Please Look After Mom

by Kyung-Sook Shin

When you write July 24, 1938, as Mom’s birth date, your father corrects you, saying that she was born in 1936. Official records show that she was born in 1938, but apparently she was born in 1936. This is the first time you’ve heard this. Your father says everyone did that, back in the day. Because many children didn’t survive their first three months, people raised them for a few years before making it official.

Mom, who liked to buy socks for everyone in the family, had in her dresser a growing collection of socks that her children didn’t take.

Nobody can decide which picture of Mom you should use. Everyone agrees it should be the most recent picture, but nobody has a recent picture of her.

“Your mother is pretty, and she doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would get lost.”

Either a mother and daughter know each other very well, or they are strangers.

The word “Mom” is familiar and it hides a plea: Please look after me. Please stop yelling at me and stroke my head; please be on my side, whether I’m right or wrong.

To you, Mom was always Mom. It never occurred to you that she had once taken her first step, or had once been three or twelve or twenty years old. Mom was Mom. She was born as Mom. Until you saw her running to your uncle like that, it hadn’t dawned on you that she was a human being who harbored the exact same feeling you had for your own brothers, and this realization led to the awareness that she, too, had had a childhood. From then on, you sometimes thought of Mom as a child, as a girl, as a young woman, as a newlywed, as a mother who had just given birth to you.

One winter, Mom gazed at your frozen hands as you sat across from her and declared, “Who cares if we don’t skin it,”

“They say that if you take in a person he will betray you, and if you take in a dog he will pay you back. I think the dog went in my place.”

How did Mom feel all those years in that old-fashioned kitchen, cooking for our big family? Remember how much we ate? We had two small tables filled with food. Remember how big our rice pot was? And she had to pack all of our lunches, including the side dishes she made with whatever she could get in the countryside.… How did Mom get through it every day?

You were caught off guard. You had never thought of Mom as separate from the kitchen. Mom was the kitchen and the kitchen was Mom. You never wondered, Did Mom like being in the kitchen?

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.…”

I cooked because I had to. I had to stay in the kitchen so you could all eat and go to school. How could you only do what you like? There are things you have to do whether you like it or not.”

But there’s no beginning or end to kitchen work. You eat breakfast, then it’s lunch, and then it’s dinner, and when it’s bright again it’s breakfast again.…

When the kitchen felt like a prison, I went out to the back and picked up the most misshapen jar lid and threw it as hard as I could at the wall.

And there were days when I could see the rice in the jar in the cellar disappearing day by day, and times when the jar would be empty. When I went to the cellar to get some rice for dinner and my scoop scraped the bottom of the rice jar, my heart would sink: What am I going to feed my babies tomorrow morning?

People say that when they have their first child they’re surprised and happy, but I think I was sad. Did I really have this baby? What do I do now? I was so afraid that at first

He thought he had to become a prosecutor to keep Mom at home.

“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.”

“After Mom went missing, I realized that there’s an answer to everything. I could have done everything she wanted me to. It wasn’t important. I don’t know why I got under her skin over things like that. I’m not going to get on a plane anymore, either.”

You had no idea that a stranger was reading your daughter’s novel to your wife. How hard your wife must have worked to hide from this young woman the fact that she didn’t know how to read.

If your wife had asked you to read her the novel, would you have read it to her? Before she went missing, you spent your days without thinking about her. When you did think about her, it was to ask her to do something, or to blame her or ignore her. Habit can be a frightening thing. You spoke politely with others, but your words turned sullen toward your wife. Sometimes you even cursed at her. You acted as if it had been decreed that you couldn’t speak politely to your wife. That’s what you did.

After your children’s mother went missing, you realized that it was your wife who was missing. Your wife, whom you’d forgotten about for fifty years, was present in your heart. Only after she disappeared did she come to you tangibly, as if you could reach out and touch her.

Only now do you realize, painfully, that you turned a blind eye to your wife’s confusion.

You left this house whenever you wanted to, and came back at your whim, and you never once thought that your wife would be the one to leave.

I would have kept you by me a few more years if it wasn’t for the war. But what can we do when the world is so frightening? It’s not a bad thing to get married. It’s something you can’t avoid. You were born deep in the mountains. I wasn’t able to send you to school, so if you don’t get married what can you do?

We are now burdens to the children, who have no use for us.

“How can you be like this, you useless human being! How can a husband lose his wife! How could you come back here like this, when that poor woman is out there somewhere?”

I thought, I don’t know exactly what she’s doing, but I’m sure she’s doing it because she can do it.

When was the last time I’d walked alone, with nothing in my hands, on my head, or on my back?

You were the first person since I got married to ask me my name.

how could we have thought of Mom as Mom her entire life? Even though I’m a mother, I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven’t forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning?