Please Look After Mom (11 page)

He had been wondering what to give as a promotional gift this time, so he asked, “Well, what do you think would be memorable?”

“I’m not sure, but people quickly forget about things like this. Wouldn’t it be better if it were a fountain pen or something? Think about it. Do you think your wife would be happy if you got her kitchen gadgets for her birthday? If you get a mat to promote an apartment sale, you’d just forget about it. But I think I would be pleasantly surprised if it was a book or a movie ticket, and I’d probably remember it. If I had to make plans to use it, I’d keep remembering how I got it. Am I the only one who thinks like that?” His sister left the mat behind when she went home.

At a meeting the following week, someone mentioned promotional gifts. Everyone liked his suggestion of a cultural gift. A singer with many middle-aged fans was performing, in a convenient coincidence, a long-running concert series, so Hyong-chol got a block of tickets. He was praised by his boss; perhaps it was a singer his boss liked. A survey showed that the concert tickets heightened the company’s image. Though this probably had nothing to do with the promotional gifts, his apartments in Songdo had almost all sold, whereas the occupancy rate of Kim’s Yongin apartments stood at only 60 percent. So, when Kim made the remark, Hyong-chol just laughed it off, saying it was dumb luck, but after a few more drinks, Kim commented that if Hyong-chol used his clever brain somewhere else he could have become the head prosecutor. Kim knew that Hyong-chol had gone to a law college and had studied for the bar exam. He went on to comment that he didn’t know what scheme Hyong-chol had used to get promoted so quickly when he wasn’t even a graduate of Yonsei
University or Koryo University, which produced the main power players in the company. In the end, Hyong-chol dumped out the liquor that Kim had poured in his glass and left. The next morning, when his wife said she would visit their daughter, Chin, instead of going to Seoul Station, he’d planned to meet his parents himself. Father wanted to stop by his younger son’s, who had just moved to a new place. Hyong-chol had meant to pick them up and drop them off at his brother’s, but once he was at work he felt a chill coming on and had a headache. Father did say that he could find his way.… Instead of going to Seoul Station, Hyong-chol went to a sauna near work. As he sweated in the sauna, which he often visited the day after he drank too much, Father was getting on the train without Mom.

As a boy, Hyong-chol made up his mind to become a prosecutor to get Mom to return home. She had left because she was disappointed by Father. One spring day, as flowers bloomed all around the village, Father had brought home a woman with fair skin, who smelled fragrant, like face powder. When the woman came in through the front gate, Mom left through the back. The woman, trying to buy her way into Hyong-chol’s cold heart, topped his lunch every day with a fried egg. He would storm out of the house with his lunch container, which the woman had wrapped carefully in a scarf, and he’d leave it on top of the large condiment jars in the back yard and go to school. His siblings, watching him always, if surreptitiously, took the lunches the woman made. One misty morning, on the way to school, he gathered his siblings at the
creek snaking by the cemetery. He dug a hole near a blooming weeping willow and made them bury their lunches. His brother tried to run away with his lunch, but Hyong-chol caught him and hit him. His sisters obediently buried their lunches. He thought the woman would no longer be able to make them lunch. But the woman went to town and bought new containers. They weren’t yellowish aluminum containers but special ones that kept the rice warm. Awed, his siblings touched the new containers cautiously. When the woman handed them their lunches, his brother and sisters looked at him. He would push his lunch toward the end of the porch and leave for school alone. His siblings would wait until he was out of sight, then go to school themselves, carrying their warm lunches in their hands. Perhaps having heard from someone that he wasn’t taking the lunches made by the woman and that he wasn’t eating, either, Mom came to school to find him. It was about ten days after the woman had come to live with them.

“Mom!” Tears spilled from his eyes.

Mom led him to the hill behind the school. She pulled up the legs of his pants to reveal his smooth calves, grabbed a switch, and hit them.

“Why aren’t you eating? Did you think I would be happy if you didn’t eat?”

Mom’s thrashing was harsh. He had been upset that his siblings weren’t listening to him, and now he couldn’t understand why Mom was whipping him. His heart brimmed with resentment. He didn’t know why she was so angry.

“Are you going to take your lunch? Are you?”

“No!”

“You little …”

Mom’s whipping became swifter. He didn’t admit it hurt, not once, and soon Mom grew tired. Instead of running away, he stood still, silent, and suffered her blows.

“Even now?”

The redness bloomed into blood on his calves.

“Even now!” he yelled.

Finally, Mom tossed the switch away. “God, you brat! Hyong-chol!” she said, embracing him and bursting into sobs. Eventually, she stopped, and tried to persuade him. He had to eat, she said, no matter who cooked the meals; she would be less sad if he ate well. Sadness. It was the first time he’d heard Mom say the word “sad.” He didn’t know why his eating properly would make Mom less sad. Since Mom had left because of that woman, it seemed to him that she would be sad if he ate the woman’s food, but she told him the opposite was true. She would be less sad if he ate, even if it was that woman’s food. No, he didn’t understand it, but since he didn’t want her to be sad, he said, grouchily, “I’ll eat it.”

“That’s my boy.” Mom’s eyes, filled with tears, lit up along with her smile.

“Then promise you’ll come home!” he insisted.

Mom faltered. “I don’t want to come home.”

“Why? Why?”

“I never want to see your father again.”

Tears ran down his cheeks. Mom acted as if she would really never come home. Maybe that was why she’d said he had to eat, no matter who cooked the food. He got scared.

“Mom, I’ll do everything. I’ll work in the fields and the paddies and sweep the yard and bring the water. I’ll grind the rice and make the fire. I’ll chase the mice and I’ll kill the chicken for the ancestral rites. Just come back!”

For ancestral rites or holidays, Mom always begged Father or any other male in the house to kill a chicken for her. Mom, who went into the fields after a heavy rain and propped up fallen beanstalks all day, who practically carried Father on her back to bring him home when he was drunk, who beat the pig’s behind with a stick when it escaped from the pen to usher it back inside, couldn’t kill a chicken. When Hyong-chol caught a fish from the creek, she wouldn’t touch it until it was dead. When every student was instructed to bring in the tail of a mouse to show that everyone had captured a mouse at home on mouse-catching days, other children’s moms caught a mouse and cut off the tail and wrapped it up in paper to take to school. But Mom shrank away even from hearing about it. A woman of sturdy build, she couldn’t bring herself to catch a mouse. If she went to the shed to get some rice and encountered a mouse, she would scream and run outside. Aunt would glare disapprovingly and cluck at Mom when she rushed out of the shed, red-faced. But even though he promised he would kill chickens and chase mice, Mom didn’t say she would come home.

“I’ll become an important person,” Hyong-chol promised.

“What are you going to be?”

“A prosecutor!”

Mom’s eyes sparkled then. “If you want to be a prosecutor, you have to study hard. A lot more than you think you do. I know someone who wanted be a prosecutor and studied night and day and never made it and went crazy.”

“I’ll do it if you come home.…”

Mom looked into his anxious eyes. She smiled. “Yes. You can do it. You were able to say Ma before you were a hundred days old. Even though no one taught you to read, you learned
to read as soon as you went to school, and you’re ranked first in your class.” She sighed. “Why would I leave that house when you’re there—why didn’t I think of that? You’re there.”

Mom stared at his calves speckled with blood, then turned around and squatted, telling him to climb on her back. He looked at her. Mom turned her head. “Get on,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

   That was how, in the late afternoon, Mom came home that day. She shoved that woman out of the kitchen and cooked. And when the woman and Father went to live in another house in town, Mom rolled up her sleeves, ran over to their house, grabbed the rice pot hanging over their hearth, and sent it rushing down the creek. It seemed as if Mom became a fighter so that she could keep the promise she had made to Hyong-chol, and return home. When Father and the woman, unable to stand Mom’s harassment, left the town altogether, Mom called Hyong-chol to her and sat him down before her, knee to knee. Calmly, she asked Hyong-chol, who was once again frightened that she might leave as well, “How much studying did you do today?” When he pulled out the test he had gotten a perfect score on, Mom’s gloomy eyes regained their fire. She looked at the test, on which his teacher had circled in red every correct answer, and grabbed him in a hug.

“Oh, my baby!”

Mom pampered him while Father was gone. She let him ride Father’s bicycle. She gave him Father’s sleeping mat and covered him with Father’s blanket. She scooped rice for him into the big rice bowl, which only Father had used. She placed the first bowl of soup in front of him. When his siblings started to eat, she would scold, “Your brother hasn’t even picked up
his spoon!” When the fruit vendor came by with a rubber bin filled with grapes, she traded a half bowl of sesame seeds drying in the yard for some grapes and saved them for him, telling the other children, “This here is for your brother.” And every time she did that, Mom reminded him, “You have to become a prosecutor.”

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

   That fall, Mom harvested rice and hulled it and dried it by herself, without Father. At dawn, she went to the fields and, bent over, cut rice stalks with her scythe, stripped the grain, and spread it on the ground in the sun to dry. She came home when it got dark. When Hyong-chol tried to help, Mom said, “You go study,” and pushed him toward his desk. On warm Sundays after all the rice was harvested, Mom would take his siblings to the field in the hills to dig for sweet potatoes, but she would nudge him toward his desk. They would come back near dusk pushing a wheelbarrow filled with russet sweet potatoes. His brother, who had wanted to stay home to study but had been forced to go with Mom, hunched over the well, scrubbing the dirt from under his fingernails.

“Mom! Is Hyong-chol that important?”

“Yes! He’s that important!” Mom rapped his brother on the head without giving the question a second thought.

“Then you don’t need us?” His brother’s cheeks were flushed from the crisp air.

“No! I don’t need you.”

“Then we’re going to go live with Father!”

“What?” Mom was about to give his brother another rap on the head but stopped. “You’re important, too. You are all important! Come here, my important children!” Everyone laughed. Sitting in the glow of the room in front of his desk, listening to his family at the well outside, Hyong-chol smiled, too.

   It’s not clear exactly when, but Mom stopped locking the gate at night. Soon after, when she scooped rice for everyone in the morning, she started to put some in Father’s rice bowl and leave it under a blanket in the warmest part of the room. Hyong-chol studied even harder while Father was gone. Mom continued to refuse to let him help in the fields. Even when she was yelling at her other children that they had left the peppers spread out in the yard in the rain, she lowered her voice if she thought he was studying. In those days, Mom’s face was always crumpled with fatigue and worry, but when he studied by reading out loud, the flesh around her eyes became brighter, as if she had dabbed on powder. Mom opened and closed the door to his room quietly. She silently slid a plate of boiled sweet potatoes or persimmons into the room, then gently closed the door. One winter night when the snow drifted onto the porch, Father walked in the open gate, cleared his throat, took his shoes and smacked them against the wall to get the snow off, and opened the door. It was so cold that everyone was sleeping together. Through half-open eyes, Hyong-chol watched Father touch everyone’s head and gaze down at them all. He saw Mom placing on the table the rice bowl she’d kept in the warmest part of the room, saw her bringing sheets of seaweed toasted with perilla oil and putting them next to the
rice bowl, and watched as she placed a bowl of rice-boiled water next to the rice bowl without a word—as if Father had left that morning and had come back at night, instead of having left in the summer and returned sheepishly in the bitter cold of winter.

   When Hyong-chol graduated from college and passed the entrance exam for the company he works at now, Mom wasn’t happy. She didn’t even smile when the neighbors congratulated her on Hyong-chol’s employment at a top corporation. When he came home with the traditional gift of underwear bought with his first paycheck, she barely looked at it, and coldly shot at him, “What about what you were going to be?”