Please Look After Mom (2 page)

Your second-eldest brother says, “You’d tug on people’s heartstrings if you write that there will be a reward.”

When you write,
We will reward you generously
, your sister-in-law says you can’t write like that: people take notice only if you write a specific amount.

“So how much should I say?”

“One million won?”

“That’s not enough.”

“Three million won?”

“I think that’s too little, too.”

“Then five million won.”

Nobody complains about five million won. You write,
We will reward you with five million won
, and put in a period. Your second-eldest brother says you should write it as,
Reward: 5 million won
. Your younger brother tells you to put
5 million won
in a bigger font. Everyone agrees to e-mail you a better picture of Mom if they find something. You’re in charge of adding more to the flyer and making copies, and your younger brother volunteers to pick them up and distribute them to everyone in the family. When you suggest, “We can hire someone to give out flyers,” Hyong-chol says, “We’re the ones who need to do that. We’ll give them out on our own if we have some free time during the week, and all together over the weekend.”

You grumble, “How will we ever find Mom at that rate?”

“We can’t just sit tight; we’re already doing everything we can,” Hyong-chol retorts.

“What do you mean, we’re doing everything we can?”

“We put ads in the newspaper.”

“So doing everything we can is buying ad space?”

“Then what do you want to do? Should we all quit work tomorrow and just roam around the city? If we could find Mom like that, I’d do it.”

You stop arguing with Hyong-chol, because you realize that you’re pushing him to take care of everything, as you always do. Leaving Father at Hyong-chol’s house, you all head home. If you don’t leave then, you will continue to argue. You’ve been doing that for the past week. You’d meet to discuss how to find Mom, and one of you would unexpectedly dig up the different ways someone else had wronged her in the past. 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.

When you first heard Mom had gone missing, you angrily asked why nobody from your large family went to pick her and Father up at Seoul Station.

“And where were you?”

Me?
You clammed up. You didn’t find out about Mom’s disappearance until she’d been gone four days. You all blamed each other for Mom’s going missing, and you all felt wounded.

   Leaving Hyong-chol’s house, you take the subway home but get off at Seoul Station, which is where Mom vanished. So many people go by, brushing your shoulders, as you make your way to the spot where Mom was last seen. You look down at your watch. Three o’clock. The same time Mom was left behind. People shove past you as you stand on the platform where Mom was wrenched from Father’s grasp. Not a single person apologizes to you. People would have pushed by like that as your mom stood there, not knowing what to do.

How far back does one’s memory of someone go? Your memory of Mom?

Since you heard about Mom’s disappearance, you haven’t been able to focus on a single thought, besieged by long-forgotten memories unexpectedly popping up. And the regret that always trailed each memory. Years ago, a few days before you left your hometown for the big city, Mom took you to a clothing store at the market. You chose a plain dress, but she picked one with frills on the straps and hem. “What about this one?”

“No,” you said, pushing it away.

“Why not? Try it on.” Mom, young back then, opened her eyes wide, uncomprehending. The frilly dress was worlds away from the dirty towel that was always wrapped around Mom’s head, which, like other farming women, she wore to soak up the sweat on her brow as she worked.

“It’s childish.”

“Is it?” Mom said, but she held the dress up and kept examining it, as if she didn’t want to walk away. “I would try it on if I were you.”

Feeling bad that you’d called it childish, you said, “This isn’t even your style.”

Mom said, “No, I like these kinds of clothes, it’s just that I’ve never been able to wear them.”

I should have tried on that dress
. You bend your legs and squat on the spot where Mom might have done the same. A few days after you insisted on buying the plain dress, you arrived at this very station with Mom. Holding your hand tightly, she strode through the sea of people in a way that would intimidate even the authoritative buildings looking on from above, and headed across the square to wait for Hyong-chol under the clock
tower. How could someone like that be missing? As the headlights of the subway train enter the station, people rush forward, glancing at you sitting on the ground, perhaps irritated that you’re in the way.

   As your mom’s hand got pulled away from Father’s, you were in China. You were with your fellow writers at the Beijing Book Fair. You were flipping through a Chinese translation of your book at a booth when your mom got lost in Seoul Station.

“Father, why didn’t you take a cab instead? This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t taken the subway!”

Father said he was thinking, Why take a taxi when the train station is connected to the subway station? There are moments one revisits after something happens, especially after something bad happens. Moments in which one thinks, I shouldn’t have done that. When Father told your siblings that he and Mom could get to Hyong-chol’s house by themselves, why did your siblings let them do that, unlike all the other times? When your parents came to visit, someone always went to Seoul Station or to the Express Bus Terminal to pick them up. What made Father, who always rode in a family member’s car or a taxi when he came to the city, decide to take the subway on that particular day? Mom and Father rushed toward the subway that had just arrived. Father got on, and when he looked behind him, Mom wasn’t there. Of all days, it was a busy Saturday afternoon. Mom was pulled away from Father in the crowd, and the subway left as she tried to get her bearings. Father was holding Mom’s bag. So, when Mom was left alone in the subway station with nothing, you were leaving the book fair, headed toward Tiananmen Square. It was your
third time in Beijing, but you hadn’t yet set foot in Tiananmen Square, had only gazed at it from inside a bus or a car. The student who was guiding your group offered to take you there before going to dinner, and your group decided it was a good idea. What would your mom have been doing by herself in Seoul Station as you got out of the cab in front of the Forbidden City? Your group walked into the Forbidden City but came right back out. That landmark was only partially open, because it was under construction, and it was almost closing time. The entire city of Beijing was under construction, to prepare for the Olympic Games the following year. You remembered the scene in
The Last Emperor
where the elderly Puyi returns to the Forbidden City, his childhood home, and shows a young tourist a box he had hidden in the throne. When he opens the lid of the box, his pet cricket from his youth is inside, still alive. When you were about to head over to Tiananmen Square, was your mom standing in the middle of the crowd, lost, being jostled? Was she waiting for someone to come get her? The road between the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square was under construction, too. You could see the square, but you could get there only through a convoluted maze. As you watched the kites floating in the sky in Tiananmen Square, your mom might have collapsed in the passageway in despair, calling out your name. As you watched the steel gates of Tiananmen Square open and a squadron of police march forth, legs raised high, to lower the red national flag with five stars, your mom might have been wandering through the maze inside Seoul Station. You know this to be true, because that’s what the people who were in the station at that time told you. They said they saw an old woman walking very slowly, sometimes sitting on the floor or
standing vacantly by the escalators. Some saw an old woman sitting in the station for a long time, then getting on an arriving subway. A few hours after your mom disappeared, you and your group took a taxi through the nighttime city to bright, bustling Snack Street and, huddled under red lights, tasted 56-proof Chinese liquor and ate piping-hot crab sautéed in chili oil.

   Father got off at the next stop and went back to Seoul Station, but Mom wasn’t there anymore.

“How could she get so lost just because she didn’t get on the same car? There are signs all over the place. Mother knows how to make a simple phone call. She could have called from a phone booth.” Your sister-in-law insisted that something had to have happened to your mom, that it didn’t make sense that she couldn’t find her own son’s house just because she failed to get on the same train as Father. Something had happened to Mom. That was the view of someone who wanted to think of Mom as the old mom.

When you said, “Mom can get lost, you know,” your sister-in-law widened her eyes in surprise. “You know how Mom is these days,” you explained, and your sister-in-law made a face, as if she had no idea what you were talking about. But your family knew what Mom was like these days. And knew that you might not be able to find her.

When was it you realized that Mom didn’t know how to read?

·   ·   ·

You wrote your first letter when you jotted down what Mom dictated to send to Hyong-chol, soon after he moved to the city. Hyong-chol graduated from high school in the small village you were all born in, studied at home for the civil-service exam for a year, and went to the city for his first assignment. It was the first parting between Mom and one of her children. Back then, your family didn’t have a phone, and the only way to communicate was through letters. Hyong-chol sent her letters written in large type. Your mom always intuitively knew when Hyong-chol’s letters would arrive. The mailman came around eleven in the morning with a large bag hanging from his bicycle. On the days when Hyong-chol’s letters arrived, Mom would come in from the fields, or from the creek where she would be doing the laundry, to receive the letter personally from the mailman. Then she waited for you to come home from school, led you to the back porch, and took out Hyong-chol’s letter. “Read it out loud,” she would tell you.

Hyong-chol’s letters always started with “Dearest Mother.” As if he were following a textbook on how to write letters, Hyong-chol asked after the family and said he was doing well. He wrote that he brought his laundry to Father’s cousin’s wife once a week, and that she washed it for him, as Mom had asked her to do. He reported that he was eating well, that he had found a place to sleep as he had started staying overnight at work, and asked her not to worry about him. Hyong-chol also wrote that he felt he could do anything in the city, and that there were many things he wanted to do. He even revealed his ambition to become a success and give Mom a better life.
Twenty-year-old Hyong-chol gallantly added,
So, Mother, do not worry about me, and please take care of your health
. When you peeked over the letter at Mom, you would see her staring at the taro stalks in the back yard, or at the ledge of tall clay jars filled with sauces. Your mom’s ears would be cocked like a rabbit’s, trying not to miss a single word. After you finished reading the letter, your mom instructed you to write down what she would tell you. Mom’s first words were “Dear Hyong-chol.” You wrote down,
Dear Hyong-chol
. Mom didn’t tell you to put a period after it, but you did. When she said, “Hyong-chol!” you wrote down,
Hyong-chol!
When Mom paused after calling his name, as if she’d forgotten what she wanted to say, you tucked strands of your bob behind your ear and waited attentively for your mom to continue, ballpoint pen in hand, staring down at the stationery. When she said, “The weather’s turned cold,” you wrote,
The weather has turned cold
. Mom always followed “Dear Hyong-chol” with something about the weather: “There are flowers now that it’s spring.” “It’s summer, so the paddy bed is starting to dry and crack.” “It’s harvest season, and there are beans overflowing on the paddy banks.” Mom spoke in your regional dialect unless it was to dictate a letter to Hyong-chol. “Don’t worry about anything at home, and please take care of yourself. That is the only thing your mother wishes from you.” Mom’s letters always swelled with a current of emotion: “I am sorry that I can’t be of any help to you.” As you carefully wrote down Mom’s words, she would shed a fat tear. The last words from your mom were always the same: “Make sure you eat all your meals. Mom.”

   As the third of five children, you witnessed Mom’s sorrow and pain and worry when each of your older brothers left
home. Every morning at dawn after Hyong-chol left, Mom would clean the surface of the glazed clay sauce-jars on the ledge in the back yard. Because the well was in the front yard, it was cumbersome to bring water to the back, but she washed each and every jar. She took off all the lids and wiped them clean, inside and out, until they shone. Your mom sang quietly. “If there were no sea between you and me there wouldn’t be this painful goodbye.…” Her hands busily dipping the rag in cold water and lifting it out and wringing it and rubbing the jars, Mom sang, “I hope you won’t leave me one day.” If you called to her at that moment, she would turn around with tears welling in her big, guileless eyes.