Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

Author:Kyung-Sook Shin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, Family Life, General, Literary, Fiction, Cultural Heritage
ISBN: 9780307595492
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-05T10:00:00+00:00

You returned home because of the things your wife grew and raised, even though coming home meant that you had to cast away the things you’d obtained in other places. When you walked in through this gate, your wife would be digging for sweet potatoes, or making yeast with a soiled towel wrapped around her head, watching over Hyong-chol at his desk. Your sister liked to say that your nomadic leanings stemmed from your youthful habit of not sleeping at home, to avoid being drafted into the military. Once, however, you actually went to the police station, because you were tired of hiding. Your uncle, a detective, and only five years older than you, sent you away. He said, “Even though our family is ruined, the eldest son of the eldest son has to survive.” Despite the family’s decline, you had to survive to maintain the family graveyard and oversee the ancestral rites. But that wasn’t a good enough reason for your uncle to stick your forefinger in the straw cutter and slice off a knuckle: it wasn’t you but your wife who looked after the family graveyard and took care of the ancestral rites each season. Was that why? Did you become a vagabond because you were forced to leave home and sleep outside, blanketed in dew? That might have been it. The habit of sleeping on the street could have been why you wandered away from home. When you slept at home, you were overcome by anxiety that someone would rush through the gate to grab you. Once, you even ran out of this house in the middle of the night, as if you were being chased.

One winter night, you came home and your children had suddenly grown up. Everyone was sleeping huddled together because it was so cold outside. Your wife took the rice bowl she had left in the warmest part of the room and put a small table draped with a cloth in front of you. There was a snowstorm that night. Your wife toasted seaweed on the brazier. The nutty smell of perilla oil woke your children one by one, and they crowded around you. You wrapped some rice with seaweed and put it in each child’s mouth. You put some in your eldest son’s and your second son’s and your elder daughter’s mouths. Even before you got to your younger daughter or the baby, Hyong-chol was already waiting for more. It took you longer to prepare the rice than it took your children to eat it. You grew frightened of your children’s appetites. You wondered what to do with all of them. That was when you decided that you needed to forget about the outside world, that you couldn’t leave this house again.

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