Please Look After Mom

by Kyung-Sook Shin

You aren’t sure how helpful your words will be in finding Mom.

If you don’t leave then, you will continue to argue. You’ve been doing that for the past week.

The things that had been suppressed, that had been carefully avoided moment by moment, became bloated, and finally you all yelled and smoked and banged out the door in a rage.

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

If you are with family, you needn’t feel embarrassed about leaving the table uncleared after a meal and going to do something else. You realized you’d become a stranger as you watched Mom try to conceal her messy everyday life.

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. You never stopped calling her Mom. Even now, when Mom’s missing. When you call out “Mom,” you want to believe that she’s healthy. That Mom is strong. That Mom isn’t fazed by anything. That Mom is the person you want to call whenever you despair about something in this city.

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.

Instead of answering, you grabbed Mom’s hand, desperately, as if you were grasping for a lifeline in the darkness, because you didn’t know how to explain your emotions.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual—if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through.

Feeling friendship from eyes that had never seen, eyes that seemed to understand and accept any flaw of yours, you said something you had never said about that book. Mom asked, “What was it?” “I said if I were to write it again I don’t think I would write it like that.” “Is that such a big deal to say?” she asked. “Yes, because I was rejecting what exists, Mom!”

When was the last time you’d told Mom about something that had happened to you? At a certain point, the conversations between you and Mom became simplified.

Mom’s labor showed that nothing would be reaped if the seeds were not sown.

So in those days it wasn’t about whether I liked to be in the kitchen or not. If I made a big pot of rice and a smaller pot of soup, I didn’t think of how tired I was. I felt good that these were going into my babies’ mouths. Now, you probably can’t even imagine it, but in those days we were always worried that we would run out of food. We were all like that. The most important thing was eating and surviving.” Smiling, your mom told you that those days were the happiest in her life.

Was that, he wondered, the most romance Mom was able to experience in those days?

Mom’s disappearance was triggering events in his memory, moments, like the maple-leaf doors, he thought he’d forgotten about.

Even though it was really because there was only one room, a small room where her three grown children had to sleep huddled together, unable to move about, Mom just said, “I have to go. I have things to do tomorrow.”

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.

Only after she disappeared did she come to you tangibly, as if you could reach out and touch her.

You assumed that was how you would live out the rest of your days. But since that day in Seoul Station when you left on the subway train, that day when she was only a few steps behind you, your wife still hasn’t come to you.

You realize how selfish you were to wish that your wife survived you. It was your selfishness that made you deny that your wife had a serious illness. In some corner of your heart, you must have known that your wife, who often appeared fast asleep when you came home at night, kept her eyes closed because her headache was so severe. You just didn’t think about it too hard.

Your relatives liked your wife. All you said to them was hello when they arrived and goodbye when they left, but your many relatives came because of your wife.

Your wife changed after that happened to Kyun. A formerly happy person, she stopped smiling. When she did smile, the smile quickly disappeared.

You didn’t want to talk to anyone about Kyun. Kyun was a scar upon your soul, too. Although the apricot tree was gone, you remembered clearly where he had died. You knew that your wife stared at that place sometimes. You didn’t want to pick at your wound. There were worse things in life.

Even if everyone in the world forgets, your daughter will remember. That your wife truly loved the world, and that you loved her.

Life is sometimes amazingly fragile, but some lives are frighteningly strong.

A smile doesn’t cost you any money.