Kyung-sook Shin: Please Look After Mom

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.

A few days later, Mom called. “You weren’t like this before, but you’ve become cold. If your mother hangs up like that, you’re supposed to call her back. How could you dig in your heels?”

It wasn’t that you had been stubborn; you hadn’t had time to think about it for that long. You would remember how Mom had hung up, angry, and think, I should give her a call, but because of one thing or another you would push calling her to the end of your list.

“Are all educated people like this?” Mom snapped, and hung up.

Around Full Moon Harvest, you went to your parents’ house and saw that there was a big doghouse next to the shed. On the floor of the doghouse was a soft layer of hay.

Standing next to you on the hill, your mom started talking. “In October, while I was washing rice at the sink to make breakfast, someone kept tapping me on the back. When I looked around, nobody was there. It was like that for three whole days: I felt something tapping me, as if they were calling me, but nobody was there when I looked. It must have been the fourth day; as soon as I woke up, I went to the bathroom, and the dog was lying in front of the toilet. You got angry with me last year, saying that I was abusing the dog, but that dog had been wandering around the railroad tracks, covered with mange. I felt bad for him, so I brought him home and tied him up and gave him food. If you don’t tie him up, you don’t know where he’ll go, or whether someone’s going to catch him and eat him… That day, he didn’t move. At first I thought he was sleeping. He didn’t move even when I nudged him. He was dead. He’d been eating well and wagging his tail the day before, but he was dead, and he looked peaceful. I don’t know how he got loose from the chain. At first he was all bones. He’d fattened up, and his coat was getting shiny. And he was so smart. He would catch moles.” Mom paused to sigh. “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.”

This time you sighed.

“Last spring, I donated money to a passing monk and he said that this year one member in our family would be gone. When I heard that, I was anxious. For an entire year I thought of that. I think death came to fetch me, but because I was washing rice to cook for myself every time, he took the dog instead.”

“Mom, what are you talking about? How can you believe that, when you go to church?” You thought of the empty doghouse next to the shed, and the chain on the ground. You put an arm around Mom’s waist.

“I dug a deep grave in the yard and buried him.”

Your mom always did tell imaginative stories. On the night of an ancestral rite, Father’s sister and other aunts would come over with bowls of rice. It was when food was scarce, so they would all contribute. After the ancestral rites, your mom would fill the relatives’ bowls with food for them to take home. During the rites, the bowls of rice sat in a row nearby; afterward, Mom said that birds had flown in and perched on the rice, then left. If you didn’t believe her, she’d say, “I saw them! There were six birds. The birds are our ancestors, who came to eat!” The others laughed, but you thought you could see their footprints in the white rice. Once, Mom went to the fields in the early morning, bringing along a snack for later, but someone was there already, bent over and pulling weeds. When she asked who he was, he said he was passing by and stopped to pull weeds because there were so many. Mom and the stranger weeded together. She was grateful, so she shared the snack she had brought. They talked about this and that and weeded the field and went their separate ways when it got dark. When she came back from the field and told Father’s sister that she had weeded with the stranger, Father’s sister stiffened and asked what he looked like. “That used to be the owner of that field. He died of sunstroke one day while he was weeding the field.” You asked, “Mom, weren’t you scared to be in the field with a dead person all day?” But your mom replied nonchalantly, “I wasn’t scared. If I’d had to weed that field all by myself, it would have taken two or three days. So I’m just grateful he helped me.”

After your visit, you noticed how your mom’s headaches seemed to be eating away at her. She quickly lost her outgoing personality and vivacity, and started to lie down more often. Your mom couldn’t even concentrate on card games with hundred-won bets, which were among the few joys in her life. And her senses became dull. One day, after she put a pot of rags on the gas range to bleach them, your mom crumpled on the floor of the kitchen and couldn’t get back up. All the water evaporated, the rags began to burn, and the kitchen was enveloped in smoke, but your mom couldn’t snap out of it. The house might have gone up in flames if a neighbor hadn’t come in to see what was going on, after catching a glimpse of the column of smoke in the air.

Your sister, who has three kids, once asked you a question about your mom and her constant headaches: “Do you think Mom liked being in the kitchen?” Her voice was low, serious.

“Why do you ask?”

“Somehow I don’t think she did.”

Your sister, who was a pharmacist, opened her pharmacy while pregnant with her first child. Your sister-in-law babysat for the infant, but she lived far from the pharmacy. The baby lived with your sister-in-law for a while. Your sister, who’d always loved children, ran the pharmacy even though she could see her baby only once a week. It was wrenching to watch her part with her baby. There couldn’t have been a farewell as sorrowful as that. But your sister seemed to have more trouble with the situation than the baby. While he adapted to his life away from his mother fairly well, she drove him back to your sister-in-law’s at the end of each weekend crying, her tears drenching her hands as they gripped the steering wheel on the way home, and on Monday she stood in her pharmacy with her eyes swollen from weeping. It was so bad that you would say, “Do you really need to go to such lengths to run a pharmacy?” When your sister’s husband was to go to the United States for two years of training, your sister closed the pharmacy, which she had continued to run even after she had her second child. She said she thought living in America would be a good experience for the kids, and you thought, Yes, please take it easy and take some time off. She had never once taken time off after she got married. She had her third baby in the States and then returned. Now she had to cook for a family of five. Your sister said that once they ate two hundred croakers in one month.

“Two hundred in one month? Did you only eat croakers?” you asked, and she said they had.