Kyung-sook Shin - Please Look After Mom

It was when Mom brought his sister, who had just graduated from middle school, to the city to stay with him that she started to tell him she was sorry all the time. She brought his sister from the country when he was twenty-four. It was before he was able to save money, before he could take the bar exam again. She kept her eyes lowered.

“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.”

They met in front of the clock tower at Seoul Station. Before she went home, she suggested a meal of rice and soup. Mom kept picking out the beef in her soup and placing it in his bowl. Even though he said he couldn’t eat it all and that she should eat some, Mom kept transferring the meat from her bowl to his. And although it had been her idea to eat, not a single morsel reached her lips.

“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked.

“I’m eating, I am,” she said, but kept plopping the meat into his bowl. “But you… what are you going to do?” Mom put down her spoon, which was rimmed with soup. “It’s all my fault. I’m sorry, Hyong-chol.”

As she stood in Seoul Station to board the train home, her rough hands with her short-clipped nails buried deep in her pockets, Mom’s eyes were ringed with tears. He thought then that her eyes looked like those of a cow, guileless and kind.

He calls his sister, who’s still at Seoul Station. The day is fading. His sister stays silent when she hears his voice. It seems that she wants him to speak first. They listed everyone’s cell-phone numbers on the flyer, but his sister has gotten most of the calls. Most of them were false reports. One guy said, “The lady is with me right now.” He even gave a detailed explanation of where he was. His sister rushed by taxi to the footbridge the caller directed her to, and found a young drunk, a man, not even a woman, snoring away, so inebriated that he wouldn’t have noticed if someone had carted him away.

“She isn’t here,” he tells his sister.

His sister releases the breath she was holding.

“Are you going to stay at the station?” he asks.

“For a little while… I still have some flyers.”

“I’ll come to you. Let’s get some dinner.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Then we’ll have a drink.”

“A drink?” she asks, and falls silent for a moment. “I got a phone call,” she says, “from a pharmacist at Sobu Pharmacy, in front of Sobu Market, in Yokchon-dong. He said he’d seen a flyer his son had brought home. He thought he saw someone like Mom in Yokchon-dong two days ago… but he said that she was wearing blue plastic sandals. That she must have walked so much that the top of her foot had a gash, and that it was infected all the way to her toenails, and that he put some medicine on it…”

Blue sandals? His cell phone slides off his ear.

“Brother!”

He presses the phone back to his ear.

“I’m going to go over there. Do you want to come?”

“Yokchon-dong?” he asks. “Do you mean that Sobu Market we used to live near?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

He doesn’t want to go home. He doesn’t have anything particular to say when he meets his sister. When he called her, he was thinking only, I don’t want to go home. But Yokchon-dong? He raises his hand to flag a taxi. He doesn’t understand. Several people have called to say they saw someone like Mom wearing blue plastic sandals. Strangely, they all said they’d seen her in a neighborhood he’s lived in. Kaebong-dong, Taerim-dong, Oksu-dong, under the Naksan Apartments in Tongsung-dong, Suyu-dong, Singil-dong, Chongnung. If he stopped by, the callers would say they saw her three days ago, or sometimes a week ago. Someone even said he’d seen her a month before she went missing. Every time he received a tip, he went to that neighborhood, alone or with his siblings or with Father. Even though they all said they’d seen her, he couldn’t find anyone like Mom wearing blue plastic sandals. After hearing their stories, he could only post some flyers on the utility poles in the neighborhood, or on a tree in the park, or inside a telephone booth, just in case. When he passed the places he used to live, he would pause and peek in at these spaces where others were now living.

No matter where he lived, Mom never came by herself to his house. A family member always went to greet Mom at Seoul Station or the Express Bus Terminal. And once in Seoul, Mom didn’t go anywhere until someone came to take her to her next destination. When she went to his brother’s, he came to get her; when she went to his sister’s, she came to get her. Nobody ever said it out loud, but at some moment he and his family tacitly came to believe Mom couldn’t go anywhere in this city by herself. So, whenever Mom came to Seoul, someone was always with her. He realized, after placing the newspaper ad for Mom and passing out flyers, that he had lived in twelve different neighborhoods. Now he straightens and looks up. Yokchon-dong, he remembers, was the first place where he was able to buy a house.

“It’s Full Moon Harvest in a few days…” In the taxi heading for Yokchon-dong, his sister nervously rubs her fingernails with her hand. He’s thinking the same thing. He clears his throat and frowns. The Full Moon Harvest holiday is several days long. The media reports every time that this year more people were going abroad during the holiday than ever before. Until a couple of years ago, people criticized those who went abroad during the holiday, but now people blatantly say, “Ancestors, I’ll be back,” and go to the airport. When people started to hold ancestral rites in time-share vacation condos, they worried whether the ancestral spirits would be able to find them, but now people just hop on planes. This morning, his wife, who was reading the paper, said, as if it were news, “It says right here that more than a million people will be going abroad this year.”

“People sure have a lot of money,” he replied, at which she mumbled, “People who can’t leave-well, they’re not too smart.”

Father just watched them.

His wife continued, “Since their friends go abroad during the Full Moon Harvest, the kids were saying, I wish we could do that, too.” When he glared at his wife, unable to listen to it any longer, she explained, “You know how kids are sensitive to that kind of thing.” Father got up from the table and went into his room.

“Are you crazy? Is this something to talk about right now?” he snapped, and his wife retorted, “Look, I said the kids said that; did I say I wanted to? Can’t I even relay what the kids said? It’s so frustrating. I’m supposed to live without saying anything?” She got up and left the table.

“Shouldn’t we hold the ancestral rites?” Chi-hon asks.

“Since when did you think about the ancestral rites? You never even came home for the holidays, and now you care about Full Moon Harvest?”

“I was wrong. I shouldn’t have been that way.”

He watches his sister as she stops rubbing her fingernails and sticks her hands in her jacket pockets. She still hasn’t gotten rid of that habit.

When they lived together in Seoul, when he had to sleep in the same room as his brother and his sister, his sister took her place nearest the wall, he lay in the middle, and his brother lay near the other wall. Just about every night, he’d be smacked in the head and wake up to find his brother’s hand draped across his face. He would take it off carefully and be about to fall asleep again when his sister’s hand would be flung onto his chest. It was the way they used to sleep in the large room at home, rolling around as much as they pleased. One night, he let out a yell when he got punched in the eye. His siblings woke up.