl of rice-boiled water next to the rice bowl without a word—as if Father had left that morning and had come back at night, instead of having left in the summer and returned sheepishly in the bitter cold of winter.
When Hyong-chol graduated from college and passed the entrance exam for the company he works at now, Mom wasn’t happy. She didn’t even smile when the neighbors congratulated her on Hyong-chol’s employment at a top corporation. When he came home with the traditional gift of underwear bought with his first paycheck, she barely looked at it, and coldly shot at him, “What about what you were going to be?”
He replied simply that he would work hard at the company, save for two years, and start studying again.
Now he reflects on this. When she was younger, Mom was a presence that got him to continue building his resolve as a man, as a human being.
It was when Mom brought his sister, who had just graduated from middle school, to the city to stay with him that she started to tell him she was sorry all the time. She brought his sister from the country when he was twenty-four. It was before he was able to save money, before he could take the bar exam again. She kept her eyes lowered.
“Since she’s a girl, she has to get more schooling. Somehow you have to make it possible for her to go to school here. I can’t have her live like me.”
They met in front of the clock tower at Seoul Station. Before she went home, she suggested a meal of rice and soup. Mom kept picking out the beef in her soup and placing it in his bowl. Even though he said he couldn’t eat it all and that she should eat some, Mom kept transferring the meat from her bowl to his. And although it had been her idea to eat, not a single morsel reached her lips.
“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked.
“I’m eating, I am,” she said, but kept plopping the meat into his bowl. “But you … what are you going to do?” Mom put down her spoon, which was rimmed with soup. “It’s all my fault. I’m sorry, Hyong-chol.”
As she stood in Seoul Station to board the train home, her rough hands with her short-clipped nails buried deep in her pockets, Mom’s eyes were ringed with tears. He thought then that her eyes looked like those of a cow, guileless and kind.
He calls his sister, who’s still at Seoul Station. The day is fading. His sister stays silent when she hears his voice. It seems that she wants him to speak first. They listed everyone’s cell-phone numbers on the flyer,