Kyung-sook Shin: Please Look After Mom

“I think I want to be by myself today,” you ventured.

“What are you going to do by yourself?” he asked, still facing the other way.

“I want to go to St. Peter’s Basilica. Yesterday, while I was waiting for you in the lobby, I signed up for the Vatican tour. I have to get ready and go. They said we were leaving at seven-twenty from the lobby. They said that the line gets so long that if we don’t get there by nine, it will take more than two hours to get inside.”

“You can go with me tomorrow.”

“We’re in Rome. There are so many other places I can go with you.”

You washed your face quietly, so as to not disturb him. You wanted to wash your hair, but you thought the sound of the water would be too loud, so you just tied your hair back, looking at your reflection in the mirror. When you emerged from the bathroom after getting dressed, you said, as if you just remembered, “Thanks for bringing me here.”

He pulled the sheet over his face. You knew that he was being as patient as he could possibly be. He introduced you as his wife to people you met here. You would probably be his wife by now, if Mom had been found. After his morning seminar, you two were supposed to have lunch with a few other couples. If he went to lunch by himself, the others would ask him where his wife was. You glanced at your boyfriend, the sheet still pulled over his head, and left the room.

After your mom went missing, you developed impulsive behaviors. You drank impulsively, and you would impulsively take a train down to your parents’ home in the country. You stared at the ceiling of your studio, unable to sleep, then got up and ran around the streets of Seoul, pasting flyers, whether it was in the middle of the night or at dawn. You once burst into the police station and screamed at them to find your mom. Hyong-chol came to the police station after receiving a call, and just stared at you. “Find Mom!” you screamed at your brother, who at a certain point had started to accept Mom’s absence, sometimes even going golfing.

Your scream was both a protest against people who knew Mom and hatred for yourself, who hadn’t been able to find her. Your brother calmly listened to your shrieking attacks: “How can you be like this? Why aren’t you finding Mom? Why? Why!”

All your brother could do was to walk the city with you at night. You would search underground concourses, wearing the mink coat that you took from Mom’s closet and brought with you last winter, or with the coat slung over your arm-so that you could drape it on Mom, who was last seen wearing summer clothes, when you found her. Your shadow holding the mink coat would be cast on the marble buildings as you walked among the sleeping homeless who were using newspaper or ramen crates as blankets. You kept your phone on all the time, but now nobody called to say they had seen someone who looked like Mom.

One day, you went to Seoul Station, to the spot where Mom was left behind, and bumped into your eldest brother, who was standing there aimlessly. You sat together, watching the subway trains come and go, until service ended for the night. He said that at first when he sat there like that he thought Mom would appear and tap him on the shoulder and say, “Hyong-chol!” But now he didn’t think that was going to happen. He mentioned that he didn’t think anymore, that the inside of his head was blank. That when he doesn’t want to go home right away after work, he finds himself coming to the station.

One holiday, you went to his house. You saw your brother get out of the car with his golf clubs and screamed, “You asshole!” and made a scene. If even your brother accepts Mom’s disappearance, who in the world is going to find her? You grabbed his clubs and threw them on the ground. Everyone was slowly becoming the son, daughter, and husband whose mom and wife was missing. Even without Mom, daily life continued.

Another time, you went back in the early morning to the spot where Mom had gone missing, and you again bumped into your brother. From behind, you grabbed him in a hug as he stood in the dawn light. He said that maybe it was only her children who thought of Mom’s life as being filled with pain and sacrifice, because of our guilt. We might actually be diminishing her life as something useless. To his credit, he remembered something Mom always said, even when the smallest positive thing happened: “I’m thankful! It’s something we should be grateful for!” Mom expressed gratitude for the small moments of happiness that everyone experienced. Your brother said that Mom’s gratitude came from the heart, that she was thankful about everything, that someone who was so grateful couldn’t have led an unhappy life. When you said goodbye, your brother said he was afraid that Mom wouldn’t recognize him even if she came back. You told him that, for Mom, he was the most precious person in the world, that Mom would always recognize him, no matter where he was or how he changed. When he was drafted into the army and entered training camp, there was a day when parents were invited to visit. Mom made rice cakes and carried them on her head to see Hyong-chol, with you in tow. Even though hundreds of soldiers were wearing the same clothes and demonstrating the same taekwondo moves, she was able to pick out your brother. To you, they all looked the same, but Mom smiled a great big smile and pointed: “There’s your brother!”

For once, you were peacefully talking about Mom with your brother, but then you raised your voice, asking why he wasn’t doing more to look for her. “Why are you talking about Mom as if she won’t be able to come back?” you yelled. He said, “Tell me, how am I supposed to find her?” In his frustration, he ripped open the top few buttons of his white shirt under his suit jacket, and ended up showing you his tears. After that, he stopped answering your calls.

Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom’s everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn’t think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves. You realized that her position in life hadn’t changed even after the war was over, and even when the family could afford to feed itself. When the family got together for the first time in a long while, sat around the table with Father, and talked about the presidential elections, Mom would cook and bring out the food and wash the dishes and clean and hang damp dishrags to dry. Mom took care of fixing the gate and the roof and the porch. Instead of helping her do the work that she did nonstop, even you thought of it as natural, and took it for granted that this was her job. Sometimes, as your brother pointed out, you thought of her life as disappointing-even though Mom, despite never having been well off, tried so hard to give you the best of everything, even though it was Mom who patted your back soothingly when you were lonely.

Around the time tiny new leaves started to sprout on the ginkgo trees in front of City Hall, you were squatting under a large tree on a main road that led to Samchong-dong. It was unbelievable that spring was coming without Mom here. That the frozen ground was thawing and the trees were starting to wake up. Your heart, which had sustained you throughout this ordeal with the belief that you would be able to find Mom, was crushed. Even though Mom’s missing, summer will come and fall will come again and winter will come, like this. And I’ll be living in a world without Mom . You could imagine a desolate road. And the missing woman plodding down that road, wearing blue plastic sandals.

Without telling anyone in the family, you left with Yu-bin for Rome, where he was going to attend a seminar. He’d asked you to come with him but didn’t expect you to say yes. When you actually decided to go with him, he was a little taken aback, though he patiently made a few changes in his schedule. The day before you were to leave, he even called to ask, “Nothing’s changed, right?” As you got on the Rome-bound plane with him, you wondered for the first time whether Mom’s dream was to travel. Mom would always worry and tell you not to get on planes, but when you came back from somewhere, she would ask you detailed questions about the place you’d visited: “What kind of clothes do Chinese people wear?” “How do the Indians carry their children?” “What was the most delicious food you had in Japan?” Mom’s questions would spill out onto you. You would always reply curtly, “Chinese men take off their shirts in the summer and walk around like that.” “The Indian woman I saw in Peru carried her child wrapped in a sack on her hip.” “Japanese food is too sweet.” When Mom asked more questions, you got annoyed and said, “I’ll tell you later, Mom!” But you had no opportunity for these conversations later, because you always had something else to do. You leaned back in your airplane seat and heaved a deep sigh. It was Mom who’d told you to live someplace far away. It was also Mom who’d sent you at a young age to live in a city far from your birthplace. Mom back in those days-you realized, painfully, that Mom was the same age as you are now when she brought you to the city and left, taking the night train back home. One woman. That woman disappeared, bit by bit, having forgotten the joy of being born and her childhood and dreams, marrying before her first period and having five children and raising them. The woman who, at least when it came to her children, wasn’t surprised or thrown off by anything. The woman whose life was marred with sacrifice until the day she went missing. You compare yourself with Mom, but Mom was an entire world unto herself. If you were Mom, you wouldn’t be running away like this, running away from fear.