A WOMAN TAKES ONE of his flyers and pauses for a moment to look at the picture of Mom. Under the clock tower where Mom used to wait for him.
After he found a place in the city, Mom would arrive at Seoul Station looking like a war refugee. She would walk onto the platform with bundles balanced on her head and slung over her shoulders and in her hands, the things she couldn’t otherwise carry strapped to her waist. It was amazing that she could still walk. If she could have, Mom would have come to see him with eggplants or pumpkins tied to her legs. Her pockets often bulged with unripe peppers, peeled chestnuts, or peeled garlic wrapped in newspaper. Whenever he went to meet her, he would see a heap of so many parcels by Mom’s feet and marvel that one woman could have brought them all by herself. Standing amid the packages, Mom would look around, her cheeks flushed, waiting for him.
The woman comes up to him hesitantly, pointing to the picture of his mom printed on the flyer, and says, “Excuse me, I think I’ve seen her in front of the Yongsan 2-dong office.” On the flyer his younger sister made, his mom smiles brightly, wearing a pale-blue hanbok. The woman continues, “She wasn’t wearing this outfit, but the eyes are so similar, and I remember them because they looked honest and loyal.” The woman looks again at his mom’s eyes in the flyer and adds, “She had a cut on her foot.” She says his mom was wearing blue plastic sandals, one of which was cutting into her foot near her big toe, and a piece of flesh had fallen off, creating a groove, perhaps because she’d walked so far. The woman tells him that flies buzzed around and landed near the pus-filled wound, and that his mom kept shooing them away with her hand, as if she was irritated. And even though the gash looked painful, she kept staring into the office as if she didn’t feel it. This was about a week ago.
A week?
Not knowing what to make of what the woman told him, he continues to give out flyers after she has left. His entire family has posted flyers and distributed them everywhere, from Seoul Station to Namyong-dong, from restaurants and clothing stores to bookstores and Internet cafés. When the flyers were torn off because the family had posted them in a place they weren’t supposed to, they reposted them in the same place. They didn’t limit it to the area around Seoul Station, either, but handed out and posted flyers in Namdaemun, Chungnim-dong, and even in Sodaemun. They didn’t receive a single phone call from the ad they had placed in the newspaper, but some people did call after seeing the flyers. They received a tip that someone like Mom was at a restaurant and rushed over, but it wasn’t her; it was a woman around Mom’s age who worked there. Once, a caller said that he had invited Mom into his house, and carefully spelled out his address on the phone; filled with expectation, they ran over there, but the address itself didn’t exist. There was even someone who said that he would find Mom for them if they would pay him the five-million-won reward up front. But even these calls became sparse after about two weeks. The members of his family, who had rushed around with hope-filled hearts, would often find each other sitting at the base of the Seoul Station clock tower, dejected. When people crumpled the flyer as soon as it was handed to them and threw it on the ground, his younger sister, the writer, picked it up, smoothed it out, and gave it to someone else.
His sister, who came to Seoul Station with an armful of flyers, stands next to him. Her dry eyes glance at his. He relays the woman’s words and asks, “Should we go to the Yongsan 2-dong office and look around?” His sister asks, “Why would Mom go there?” Looking despondent, she says, “We can stop by later,” and, addressing the people brushing past them, says loudly, “It’s our mom-please take a look at it before throwing it away,” and hands out flyers. Nobody recognizes his sister, whose picture is sometimes featured in the daily paper’s culture section when she publishes a new book. It must be more effective to combine yelling and giving out flyers, as his sister does. People don’t throw away her flyers as soon as they turn around, the way they do with his. There aren’t many places Mom might go to, other than his siblings’ houses. This is the root of his and his family’s agony. If Mom had some places she might head for, they would focus their search there, but because there isn’t any such place, they have to comb the whole city. When his sister asked, “Why would Mom go there?” he didn’t immediately realize that his first job in this city had been at the Yongsan 2-dong office. Because that was thirty years ago.
The wind has turned cool, but beads of sweat dot his face. He’s a few years past fifty, a marketing director for a developer of apartment buildings. Today, Saturday, is not a workday, but if Mom hadn’t gone missing he would be at the model house in Songdo. His company is recruiting last-minute buyers for units in a large apartment complex there, which will soon be completed. He’s worked day and night to reach 100 percent occupancy. All through the spring, he was in charge of the ad campaign and worked on selecting an ordinary housewife as the model, instead of going for the typical professional. During that time, he never got home before midnight; he was so busy with the construction of the model house and wining and dining journalists. On Sundays, he would often escort the CEO and other executives to golf courses in Sokcho or Hoengsong.
“Hyong-chol! Mom’s missing!” His younger brother’s urgent voice on a midsummer afternoon created a fissure in his daily life, shattering it as if he’d set foot on thin ice. Even as he heard that Father and Mom had been about to get on the subway heading for his brother’s house, but that the car had left with only Father aboard, leaving Mom behind in the station, and that she couldn’t be located, it didn’t occur to him that this would lead to Mom’s disappearance. When his brother said that he’d called the police, Hyong-chol wondered whether he was overreacting. Only after a week passed did he put an ad in the paper and call emergency rooms. Every night, they split up into teams and visited homeless shelters, to no avail. Mom, who had been left behind at Seoul Station, disappeared as if she were a figment of a dream. No trace of her remained. He wanted to ask Father whether she had really come to Seoul. Ten days passed since her disappearance, then two weeks, and when it became almost a month, he and his family fumbled around in confusion, as if they had all injured a part of their brains.
He hands his flyers to his sister. “I’m going to check it out.”
“You mean Yongsan?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a hunch?”
“It’s the first place I lived in when I came to Seoul.”
He tells his sister to check her cell phone often, that he will call her if he discovers anything. These are unnecessary words at this point. His sister, who never used to answer her phone, now picks up before the third ring. He walks toward the line of taxis. Mom worried about his sister Chi-hon, who is in her mid-thirties but is still unmarried. Sometimes Mom called him in the early morning and fretted, “Hyong-chol! Go over to Chi-hon’s; she’s not answering the phone. She’s not answering, and she’s not calling me, either-I haven’t heard her voice in a month.” When he told Mom that Chi-hon would be holed up at home, writing, or that she must have gone somewhere, Mom insisted that he go over to his sister’s apartment: “She’s alone. She could be sick in bed, or she might have fallen in the bathroom and can’t get up…” When he listened to the string of mishaps that might occur to someone living alone, he would be swayed into thinking that any of those things could really happen. Before work or during lunch, he would stop by his sister’s apartment at Mom’s urging and see a heap of newspapers at her door, signaling Chi-hon’s absence. He would gather the newspapers and shove them into a garbage can. When he didn’t see any papers or milk delivered at her door, he would keep pressing the doorbell, knowing that she was inside, and she would poke her unkempt face out and grumble, “What now?” Once, when he was ringing her doorbell, a man arrived, seemingly to visit Chi-hon. The man even said hello to him, awkwardly. Before Hyong-chol could ask who he was, the man said, “You look so much like Chi-hon that I don’t even need to ask who you are.” The man said he’d come by because he had suddenly stopped hearing from her. When Hyong-chol told Mom that his sister seemed to have gone on a trip, or that she was at home and she was fine, Mom would sigh and say, “We won’t know about it even if she dies.” Then she would ask, “What is it exactly that she does?” His sister wrote novels, and to do this she would disappear for fifteen days or sometimes even a month. When he asked her, “Do you have to do that when you write?” she would mumble, “Next time I’ll call Mom.” That was it. Even though Mom was like that, the chasm between the family and his sister continued. Mom stopped asking him to go check on Chi-hon after he ignored her requests a few times. She only mentioned once, “I guess you don’t have time to listen to me.” Because his sister’s abrupt silences continued, he figured someone else in the family must be doing Mom’s bidding. After Mom went missing, his sister muttered to him, “Maybe I’m being punished…”
There is a lot of traffic between Seoul Station and Sook-myung Women’s University. He looks out the car window at the towering gray buildings. He carefully inspects people walking by. In case Mom is in the crowd somewhere.
“Sir, you said the Yongsan 2-dong office, right?” the taxi driver asks him, turning in front of the university toward Yongsan High School, but Hyong-chol doesn’t register the question.
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“You said the Yongsan 2-dong office, right?”
“Yes.”
He walked this street every day when he was twenty but the scenery outside the car window is foreign to him. He wonders if this is the right way. It would actually be more jarring if the district hadn’t changed at all in thirty years.
“Since it’s Saturday, the office is probably closed.”
“I guess that’s right.”
The taxi driver is about to say something else, but Hyong-chol takes out a flyer from his pocket and pushes it toward him. “If you see someone like this while you’re driving around, please let me know.”
The driver glances at the flyer. “Is this your mother?”
“Yes.”
“How terrible…”
Last fall, he didn’t do anything even though his sister called to say that Mom was acting strangely. He thought that, at her age, Mom would have ailments and illnesses. His sister ruefully told him that Mom seemed to be fainting from her headaches, but when he called home Mom answered warmly, “Hyong-chol!” When he asked, “Is anything going on?” Mom laughed and said, “I wish there was something going on! Don’t worry about us. What would be going on with two old folks like us? Take care of yourselves.”
“Come visit us in Seoul.”
Mom said, “Okay, we will,” and trailed off. His sister, angry at his indifference, came to his office and shoved into his hands a scan of Mom’s brain. His sister related the doctor’s words that a stroke had occurred in Mom’s brain without her realization. When he listened placidly, she said, “Hyong-chol! Are you really Yun Hyong-chol?” and stared into his eyes.
“She said nothing was going on, so what’s all this?”
“You trust her? Mom always says that. That’s Mom’s mantra. You know it’s true. You know she’s just saying that because she feels guilty about being a burden to you.”
“Why does she feel guilty?”
“How would I know? Why do you make her feel guilty?”
“What did I do?”
“Mom’s been saying that for a long time. You know she has. Let me ask you, why in the world does Mom feel guilty when it comes to you?”
Thirty years ago, after he passed the fifth-level civil-service exam, the first placement he received was at the Yongsan 2-dong office. In high school, when he didn’t get into any university in Seoul, Mom couldn’t believe it. For her it was an obvious reaction. From the early days of elementary school through high school, he had always been the best student in his class. Until he failed to get into college, he had always placed first, no matter which test he took. When he was in sixth grade, he got the best score in the middle-school entrance exam, which allowed him to attend school tuition-free. For three straight years, he was the best student at school, so he never had to pay a cent. He was admitted to high school as the first in his class. “I wish I could pay my Hyong-chol’s tuition at least once,” Mom would exclaim in pride. It was hard for her to understand how someone who was the top student throughout high school didn’t pass the college entrance exam. When they heard that he not only failed to pass at the top but didn’t make it at all, Mom was puzzled. “If you can’t pass, who can?” she asked herself. He had been planning to study hard in college to remain at the top of his class. It wasn’t really a plan-it was his only option. The only way he could go to college was on scholarship. But because he didn’t pass, he had to find another path. He didn’t have the luxury even to consider retaking the test the following year, and he soon figured out what to do: he took two civil-service exams and passed both. He left home, taking the first assignment he received. And a few months later, he learned that there was a night law college in Seoul and decided to apply for it. He realized that he needed his high-school graduation certificate. If he sent a letter asking for a copy and waited for it to come by mail from the countryside, it would arrive after the application was due. So he wrote a letter to his father, requesting that he go to the bus terminal with a copy of the certificate and ask someone coming to Seoul to take it for him. He asked his father to call him at work after doing that-if his father could tell him what time the bus was due to arrive, he would go to the terminal and get the certificate from the person carrying it. He waited and waited, but there was no phone call. In the middle of the night, as he was wondering what he could do about the application, which was due the next day, someone banged on the door of the office, where he was living at the time. The employees had to take turns for night duty, but since he didn’t have a place to stay, it was decided that he would live in the night duty room: he was on duty every night. The banging went on as if it would break down the door; when he went out, a young man stood in the darkness.
“Is this your mother?”
His mom was standing behind the young man, shivering in the cold. Before he could say anything she said, “Hyong-chol! It’s me! Mom!” The young man looked at his watch and said, “There’s only seven minutes until the curfew!” and, turning to Hyong-chol’s mom, said “Goodbye!” and ran into the darkness to beat the government-imposed deadline.
Father had been away from home. When Hyong-chol’s sister read Mom his letter, Mom fretted, then went to his high school and got a copy of his graduation certificate and hopped on the train. It was the first time in her life that she’d ridden a train. That young man had seen Mom at Seoul Station asking people how to get to Yongsan-dong. Hearing her say that there was something she absolutely had to get to her son that night, he was compelled to bring her to the office himself. Hyong-chol’s mom was wearing blue plastic sandals in the middle of winter. During fall harvest, she had hurt her foot, near her big toe, with a scythe, and because it hadn’t fully healed, the plastic sandals were the only shoes she could wear. His mom left her sandals outside the night duty room before entering. “I don’t know if it’s too late!” she said, and took out his graduation certificate. Mom’s hands were frozen. Grasping them, he vowed to himself that he would make these hands and this woman happy, no matter what. But a rebuke tumbled out of his mouth, asking her how she could follow a stranger just because he told her to. Mom scolded him right back: “How can you live without trusting people? There are more people who are good than people who are bad!” And she smiled her typical optimistic smile.
He stands in front of the closed office and studies the building. Mom couldn’t have come here. If she could figure out how to get here, she could have gone to one of her children’s places. The woman who said she had seen his mom here remembered her because of her eyes. She said his mom was wearing blue plastic sandals. Blue plastic sandals. He remembers just now that the shoes Mom had on when she went missing were low-heeled beige sandals. Father had told him. But the woman who had told him that Mom’s sandals had cut into her foot because she had walked so far had definitely said that they were blue. He peers into the office, then looks around the streets leading to Posong Girls’ High School and Eunsong Church.
Does the night duty room still exist in that office?
That night duty room was where he slept next to Mom all those years ago, sharing a blanket. Next to the woman who had boarded the Seoul-bound train without a plan, to bring a graduation certificate to her son. That must have been the last time he had lain next to Mom like that. A chilly draft seeped in, in waves from the wall facing the street. “I can fall asleep better if I’m next to the wall,” Mom said, and switched sides with him. “It’s drafty,” he said, and got up to stack his bag and books next to the wall, to block out the wind. He piled the clothes he had been wearing that day next to the wall, too. “It’s fine,” Mom said, pulling him by the hand. “Go to bed; you have to get up for work tomorrow.”
“How’s your first taste of Seoul?” he asked, looking up at the ceiling, lying next to his mom.
“Nothing special,” Mom said, and laughed. She turned to look at him, and started to talk of times gone by. “You’re my first child. This isn’t the only thing that you got me to do for the first time. Everything you do is a new world for me. You got me to do everything for the first time. You were the first who made my belly swollen, and the first to breastfeed. I was your age when I had you. When I saw your red, sweaty face, eyes shut, for the first time… People say that when they have their first child they’re surprised and happy, but I think I was sad. Did I really have this baby? What do I do now? I was so afraid that at first I couldn’t even touch your squirmy little fingers. You were holding those tiny hands in such tight fists. If I opened your fists up one finger at a time, you smiled. They were so small that I thought, If I keep touching them they might disappear. Because I didn’t know anything. I got married at seventeen, and when I didn’t get pregnant until I was nineteen, Aunt kept saying I probably wouldn’t be able to have children, so when I found out I was pregnant with you, the first thing I thought was, Now I don’t have to hear that from her-that was what made me the most excited. Later, I was happy to see your fingers and toes grow every day. When I was tired, I went over to you and opened your fingers. Touched your toes. When I did that, I felt energized. When I first put shoes on you, I was really excited. When you toddled over to me, I laughed so much; even if someone had spilled out a heap of gold and silver and jewels in front of me, I wouldn’t have laughed like that. And how do you think I felt when I sent you to school? When I pinned your name tag and a handkerchief on your chest, I felt so grown up. How can I compare the happiness I got watching your legs get thicker with anything else? Every day, I sang, Grow and grow, my baby. And then, one day, you were bigger than me.”
He gazed at Mom as the words spilled out like a confession. She rolled over onto her side to face him and stroked his hair. “Even though I said, ‘I hope you grow tall and big,’ when you got bigger than me I was scared, even though you were my child.”
He cleared his throat and turned to stare at the ceiling again, to hide his watery eyes.
“Unlike other children, you didn’t need me to tell you anything. You did everything by yourself. You are handsome, and you were good in school. I’m so proud, and sometimes I’m amazed that you came from me… If it weren’t for you, when would I have the chance to come to Seoul?”
He resolved then that he would earn a lot of money so that when Mom came back to this city she would be able to sleep in a warm place. That he wouldn’t allow her to sleep in the cold again. Some time passed. In a low voice, Mom said, “Hyong-chol.” He heard her voice from far away, half asleep. Mom reached out and stroked his head. She sat up and looked over his sleeping figure and touched his forehead. “I’m sorry.” Mom quickly took her hand away to wipe her tears, but they dropped on his face.
When he woke up at dawn, his mom was sweeping the floor of the office. He tried to stop her, but Mom said, “I might as well, I’m not doing anything,” and, as if she would be punished if she weren’t doing anything, washed the floor with a wet mop and thoroughly cleaned the employees’ desks. Mom’s breath was visible, and the top of her swollen foot was pushing against her blue sandal. As they waited for the nearby bean-sprout-soup place to open so they could eat breakfast, Mom’s hands made the office gleam.
This house is still here. His eyes grow wide. He has been poking around the narrow alleys filled with parked cars, looking for Mom. Now, as the sun hangs low in the sky, he finds himself in front of the house where he rented a room thirty years ago. He reaches out to touch the gate, amazed. The sharp arrowlike steel spikes on top of the gate are still there, the same as thirty years ago. The woman who once loved him but ended up leaving him would sometimes hang a plastic bag filled with Chinese buns on the gate when he wasn’t there. All the other houses nearby have been converted to townhouses or studio apartments.
He reads the ad posted on the gate:
100,000 WON PER MONTH,
WITH A DEPOSIT OF 10 MILLION WON.
150,000 WON PER MONTH POSSIBLE
WITH A DEPOSIT OF 5 MILLION WON.
8 pyong, standard sink, shower in bathroom.
Close to Namsan, good for exercising.
Can get to Kangnam in 20 minutes, Chongno in 10 minutes.
Cons: Small bathroom. You’re not going to live in it.
It’s probably hard to find something this cheap in Yongsan.
The reason I’m moving: I got a car and need a parking
space. Please text or e-mail. I’m renting the room
myself to save on broker fees.
Having read even the cell-phone number and the e-mail address, he pushes the gate slowly. The gate opens, just as it did thirty years ago. He looks inside. A U-shaped house, the same as thirty years ago, the door to each unit facing the courtyard. The door of the unit he used to live in has a padlock on it.
“Anyone home?” he calls out, and two or three doors open.
Two young women with short hair and two boys around seventeen look at him. He steps into the courtyard.
“Have you seen this person?” He shows the flyer to the young women first, then quickly hands one to the boys, who are about to shut their door. There are two girls around the same age peering out from inside the boys’ room. The boys, thinking he’s looking into their room, bang the door shut. The outside looks the same as thirty years ago, but each unit has become a studio. The owners must have renovated, creating one space, combining the kitchen and the room. He can see a sink in the corner of the women’s unit.
“No,” the young women say, and hand him the flyer. They have sleep in their eyes; perhaps they were napping. They watch him turn around and head back to the gate. He’s about to step outside when the boys’ door opens and someone calls, “Wait! I think this grandmother was sitting in front of the gate a few days ago.”
When he approaches the room, the other boy sticks his head out and says, “No, I told you this isn’t her. This lady is young. That lady was really wrinkly. Her hair wasn’t like this, either-she was a beggar.”
“But her eyes were the same. Look only at her eyes; they were just like these. If we find her, are you really going to give us five million won?”
“I’ll give you some money as long as you tell me exactly what happened, even if you don’t find her.” He asks the boys to step outside. The young women, who had closed their door, open it again and look out.
“That lady was the one from the bar down the street. They keep her locked up because she has dementia, and it looked like she snuck out and got lost. The owner of the bar came and took her home.”
“Not that lady; I saw this lady, too. She’d hurt her foot. It was covered in pus. She kept chasing away flies… though I didn’t look closely, because she smelled and was dirty.”
“And? Did you see where she went?” Hyong-chol asks the boy.
“No. I just went in. She kept trying to come in, so I slammed the gate…”
Nobody else had seen Mom. The boy follows him out, saying, “I really did see her!” He looks down the alleys, running ahead of Hyong-chol. Hyong-chol gives the boy a hundred-thousand-won check as he leaves. The boy’s eyes sparkle. Hyong-chol asks the boy to get the lady to stay with him if he sees her again and to give him a call. Not listening very carefully, the boy says, “Then you’ll give me five million won?” Hyong-chol nods. The boy asks for a few more flyers. He says he will hang them up at the gas station where he works part-time. He says that if Hyong-chol finds his mom from that he should be rewarded with five million won, because it will be thanks to him. Hyong-chol tells him he will.
They have faded-promises he made to himself for Mom, who changed places with him in the night duty room to protect him from the draft, saying, “I can fall asleep better if I’m next to the wall.” The pledge he had made that Mom would sleep in a warm room when she came back to this city.
He takes a cigarette from his pocket and puts it in his mouth. He doesn’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point his emotions ceased to belong only to him. He went about his life, having mostly forgotten about Mom. What was I doing when Mom was left behind on that unfamiliar subway-station platform, having failed to get on the train with Father? He looks up once more at the office and turns back. What was I doing? He hangs his head. The day before Mom went missing, he went out drinking with his co-workers, but it didn’t end well. His co-worker Kim, who was usually respectful and polite, made a subtle dig at him after a few drinks, pronouncing him “clever.” At work, Hyong-chol was in charge of the sale of the apartments near Songdo, in Inchon, and Kim oversaw the sale of the apartments near Yongin. Kim’s remark referred to Hyong-chol’s idea of giving out concert tickets as promotional gifts for people coming to the model home. This wasn’t his idea but that of his sister, the writer. When Chi-hon was over at his house, his wife gave her a bath mat that had been the promotional gift for the last apartment sale, and his sister said, “I don’t know why companies think homemakers like this kind of thing.”
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?”
He replied simply that he would work hard at the company, save for two years, and start studying again.
Now he reflects on this. When she was younger, Mom was a presence that got him to continue building his resolve as a man, as a human being.
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.
“Hey! You!”
His sister, belatedly figuring out what had happened, hurriedly stuck her hands in the pockets of the cotton pants she wore to bed and fidgeted nervously.
“If you’re going to keep this up, just go home!”
When morning came, his sister really went home to Mom, taking all of her things. Mom brought her back to Seoul right away, telling her to get on her knees before him and ask for his forgiveness. His sister, obstinate, didn’t move.
“Ask him to forgive you!” Mom said, but his sister didn’t budge.
His sister was gentle, but if she had her mind set on something, nobody could move her. Once, when he was in middle school, he had forced his sister to wash his sneakers against her will. Usually she obediently washed them clean, but that day she got upset and took them, his new but grubby sneakers, to the creek and sent them downstream. He ran all the way along the creek to retrieve his floating shoes. Later, it became a cherished memory that only siblings could share, but at the time, he came home angry with only one sneaker, which had turned green from the slimy water and clinging algae, and told on his sister. Even when Mom picked up the poker, asking where his sister had learned to be so ill-tempered, she wouldn’t say she was sorry. Instead, she got angry at Mom. “I said I didn’t want to! I told him I didn’t want to! And from now on I’m not going to do anything I don’t want to do!”
In their small room, Mom ordered his obstinate sister: “I told you to ask him to forgive you. I told you your brother was your parent here. If you don’t correct your habit of taking your things and leaving because your brother scolded you, this will stay with you your entire life. If something doesn’t go your way when you are married, are you going to take your things and leave even then?”
The more Mom told her to ask for his forgiveness, the deeper his sister’s hands burrowed into her pockets. Saddened, Mom sighed. “Now this child won’t listen to me. This child is ignoring me because I don’t have anything and have no education.” Only when Mom’s lament turned into teardrops did his sister say, “That’s not it, Mom!” To stop Mom from continuing to cry, she had to say, “I’ll ask for forgiveness, I’ll say I’m sorry,” and she took her hands out of her pockets and asked him to forgive her. From then on, his sister slept with her hands in her pockets. And any time he raised his voice, she’d quickly stuff them there.
After Mom went missing, when someone pointed something out, even something trivial, his stubborn sister would admit, subdued, “I was wrong, I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Who’s going to wash the windows at home?” Chi-hon asks him.
“What are you talking about?”
“If we called around this time of year, Mom was always cleaning the windows.”
“The windows?”
“Yes, of course. She’d always say, ‘How can we have dirty windows when the family will be coming for Full Moon Harvest?’ ”
The many windows of their country home flash before his eyes. The house, newly rebuilt a few years ago, has windows in every room, especially in the living room, unlike the old house, which had one sole windowpane in the door.
“When I suggested that she hire someone to clean the windows, she said, ‘Who’s going to come to this country hole to do that?’ ” His sister heaves a sigh and stretches her hand to the taxi window and rubs it.
“When we were little, she took off all the doors in the house around this time of year-remember?” she asks.
“I do.”
“Do you remember?”
“I said I do!”
“Liar.”
“Why do you think I’m lying? I remember. She used to paste maple leaves on the doors. Even though Aunt gave her a hard time about it.”
“So you really do remember. Remember going to Aunt’s to pick maple leaves?”
“I remember.”
Before the new house was built, Mom would choose a sunny day around Full Moon Harvest and take off every single door in the house. She would scrub the doors with water and dry them in the sun and make some paste and brush new, half-translucent mulberry paper onto the doors. Whenever Hyong-chol saw doors taken off their jambs, drying, leaning against the wall of the house, he would think, Ah, it’s almost Full Moon Harvest.
Why didn’t anyone help Mom brush on the new paper, when there were so many men in the family? His sister probably just fooled around, swirling her finger in the bucket of watery paste. Mom would take the brush and quickly slap the paste on the paper as if she were expertly drawing orchids for a traditional ink painting and, all by herself, would glue the paper on the clean doorframe with sure strokes. Her gestures were lighthearted and cheerful. Mom did work that he wouldn’t dare attempt now, even though he’s much older than she was at the time, and she did it swiftly and with ease. With a big brush in her hand, she would order his sister, who was playing with the paste, or him, who asked whether he could help, to pick Korean-maple leaves. Even though their yard had a lot of trees, persimmon trees and plum trees and trees of heaven and jujube trees, Mom specifically ordered maple leaves, which they didn’t have at home. Once, to get maple leaves, he left the house and passed the alleys and the creek and went all the way down the new road to Aunt’s house. As he picked maple leaves there, Aunt asked, “What are you going to do with them? Did your mother tell you to get them? What is this nonsense that your mother’s doing? If you look at a door with a maple leaf on it in the winter, you feel colder, but she’s going to do it again-even though I’m always telling her to stop!”
When he brought back two handfuls of maple leaves, Mom would neatly place the prettiest ones right next to the handle of every door, one on either side, and paste sheets of mulberry paper over them. The leaves decorated the spot where extra sheets of paper were layered to prevent tearing, right where people touched the door to open and close it. On his door, Mom put three more leaves than on the others, spreading the five leaves like flowers, pressing them carefully with her palms, and asking, “Do you like them?” It looked as if a young child was opening his hand. No matter what Aunt said, they looked beautiful in his eyes. When he said they looked wonderful, a big smile brightened Mom’s face. For Mom, who disliked going into the holidays with holey or ripped doors, worn from being flung open and shut throughout summer, pasting on new door paper was the true start of fall and the beginning of Full Moon Harvest. She probably wanted to keep the family from getting colds from the chillier wind after summer, too. Was that, he wondered, the most romance Mom was able to experience in those days?
He unconsciously sticks his hands in the pockets of his slacks, like his sister. The maple leaves pasted by the door handles stayed with the family in that house after Full Moon Harvest was over. They stayed through winter and snow; they stayed until new maple leaves sprouted in the spring.
Mom’s disappearance was triggering events in his memory, moments, like the maple-leaf doors, he thought he’d forgotten about.
Yokchon-dong isn’t the old Yokchon-dong he remembers. When he first bought a house in Seoul, it was a neighborhood of many alleys and houses, but now it’s crowded with towering high-rise apartment buildings and clothing stores. He and his sister walk back and forth twice, both in front of and behind the apartment buildings, unable to find Sobu Market, which was in the heart of Yokchon-dong back then. Finally, they ask a passing student where the market is, and it turns out it’s in the opposite direction from where they thought it’d be. A big box store has now replaced the telephone booth that he used to walk by every day. He can’t find the yarn store where his wife used to take knitting classes, wanting to make sweaters for their newborn daughter.
“I think it’s over there, brother!”
Sobu Market, which he remembers as being next to a large road, is buried between new boulevards, and he can’t see the signs very well.
“He said it was in front of Sobu Market…” His sister runs toward the entrance and turns around to look at the stores. “There it is!”
He looks where his sister is pointing and sees the sign that says “Sobu Pharmacy,” sandwiched between a snack bar and an Internet café. The bespectacled pharmacist, who is in his mid-fifties, looks up as he and his sister enter. When his sister asks, “You called about the flyer your son had brought you?” the pharmacist takes his glasses off.
“How did your mother happen to go missing?”
This is the most awkward-and frequent-question people have asked since Mom went missing. It’s always asked with a mixture of curiosity and judgment. At first they would explain in detail, “Well, you see, she was at the Seoul Station subway…,” but now they simply reply, “It just happened,” and assume sorrowful expressions. That is the only way they can get past the question.
“Does she have dementia?”
His sister doesn’t reply, so he denies it.
“But how can you be like this when you’re trying to find her? I called a while ago, and you’re only here now?” the pharmacist asks reproachfully, as if they could have been reunited with Mom if they had arrived earlier.
“When did you see her? Does this look like our mom?” His sister pulls out the flyer and points.
The pharmacist says he saw her six days ago. He lives on the third floor of the building, he explains, and he came down at dawn to open the pharmacy’s shutters and saw an old woman sleeping by the garbage cans in front of the snack bar next door. He tells them she was wearing blue plastic sandals. He says she’d walked so much that there was a deep cut on her foot, almost to the point of revealing bone. Her wound had become infected and reinfected, so much so that there was almost nothing that could be done.
“As a pharmacist, I couldn’t just leave her alone when I saw that gash. I thought at the very least it should be disinfected, so I went inside and brought out some disinfectant and cotton balls, and she woke up. Even though a stranger was touching her foot, she stayed still, completely still-weak. With that kind of cut, it’s normal to scream when it’s being treated, but she didn’t react at all. Surprised me. The infection was so severe, pus kept oozing out. The smell was really awful, too. I don’t know how many times I disinfected it. After that I put some ointment on it and a Band-Aid. But it wasn’t big enough, so I wrapped her foot with a bandage. It looked like she should be protected somehow, so I went inside to call the police, but then came back out to ask whether she knew anyone. She was eating sushi rolls from the trash. She must have been hungry. I told her I would give her something to eat and she should throw that away, but she didn’t, so I grabbed it from her and threw it out. Even though she didn’t let go of it when I told her to, she didn’t do anything when I took it away. I asked her to come inside the store. She just sat there, as if she didn’t understand me. Is she deaf?”
His sister is silent, so he denies it.
“I asked her, ‘Where do you live? Do you know someone who can come get you? If you know someone’s number, I’ll call for you.’ But she sat still. Just blinking her eyes. I couldn’t do anything, so I went inside and called the police, and when I came out she was gone. It was strange. I was inside for only a few minutes, and she was already gone.”
“Our mom wasn’t wearing blue plastic sandals,” says Chi-hon. “She was wearing beige sandals. Are you sure they were blue plastic ones?”
“Yes. She was wearing a light-blue shirt, and over it a top that was either white or beige, it was so dirty I couldn’t tell. Her skirt was something that might’ve been white once-but that got dirty enough to become beige. It was pleated. Her calves were bloody. They were… well, they were ravaged by mosquito bites.”
Except for the blue plastic sandals, that’s the outfit Mom was wearing when she went missing.
“Mom’s wearing a hanbok here. Her hair is completely different… She’s really made up in this picture, but she didn’t look like this when she went missing. What made you think of our mother when you saw that lady?” His sister seems to hope it wasn’t Mom; the woman the pharmacist saw was so pathetic.
“This is the same woman. Her eyes are the same. I herded cows when I was young, so I’ve seen eyes like hers, earnest and gentle. I recognized her even though she looked different, because those eyes were the same.”
His sister collapses into a chair.
“Did the police come?”
“I called them right back, told them they didn’t have to come. Like I told you, she was already gone.”
He and his sister leave the pharmacy and split up, agreeing to meet at the playground of one of the new apartment complexes in two hours. As the wind picks up, he searches the dimly lit streets around the new apartment buildings that have taken the place of the houses from when he lived here, and his sister looks near Sobu Market, where a few old alleys remain. Because of the pharmacist’s story that the woman who might be Mom was eating sushi rolls out of the trash next to the snack bar, he looks carefully at all of the garbage cans near the buildings. He also searches near the recycling bins. He wonders where the house he used to live in could be. It was the second-to-last house in the longest alley in the neighborhood. The alley was so long and dark that when he came home late from work he felt compelled to keep looking behind him before he reached the gate.
His sister is waiting for him on the wooden bench at the playground. She sees his slumped shoulders and slow footsteps and gets up. Because it’s late at night, there are no children on the playground, only a handful of old folks sitting around, having come out for a walk.
Did Mom come here to that house?
The first time Mom came to visit here, she got off the train holding a nickel kettle as big as a steamer filled with red-bean porridge. He didn’t have a car, and when he took the kettle from her and snapped, “Why did you bring this heavy thing?” Mom just kept smiling. As soon as they turned into the alley, she gestured at a house and asked, “Is this it?” When they walked past it, she pointed at the next house and asked, “Is that it?” She grinned wider when, at last, he stopped in front of his house and announced, “This is it.” Mom looked as excited as a young girl on her first journey out of her hometown as she gently pushed the gate open. “Wow, there’s a yard, too! A persimmon tree, and-what’s this?-grapevines!” As soon as Mom set foot in the house, she poured out a bowl of porridge from the kettle and sprinkled it all around the house. “This is how you ward off bad luck,” she said. His wife, who was also a first-time homeowner in the city, opened the door of one of their three rooms and said, excitedly, “This is your room, Mother. When you come to Seoul, you can stay here in comfort.” Mom looked inside and exclaimed, with an apologetic expression, “I have my own room!”
That night, past midnight, he heard something in the yard and looked out the window. Mom was walking around. She touched the gate and laid a hand on the grapevine and sat on the steps leading to the front door. She looked up at the night sky and went over to stand under the persimmon tree. He opened the window and called to her, “Come in and sleep.”
Mom asked, “Why aren’t you sleeping?” and, acting as if she were calling his name for the first time, said, secretively, “Hyong-chol, come out here.”
When he reached her, Mom took an envelope from her pocket and put it in his hand. “Now all you need is a nameplate. Use this money to get a nameplate.” He looked at Mom, the bulging envelope in his fist. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t help you buy this house,” she said.
Later, coming back from the bathroom in the early dawn, he opened the door of Mom’s room quietly. Mom and Chi-hon were lying side by side, deep in slumber. Mom seemed to be smiling in her sleep; his sister’s arm was, as ever, flung away from her body, freely.
Before that, from her first night with him in the night duty room, there hadn’t been a comfortable place for Mom to stay in Seoul. Often he and his siblings went to meet her when she came to Seoul on a chartered bus to attend a relative’s wedding. Mom would have a huge load with her. Before the wedding was even over, she would rush him and his siblings to the rented room they were living in. She’d take off the suit she’d worn to the wedding; food wrapped in newspaper or plastic or squash leaves would tumble out of her bundles. It didn’t take even a minute for Mom to change into a loose shirt and a pair of floral-print pants, which she’d brought rolled up in a corner of one of her bags. The side dishes that came out of the newspapers and plastic and squash leaves were moved onto plates and into bowls from the cupboard, and Mom brushed off her hands, quickly peeled the covers off the blankets, and washed them. She made kimchi with the salted cabbage she had brought, and scrubbed the pot that had turned black from the coal fire, and cleaned the portable stove until it shone, and sewed the covers back on the blankets after they dried in the sun on the roof, and washed rice and made bean-paste soup and set the table for supper. On the table were generous portions of stewed beef, sautéed anchovies, and sesame-leaf kimchi she’d brought from home. When he and his siblings took a spoonful of rice, Mom placed a piece of stewed beef on each person’s spoon. They urged her to eat, but she insisted, “I’m not hungry.” After they were done, she cleaned up and filled the rubber basin under the tap with water. She’d go out to buy a watermelon to keep cool in the basin, and then she’d quickly change back into her suit, the only one she had, which she wore only for weddings; then she’d say, “Take me back to the station.” It would already be late. “Spend the night and go home tomorrow, Mom,” they would say. But she would reply, “I have to go. I have things to do tomorrow.” The only thing Mom had to do was work in the rice paddies or the fields; that kind of work could wait until the following day. But Mom always went back on the train that same night. Even though it was really because there was only one room, a small room where her three grown children had to sleep huddled together, unable to move about, Mom just said, “I have to go. I have things to do tomorrow.”
He always made renewed resolutions when he brought Mom, exhausted, back to Seoul Station to wait for the night train so she could return home empty-handed. I’ll make money and move to a two-room place. I’ll rent a house. I’ll buy a house in the city. Then I’ll be able to have a room that this woman can sleep in comfortably. He bought a platform ticket whenever Mom took the night train so he could accompany her to the platform. He would find Mom a seat on the train and hand her a bag full of snacks, maybe banana milk or tangerines.
“Don’t fall asleep; remember to get off at Chongup Station.”
Mom commanded him-sometimes sadly, sometimes firmly, “Here in the city, you are your siblings’ father and mother.”
As he stood there, rubbing his hands together, only twenty-some years old, Mom would get up from her seat and open his hands and straighten his shoulders. “The eldest brother has to be dignified. He has to be the role model. If the eldest brother goes the wrong way, his siblings will go that way, too.”
When the train was about to leave, Mom’s eyes would fill with tears, and she’d say, “I’m sorry, Hyong-chol.”
It would be in the middle of the night when his mom got off at Chongup. The first bus to town would be after six in the morning. His mom would get off the train and walk, in the dark, toward home.
“I wish we’d brought more flyers to post around here,” he says, burrowing into his jacket against the night chill.
“I’ll come back tomorrow and do that,” Chi-hon assures him, and she pushes her hands into her pockets.
Tomorrow he has to escort the CEO’s aides to the model apartment in Hongchon. He can’t afford to excuse himself. “Should I have my wife do it?”
“Let her rest. She’s taking care of Father, too.”
“Or you can call the youngest.”
“Or he’ll help me.”
“He?”
“Yu-bin. When we find Mom, I’m going to marry him. Mom always wanted me to get married.”
“If it’s that easy to make up your mind, you should have done it already.”
“After Mom went missing, I realized that there’s an answer to everything. I could have done everything she wanted me to. It wasn’t important. I don’t know why I got under her skin over things like that. I’m not going to get on a plane anymore, either.”
He pats his sister’s shoulder and sighs. Mom didn’t like it when his sister got on a plane and went abroad. Mom’s opinion was that if it was during war you couldn’t help it, but otherwise you couldn’t leave your life up to fate like that, as if you didn’t care a whit about it. When Mom’s meddling about planes got worse, his sister boarded them in secret. Whether it was for business or for pleasure, if she had to take a plane, she left without telling Mom.
“The roses at that house were so beautiful…,” his sister says.
He looks at her in the dark. He has just been thinking about those roses. The first spring after he bought his house, Mom visited and suggested they go buy roses. Roses? When the word came out of his mom’s mouth he had to ask, “You do mean roses?” as if he’d misheard her.
“Red roses. Why? Isn’t there a place that sells them?”
“Yes, there is.” He took Mom to a nursery that supplied the saplings lining the streets in Kupabal. “I think this is the prettiest flower,” Mom said, and bought many more rosebushes than he had expected. Later that afternoon, she dug holes near the wall around his house and planted them. He had never seen Mom plant something to look at, not to harvest and eat, like beans or potatoes or seedlings of cabbage or radishes or peppers. Watching over her bent form, he asked whether she was planting the roses too close to the wall. Mom looked up at him and said, “That’s so that people outside can enjoy them, too.” Every spring, the roses came into full blossom. People passing by outside during the rose season paused under the wall and inhaled the scent of roses, just as Mom had hoped. After it rained, red rose petals would be strewn everywhere, having fallen on the other side of the wall.
At the bar in the big box store in Yokchon-dong, his sister, who downed two draft beers in place of dinner, takes out a notebook from her bag, opens it to a particular page, and pushes it toward him. Her face is flushed from drinking on an empty stomach. He tilts the notebook toward the light and reads. Unlike her imaginative and emotional personality, her handwriting is surprisingly compact.
I want to read to children who cannot see.
I want to learn Chinese.
If I earn a lot of money, I want to own a small theater.
I want to go to the South Pole.
I want to go on a pilgrimage to Santiago.
Underneath were thirty more sentences starting with “I.”
“What is this?”
“Last New Year’s Eve, I wrote down what I wanted to do with my life, other than writing. Just for fun. The things I wanted to do in the next ten years. But I didn’t plan on doing anything with Mom. I didn’t realize that while I was writing it. But now, when I look at it after Mom’s gone missing…”
He is drunk. He gets off the elevator and presses the doorbell. No response. He takes his keys out of his pocket and, weaving about, unlocks the door. After he parted with his sister, he went to two more bars. Whenever the image of the woman wearing blue plastic sandals, the woman who could be Mom, the woman who had walked so much that the sandals dug deep into her foot, practically revealing the bones, danced in front of his eyes, he downed another drink.
The light is on in the living room, which is quiet. The statue of Mary that Mom brought watches him. Stumbling, he heads for his bedroom, but pauses to quietly push open the door to his daughter’s room, where Father is staying. He can see Father sleeping on his side, on a mat on the floor next to his daughter’s bed. He goes inside and pulls up the blanket his father had pushed off in his sleep, and comes back out, gently closing the door behind him. In the kitchen, he pours himself a glass of water from the carafe on the table, and looks around him as he drinks it. Nothing has changed. The hum of the refrigerator is the same, and so is the sink piled with dishes his wife has left undone; she always puts off doing the dishes. He hangs his head, then ventures into his room and looks down at his sleeping wife. A necklace glints at her throat. He grabs the blankets covering her and yanks them off. She sits up, rubbing her eyes.
“When did you get home?” She sighs at his roughness, which contains a silent scolding: How can you sleep! Ever since Mom disappeared, he has started to take things out on everyone. He gets angrier when he comes home. When his brother called to see how the search was going, he answered a few questions but then erupted, “Don’t you have anything to tell me? What the hell are you doing?” When Father announced that he would return home because there was nothing he could do here in Seoul, he yelled, “And what are you going to do in the country?” In the morning, Hyong-chol would leave without glancing at the breakfast his wife made him.
“Have you been drinking?” His wife wrests the blankets from his grip and straightens them.
“How can you sleep?” He says it out loud now.
His wife smooths her nightgown.
“I said, how can you sleep!”
“What am I supposed to do, then?” his wife yells back.
“It’s your fault!” His voice is slurred. Even he knows that this is a stretch.
“Why is it my fault?”
“You should have gone to meet them!”
“I told you I was going to bring food to Chin.”
“Why did you have to go right then? My parents were coming up from the country so we could celebrate their birthdays!”
“Father said he could find his way! And we’re not the only family in the city. And they wanted to go to your brother’s that day. And your sisters are here, too. Your parents don’t always have to stay at our place, and there’s no rule that I have to be the one to go meet them! I hadn’t gone to see Chin in two weeks, and she had nothing to eat, so how could I not go see her? I’m tired, too, going to take care of Chin and everything. And she’s studying for her exam-do you even know how important this test is to her?”
“How long are you going to go on bringing food to a grown child, who doesn’t even stop by when her grandmother is missing?”
“What would she do if she came? I told her not to come. We searched everywhere. What can we do when even the police can’t find her? Do we go from door to door and ring the bells and ask, Is our mother here? What can Chin do when even the adults can’t do anything? A student has to go to school. Do we all just stop doing what we do because Mother isn’t here?”
“She’s missing, not ‘isn’t here.’ ”
“So what do you want me to do? You yourself go to work!”
“What?” He picks up a golf club from a corner and is about to hurl it across the room.
“Hyong-chol!” Father is standing at the open door. Hyong-chol puts down the golf club. Father had come to Seoul for his birthday to make it more convenient for his children. If they’d celebrated his birthday, as planned, Mom would have said, “This is celebrating my birthday, too,” sitting at the table in the traditional full-course Korean restaurant where his wife, weeks before, had made a reservation. But with Mom missing, Father’s birthday went by without any celebration, and Aunt took charge of the summer ancestral rites.
He follows Father out.
“It’s all my fault,” Father says, turning around at his granddaughter’s bedroom door.
Hyong-chol is silent.
“Don’t fight. I know what you’re feeling. But fighting doesn’t help anything. Your mom met me and had a hard life. But she is a kind person. So I’m sure she’s at least alive. And if she’s alive, we’ll hear something.”
Hyong-chol stays silent.
“I want to go home now.” Father stares at him for a while, then enters the room. Looking at the closed door, Hyong-chol bites his lip, and heat flares in his chest. He rubs his chest with his hands. He’s about to rub his face with his hands, as is his habit, but stops. He can feel Mom’s gentle touch. Mom hated it when he rubbed his hands or slouched. If he did that in front of her, she immediately straightened his hands and shoulders. If he was about to duck his head, Mom slapped him on the back, telling him, “A man has to be dignified.” He never became a prosecutor. Mom always called it his dream, but he hadn’t understood that it had been Mom’s dream, too. He only thought of it as a youthful wish that couldn’t be achieved; it never occurred to him that he had deflated Mom’s aspirations as well. He realizes that Mom has lived her entire life believing that she was the one who held him back from his dream. I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t keep my promise. His heart brims with the desire to do nothing but look after Mom when she’s found. But he has already lost that chance.
He crumples to his knees on the living-room floor.