Please Look After Mom

by Kyung-Sook Shin

  You stood up and hurried back to the road without bothering to brush the sand off your clothes. You decided against taking the plane to Seoul, and instead took a taxi to Taejon and got on a train to Chongup. Thinking all the while that you hadn’t seen Mom’s face in almost two seasons.

  You remember a classroom from long ago.

  It was a day that the sixty or so kids filled out applications for middle school. If you didn’t write an application that day, you were not going to middle school. You were one of the kids not working on an application. You didn’t completely understand what it meant that you would not be going on to middle school. Instead, you were feeling guilty.

  The night before, Mom had yelled at Father, who was sick in bed. She had shouted at him, “We don’t have anything, so how is that girl going to survive in this world if we don’t send her to school?” Father got up and left the house, and Mom lifted a squat table from the floor and threw it into the yard in frustration. “What’s the point of having a household when you can’t even send your kids to school? I might as well break it all!” You wished she would calm down; you didn’t mind not going to school. Mom wasn’t appeased by throwing the table. She opened and banged shut the door of the cellar and yanked all the laundry off the line, crumpled it, and threw it on the ground. Then she came to you, cowering by the well, and took the towel off her head and brought it to your nose. She ordered, “Blow your nose.” You could smell the intense stink of sweat on Mom’s towel. You didn’t want to blow your nose, especially not into that smelly towel. But Mom kept telling you to blow your nose as hard as you could. When you hesitated, she said that way you wouldn’t cry. You were probably standing there looking at Mom with an expression bordering on tears. Telling you to blow your nose was her way of saying, Don’t cry. Unable to resist her, you blew your nose, and your snot and the smell of sweat mingled in the towel.

  Mom came to school the next day wearing that same towel. After she spoke with your teacher, your teacher came to you and handed you an application form. You raised your head and looked outside the classroom as you wrote your name on the form, and you saw Mom watching you from the hall. When your eyes met, she took the towel off her head and waved it, smiling brightly.

  Around the time the fee for middle school was due, the gold ring that used to be on Mom’s left middle finger, her sole piece of jewelry, disappeared from her hand. Only the groove on her finger, etched by many years of wearing the band, was left behind.

  Headaches attacked Mom’s body constantly.

  During that visit to your childhood home, you woke up thirsty in the middle of the night and saw your books looming over you in the dark. You hadn’t known what to do with all of your books when you prepared to go to Japan for a year with Yu-bin on his sabbatical. You sent most of the books, books that had stayed with you for years, to your parents’ house. As soon as Mom received your books, she emptied out a room and displayed them there. After that, you never found the opportunity to take them back with you. When you visited your parents’ house, you used that room to change your clothes or to store your bags, and if you stayed over, that was where Mom would place your blankets and sleeping mat.

  After you got a drink of water and returned to your room, you wondered how Mom was sleeping, and you carefully pushed her door open. It looked as if she wasn’t there. “Mom!” you called. No answer. You fumbled with the switch on the wall and turned on the light. Mom wasn’t there. You turned on the light in the living room and opened the bathroom door, but she wasn’t there, either. “Mom! Mom!” you called as you pushed the front door open and stepped into the yard. The early-morning wind burrowed into your clothes. You turned on the light in the yard and glanced quickly at the wooden platform in the shed. Mom was lying there. You ran down the steps to the yard and approached her. She was frowning, as she had done earlier, asleep, hand on her head. She was barefoot, and her toes were curled under, perhaps from the cold. The simple dinner and the talk you had shared while you strolled around the house together shattered. It was an early morning in November. You brought out a blanket and covered Mom with it. You brought socks and put them on her feet. And you sat next to her until she woke up.

  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 slit with the knife in the skin of the skate with her red, frozen hands, your young fingers pulled the membranes off. It would have been easier if they came off in one piece, but they would fall off in sections. Mom would make another slit in the fish, and the whole process would be repeated. It was a typical winter scene, you and your mom squatting by the well that was covered in thin ice, skinning the skate. The cleaning of the skate repeated itself each year, as if someone were rewinding film. One winter, Mom gazed at your frozen hands as you sat a
cross from her and declared, “Who cares if we don’t skin it,” stopped what she was doing, and confidently cut the fish into chunks. It was the first time that the ancestral-rite table had seen a skate with its skin on. Father asked, “What’s wrong with this skate?” Mom replied, “It’s the same skate, just not skinned.” Father’s sister grumbled, “You have to put care into food for the ancestral rites.” “Then you try peeling it,” Mom retorted. That year, whenever something bad happened, someone brought up the unpeeled skate. When the persimmon tree didn’t bear fruit; when one of your brothers, who was playing a stick-toss game, got poked in the eye by a flying stick; when Father was hospitalized; when cousins fought—Father’s sister grumbled that it was because Mom hadn’t bothered to skin the skate for the ancestral rites.

  Mom placed the steamed octopus on the chopping block and tried to slice it. But the knife kept slipping, just as it had when she was slicing the radish. “I’ll do it, Mom.” You took her knife again, sliced the hot radish-scented octopus, dipped a piece in red-pepper-and-vinegar sauce, and held it out to Mom. This was what she’d always done for you. Each time, you’d tried to pick it up in the air with your own chopsticks, but Mom would say, “If you eat it with your chopsticks, it doesn’t taste as good. Just open your mouth.” Now Mom tried to lift it in the air with her own chopsticks, and you said, “If you do that it won’t taste as good, just open your mouth.” You pushed the piece of octopus into her mouth. You tried one, too. The octopus was warm and squishy and soft. You wondered, Octopus for breakfast? But you and Mom ate it with your fingers, standing in the kitchen. As you chewed on the octopus, you watched Mom’s hand as she tried to pick up a piece and dropped it. You put a piece in her mouth for her. Soon she gave up trying to eat the octopus herself and waited for you to plop it in her mouth. Her hand seemed unfocused. Eating the octopus, you said, “Mother.” It was the first time you had called her “Mother.” “Mother, let’s go to Seoul today.” Your mom replied, “Let’s go up into the mountains.”

  “The mountains?”

  “Yeah, the mountains.”

  “Is there a hiking trail from here?”

  “I’ve made one myself.”

  “Let’s go to Seoul and go to the hospital there.”

  “Later.”

  “Later when?”

  “When your niece’s entrance exam is over.” She was referring to Hyong-chol’s daughter.

  “You can go to the hospital with me instead of with Hyong-chol.”

  “I’m fine. It’ll be fine. I’m going to the doctor of Chinese medicine for it. I’m getting physical therapy, too, because they said something’s wrong with my neck.”

  You couldn’t persuade Mom—she kept insisting that she would go later. Then she asked you what the world’s smallest country was.

  The smallest country? You stared at Mom, a stranger asking you a random question: What is the smallest country in the world? Mom asked you to get rose rosary beads for her if you ever went to that country.

  “Rose rosary beads?”

  “Prayer beads made of rosewood.” She looked at you listlessly.

  “Do you need prayer beads?”

  “No, I just want prayer beads from that country.” Mom stopped and let out a deep sigh. “If you ever go there, get me a set.”

  You were quiet.

  “Because you can go anywhere.”

  Your conversation with Mom stopped there. She didn’t say another word in the kitchen. After the breakfast of steamed octopus, you and your mom left the house. You went across a few paddies in the mountains that rimmed the back of the village and stepped onto a trail in the hills. Even though it wasn’t a path people used, the trail was clear. The thick layers of oak leaves on the ground cushioned your feet. Sometimes the branches that reached into the trail hit your face. Mom, who was ahead of you, pushed the branches back for you. She let go of them after you walked through. A bird flew away.

  “Do you come here often?”

  “Yes.”

  “With who?”

  “Nobody. There’s nobody who would come with me.”

  Mom walked this path by herself? You really couldn’t say you knew Mom. It was a dark path for anyone to walk alone. At some parts, the bamboos were so dense that you couldn’t see the sky.

  “Why do you walk here by yourself?”

  “I came here once after your aunt died, and I kept coming back.”

  After a while, Mom stopped on top of a hill. When you came up next to her and looked where she was looking, you shouted, “Oh, this path!” It was a path you had completely forgotten about, the shortcut to your mom’s mother’s house, which you used to take when you were young. Even after they built the big road that passed through the village, people often used this mountain trail. It was the path you had taken one day when your grandmother was busy preparing for her ancestral rites, a live chicken trailing behind you on a rope. You had dropped the rope and lost the chicken. Though you had looked for it everywhere, you weren’t able to find it. Where had that chicken gone? Had the trail changed so much? You used to be able to walk this path with your eyes closed, but now, if it weren’t for the hill, you wouldn’t have known it was the same path. Mom stood there, staring at the place where her mother’s house once stood. Nobody lived there anymore. The people from that village, which once must have numbered fifty households, had all moved away. A few empty houses hadn’t been torn down, but it was a village that people had stopped coming to. So Mom had come here by herself to look down at the empty village she was born in? You wrapped your arm around her waist, and suggested again that she come to Seoul with you. Mom didn’t reply, and instead brought up the dog. You had been curious when you first noticed that the dog wasn’t in the doghouse, but you hadn’t had a chance to ask.

  A year before, when you’d gone home in the summer, there was a Chindo tied next to the shed. It was sweltering, and the chain was so short that it seemed the panting dog, unable to get out of the sun, would fall over dead at any moment. You told Mom to untie the dog. Mom said that if she did people would be too scared to walk by. How could she chain a dog up like that, especially in the countryside … Because of the dog, you argued with Mom as soon as you arrived, not even bothering to say hello. “Why do you keep the dog tied up? Let it roam.” But Mom insisted, “Nobody, not even in the country, lets their dog run around. Everyone ties their dog on a chain—if you don’t, it’ll get lost.” You shot back, “Then you have to get a longer chain. If you tie it up with such a short chain, how is a dog supposed to survive in this heat? Do you treat it like that just because it can’t speak up for itself?” Mom said that was the only chain in the house; it was the one she had used for the previous dog. “Then you can go buy one!” Even though you’d come home for the first time in a long while, you drove back to town before setting foot in the house and brought back a chain so long that the dog could wander down the side yard. That’s when you realized the doghouse was small. You headed out again, saying you were going to get another doghouse. But Mom stopped you, insisting that there was a carpenter in a neighboring village whom she could ask to build her a new doghouse. Your mom couldn’t fathom paying for a house for an animal: “There are pieces of wood everywhere, and all you need to do is hammer it here and there, and you want to pay money for that? You must have money rotting in your pockets.” Later, when you left for the city, you gave her two ten-thousand-won checks and got her to promise that she would build the dog a big house. Mom promised she would. Back in Seoul, you called a few times to make sure that Mom had the doghouse built. Though she could have lied, each time she said, “I’m going to, I’ll do it soon.” The fourth time you called and heard the same answer, your anger overflowed.

  “I gave you the money for it and everything. Country people are terrible. Don’t you feel bad for the dog? How is it supposed to live in that tiny space, especially in this heat? There’s feces inside, and the poor thing has stepped all over it, and you don’t even clean it up. How can such a big dog
live in such a small contraption? Otherwise, let him roam free in the yard! Don’t you feel bad for the dog?”

  The phone went silent. You started to regret saying that country people were terrible.

  Mom’s angry voice came shooting across the line. “You care only about the dog, and not your own mother? Do you think your mother is the kind of person who would abuse a dog? Don’t tell me what to do! I’m going to raise it my way!” Mom hung up first.

  You were the one who always hung up first. You would say, “Mom, I’ll call you back,” and then you didn’t. You didn’t have time to sit and listen to everything your mom had to say. But this time your mom had hung up on you. It was the first time Mom had gotten so angry with you since you left home. Once you moved out, Mom always said, “I’m sorry.” She confessed that she’d sent you to live with Hyong-chol because she couldn’t take care of you well enough. Mom would try as hard as she could to lengthen the call when you phoned. But even though she hung up first, you were more disappointed in the way she was keeping the dog. You were puzzled. How had Mom become that person? She used to look after all the animals in the house. She was the kind of person who would come to Seoul for an extended stay and three days later insist on going home to feed the dog. How could she be so clueless now? You were annoyed at your mom for becoming so insensitive.