‘I want the best for you’, that’s what she always said. That was the story she told herself while she hovered around doorways, completely convinced she’d eventually find evidence I was defying her.
But that’s what it was: a story. And I didn’t believe it anymore.
“How should I show I appreciate you?” I asked her, it was a genuine question.
She didn’t expect that. “Pardon?”
“How should I show I appreciate you?” I repeated. “In your mind, how does appreciation look? Because I do appreciate you.”
She scoffed. “No, you don’t. You’ve never appreciated me. You’ve complained every step of the way about all of the wonderful things I gave you: your education, your degree, your job—”
“I was bullied at school. I never liked marketing, and I was treated badly in my job.”
She sighed at me. “See? You find fault with everything. You’re never happy.”
I wished I could make her hear how that sounded to me. “You’ve just described yourself, Mum,” I told her. “And I’m not ‘finding fault’, I’m telling you what’s making me unhappy.”
She looked like she could hardly believe her ears. “Yes, it must be a miserable life having lots of money, nice clothes, a fantastic job, and a perfect boyfriend. How difficult it must have been for you to cope with those things.”
“What if it actually was? Should I have kept them anyway to show my appreciation for everything you’d done?” Before she could cut in, I added, “You said you came to Australia to give me a better life. Don’t you actually want me to be happy?”
Unexpectedly, a look of resolve settled firmly on her face. “Yes,” she said with conviction. “Yes, I want you to be happy. That’s why I came here: I’m not going to let you throw those things away on a whim. Maybe you’re getting cold feet about the responsibility of marriage and motherhood, I don’t know. It would certainly explain all this nonsense,” she waved her hand vaguely at my suit. “But you don’t have to do it all alone like I did with you. You’ll have Henry, and you’ll have me.”
“But what if I don’t want those things, Mum? What if I don’t want to be a mother and a wife?”
She baulked. “You don’t want a family?”
“That’s not what I said.”
She snorted. “I suppose you think you’re going to be a father then?” She said it half-laughing; I think she was trying to highlight how preposterous it was.
It wasn’t a joke to me, though. And it wasn’t a joke to the people important to me. “Maybe.”
She spent a couple of seconds considering me with a look of incredulousness on her face, and then shook her head firmly. “You know what?” she told me. “I’ve entertained this madness for long enough. This is ridiculous, Min, ridiculous, so here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to use some of my own meagre savings to buy you some proper clothes, and then I’m going to contact Henry, tell him you realised you’ve made a terrible mistake and then you’re going to make up with him. You two are going to get the counselling you clearly need, and then—no excuses this time, Min Lee—you’re going to start going to Church again. God has a plan for you, and it’s not this.”
I said it calmly. “Yeah, none of those things are going to happen, Mum.”
She reacted more to my calmness than she ever had to my tears. “Yes, they are,” she said, sounding impatient. “If you think I’m going to just let you ruin your life, you’re mistaken. I know you find it hard to believe when you force me to be tough on you, but it’s true: I love you, and because I do, I refuse to just stand by idle while you destroy everything we’ve worked so hard for. I want you to be happy, Min, and I will fight for that. I will fight as hard as I need to, I won’t give up on you.”
“For the things that actually do make me happy? Or the things you’ve decided should make me happy?”
Her brow went down over her eyes. “You don’t know anything about happiness, Min Lee,” she told me, “I was your age once, I thought I knew everything, too,” and then she launched into a bitter tirade with the same tired, old lines. I was ruining my life. Art wasn’t a career. No one would marry me if Henry didn’t. No one would look after me when I was old and frail, and, God, she couldn’t deal with that thought, she couldn’t deal with it…
I didn’t hear much of it, because I was watching her. I was watching her mouth twist and her eyes narrow. I watched her point at me, gesture at me, smack the blanket to emphasise a point. And finally, I finally saw it the way other people must see it. She was yelling at me, insulting me. Belittling the things and the people I loved in the same breath that she painted herself as this noble, self-sacrificing martyr.
This was the woman I’d come rushing down the lift to share insights about happiness with? This was the woman I agonised for months about coming out to, like how I did it would have made a scrap of difference? This was the woman I’d spent so much energy trying to protect from the truth—and why? Why did I think that would matter? What did I think I could change?
After I came out to her, she was never going to hug me while I cried and tell me, “You know, Min, I always secretly wanted a son,” with a warm smile. I was never going to be able to introduce Bree to her, and have Bree present her with a Korean dish she’d spent weeks perfecting to have Mum accept it with anticipation and delight. She was never going to hold up a painting that I’d made especially for her and tell me with pride and admiration in her eyes, ‘Oh, Min. It’s beautiful.’ And I was never going to have the Christmases, the Lunar New Years, the Birthday celebrations that in my heart of hearts I so desperately wanted from her, with us both smiling and laughing like I saw everyone else’s families doing. As a child, I’d felt like everyone in the world had those things but me.
I understood now: I was never going to have those things. She was never going to be that mother. And I was done.
I was done.
She was still going off at me. My hands unsteady, I took my phone out of my pocket and popped the case off. While she watched, I slipped my SIM card out, snapped it in half and put it gently on the mattress beside her.
The words she’d been saying died on her lips. She spent a moment of silence looking at the broken SIM card, confused. “What are you doing?”
“Listen to us. We can’t do this, Mum.”
She must have been genuinely shocked, because she didn’t pick up where she’d left off and get stuck into me again. She just stared at me in disbelief.
I put my phone back in my pocket. “I need my own life, and you need yours.”
That got her attention. “What is this, Min?” She already knew the answer, and I could see the anguish creeping onto her face. It was hard to look at. “You’re not doing what I think you’re doing, are you? You wouldn’t do that to me. You wouldn’t do that to your own mother.”
I ignored the knife twisting in my gut. “I hope you have a good flight home.”
Her lips were quivering. Her jaw was set. If she hadn’t been so keen on painting herself as this ill victim put in hospital by her selfish daughter, I have no doubt she would have sprung out of bed to physically stop me. But she didn’t. Even to the last moment, she had to keep up that façade.
I nodded then. This was it. I took one last look at my mother, the woman who’d raised me all by herself with nothing, and let the words I was about to say sink in. “Goodbye, Mum.”
I think she said something else, but I didn’t hear it. It took all my energy and all my resolve to turn my back on her. To turn away from her—the woman who had sacrificed everything that she was for me—and I took one step away from her, two steps, three steps. One foot in front of the other until I was at the door and my fingertips were resting on the cool handle. I could hardly see it through the tears in my eyes.
Then, with all of my strength, I walked through that door and closed it behind me.
THIRTY-SIX
I shouldn’t be bothering Sarah, I knew I shouldn’t be. But I just… I don’t k
now. I’d done laps of the hospital trying to empty the big well of emotion in me without sobbing in public, and nothing helped. I didn’t want to go and sit in Henry’s empty serviced apartment while he was at work. I didn’t want to go home to Sarah’s empty house. Bree wasn’t talking to me and I had no money, and no family, and there was nowhere left to go, and so I burst into room 519—Sarah half-sat up in bed, startled—and this big verbal vomit of everything that had just happened came gushing out of my mouth, blow by blow, before I could stop myself. “…and so it’s over,” I told her when I’d run out of steam. “It’s over, and I just... I just…”
I let my sentence trail off as I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. I had no idea how to finish it.
Sarah was propped up in bed on an elbow, gaping at me. “…whoa.”
Beside her, the machine made that low warning tone again. She grimaced. “Nice timing, buster,” she told the machine as she expertly reset it.
I watched her fiddling with the buttons on it, and my eyes followed all the leads attached to her in her hospital bed, and the IV in her arm, and all those numbers on the screen, and… honestly, what the fuck was I doing? She was sick, and what the fuck was I doing just dumping all my shit on her when she had plenty of her own to deal with?
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “Sorry, this is stupid, you’re trying to get better.” I turned sharply to leave.
“Wait!” she called as I lifted my hand to the door. I paused, and she jabbed a finger at me. “Oh, no, you don’t! No running away, Mister. Sit!” She pointed at one of the visitor chairs along the wall. Mutely, I followed her instructions.
She sat up very slowly and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She stayed like that for a second—I think to make sure she wasn’t going to black out again—before climbing down. Then, in a hospital gown and with bare feet, she took a machine in either arm and towed them across the floor to where I was sitting.
“Sarah…” I told her as she lowered herself down into a chair beside me. “Get back in bed, you’re supposed to be getting better.”
“I am better,” she argued, pointing to one of the numbers on the machine. “Look, it’s over 100 now, I’m fine. Here.” She put her arms very carefully around me. “Just watch my IV, the nurse said she’d make me stay another night if I pulled it out.”
She rested her head on my shoulder and gave me a big, firm hug. “Can I say it?” she asked. “I know it sucks, but I’m glad you did it. Your mum is nuts and she’s been stressing you out for ages. You’ll be way better without her looming over your life.”
Part of me agreed with her, and the other, larger part felt really guilty that I was letting someone say that about her. I didn’t know how to explain that, so I just said, “Yeah.”
She saw my expression anyway. “And I know you feel really bad about it and probably she was pretty nice sometimes, but don’t forget that in between the very occasional ‘nice’, she made you feel like absolute shit.”
That, she hit the mark on. I closed my eyes for a moment. “Yeah.”
“You did the right thing, Min.”
I nodded slowly. “I know. I just—” I exhaled. “Honestly, everything she did was for me, to give me a better life and a happy future. It’s just that she can’t fucking accept the future that I want for myself, even though I told her over and over and over again that what she wants for me isn’t going to make me happy. She won’t listen, she never listens. If she’d just fucking listen to me…”
“Maybe she will one day,” Sarah offered.
I couldn’t ever see that day coming. “Maybe,” I said anyway, and then sighed.
Sarah squeezed me. “Well, regardless: you did it. Like you said, it’s over. And it probably hurts like hell right now, but it won’t always. It will fade, and one day you’ll be in that happy future you want so much—I don’t know, like as some world-famous artist living in a big, beautiful house with Bree and a million happy kids, or whatever—and you’ll look back at what you did today and be so proud that you were strong and that you stood up for yourself so you could make it there. I know I sure as hell am proud of you.”
I don’t know what it was about that word, but it twisted a knife in my gut. I rested my cheek against the crown of Sarah’s head and exhaled at length. “My happily ever after’s a bit simpler than that,” I told her, closing my eyes. “I’d just settle for it being ‘happily’.”
“Well, it’ll be easier now,” Sarah promised, and then gave me another firm hug.
We sat like that for a bit, but we were interrupted by the startlingly loud sound of Sarah’s phone buzzing, amplified by the plywood bedside table.
She rushed to answer it before she got in trouble from the ward staff for having it on. “Work,” she said in a tired voice as she grabbed it. “$500 says it’s Omar. ‘Sarah, I looked behind me and you’re not following me around like a duckling this morning, where are you?’” She went to glance at the screen before she answered it, and what she saw made her pause for a second. Her expression changed. Glancing at me as she sat down, she said very clearly, “Hello, Henry.”
I looked up.
She was still watching me as she listened. “No, no, it’s fine. I’m okay, it’s nothing serious, I wouldn’t be answering my phone if it was. What can I do for you?”
I could faintly hear Henry through her receiver. “Well, that’s good to hear, I’m so glad you’re okay.” There was a long pause, in which Sarah’s eyes got narrower and narrower. “Listen, I’m so sorry to do this to you. I’ve been trying to call Min for the last hour but his phone off and I can’t find him anywhere.” Sarah’s eyebrows shot up, and she mouthed ‘him?’ to me. I shrugged as Henry continued, “Have you heard from him?”
Sarah still had a really strange expression. “Yes, actually. Would you like to hear from him yourself? He’s right here.”
“Oh, ‘here’ as in on level five, RPA? I’m in the waiting room. Do you think he could come out for a second? I have something for him.”
Sarah considered my red eyes. “Uh, I think he’d probably pass on being in public right now, actually.”
I was about to argue it was fine, but Henry was already speaking. “Oh…” he said. “Oh. Well, if you could just let him know I’m looking for—”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m in 519, come right in.” Before he could protest, she hung up and turned to me. “Min,” she said sternly, in an I told you not to do this voice. “Why is Henry looking for you?”
I sighed at her. “I didn’t call him, I bumped into him last night. His sister is here because she’s just had twins.”
Sarah face relaxed. “Oh.” She might have said something else to me, but there was a very polite knock on the door. “Come in!” she called instead.
The door opened gently. “Er, sorry,” Henry began, spotting us both seated beside it. Then, he noticed Sarah’s machines and frowned. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
She didn’t miss a beat. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asked innocently.
He smiled a little. “Touché,” he commented. When he looked down at me and saw my expression, though, his smile fell away. “Oh, no,” he said, and then—glancing a bit nervously at Sarah—he added in Korean, “Your mother?”
I nodded, and said in English, “Don’t worry, she’s okay. I just told her I don’t want anything to do with her anymore, and I broke my SIM card.”
It took him a moment to process that, and like a true psychologist, he didn’t let thoughts show on his face. He did look like he really wanted to say something else about it, though, but I think because Sarah was there, he didn’t. He just put a warm hand on my back and rubbed it for a moment. “Well, I can see the position of ‘shoulder’ is already taken,” he said neutrally. “So how about I just give you something that might cheer you up a little and be on my way?” He took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and passed it to me. He had a knowing smile.
I took it, opening it as I sp
oke. “It’s fine, Henry, we’re not kicking you out or…” The words trailed off as I saw what it was.
It was carbon copy paper, and up the top was a logo that read Orchard Place Fine Jewellery, and then further down was a grid with ‘white gold, 1.5cts P FROST ORIGINAL custom box…’ I began to realise what it was as my eyes tracked down to the ‘$27,000—’.
Oh my god. My breath caught in my throat. “It’s the receipt for your ring.” I gaped up at him. “Does this mean what I think it does?”
He nodded, and pointed to the fine print down the bottom that read ‘Buy with confidence: exchanges or refunds on engagement rings welcome, receipt must be presented’.
And I was holding the receipt. Oh my god.
My relief was short lived, because Henry followed up with, “I had a think about other ways I could help you, and, assuming you can get your ring back off the pawnbrokers to get a refund and pay them out, you’re set.”
Beside me, Sarah froze. “Pawnbrokers?”
Shit. Henry’s eyes widened in alarm, and his hand flew up to his mouth. “Oh—oh god, I’m sorry, Min, I thought because you’d told her about your mum that you would have told her about—”
Sarah wasn’t listening to him, she was talking to me. “Pawnbrokers, Min?” she asked sternly. “What the hell is he talking about?”
When I took too long to answer, she sat up straighter and her machine alarmed again. “You shut up,” she told it sternly.
I waited until she’d reset it again, spending those few second psyching myself up to do the inevitable. There was no point in lying to her about it. “Don’t kill me,” I said, like it would stop her. “I paid Bree’s school fees a couple of weeks ago...?”
She joined the dots quickly and shoved me again. “With a pawnbroker loan? What’s wrong with you! We all put lots of effort into helping Bree to do well, I would have drawn down against the house if you needed money that badly!”
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