Read Online Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Kyung-Sook Shin
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“I broke jar lids several times.”
“You broke jar lids?”
“I couldn’t see an end to it. At least with farming, if you plant seeds in the spring you harvest them in the fall. If you plant spinach seeds, there is spinach; where you plant corn, there’s corn.… But there’s no beginning or end to kitchen work. You eat breakfast, then it’s lunch, and then it’s dinner, and when it’s bright again it’s breakfast again.… It might have been better if I could have made different side dishes, but since the same things were planted in the fields, I always made the same panchan. If you do that over and over, there are times when you get so sick of it. When the kitchen felt like a prison, I went out to the back and picked up the most misshapen jar lid and threw it as hard as I could at the wall. Aunt doesn’t know that I did that. If she did, she would say I was crazy, throwing jar lids around.”
Your mom told you that she would buy a new lid within a few days to replace the one she broke. “So I wasted some money. When I went to get the new lid, I thought it was so wasteful and felt terrible, but I couldn’t stop. The sound of thelid breaking was medicine to me. I felt free.” Your mom put a finger to her lips and said, “Shh,” in case someone could hear. “It’s the first time I’m telling this to anyone!” A mischievous grin hovered on her face. “If you don’t want to cook, you should try throwing a dish. Even if you’re thinking, Oh, what a waste, you’re going to feel so light. Of course, since you’re not married, you wouldn’t feel that way anyway.”
Your mom let out a deep sigh. “But it was nice when you kids were growing up. Even when I was so busy that I didn’t have time to retie the towel on my head, when I watched you sitting around the table, eating, with your spoons making a racket in the bowls, I felt like there was nothing else I wanted in the world. You were all so easy. You dug in happily when I made a simple zucchini-and-bean-paste soup, and your faces lit up if I steamed some fish once in a while.… You were all such good eaters that when you were growing I was sometimes afraid. If I left a pot filled with boiled potatoes for your after-school snack, the pot would be empty when I came home. And there were days when I could see the rice in the jar in the cellar disappearing day by day, and times when the jar would be empty. When I went to the cellar to get some rice for dinner and my scoop scraped the bottom of the rice jar, my heart would sink: What am I going to feed my babies tomorrow morning? So in those days it wasn’t about whether I liked to be in the kitchen or not. If I made a big pot of rice and a smaller pot of soup, I didn’t think of how tired I was. I felt good that these were going into my babies’ mouths. Now, you probably can’t even imagine it, but in those days we were always worried that we would run out of food. We were all like that. The most important thing was eating and surviving.”Smiling, your mom told you that those days were the happiest in her life.
But Mom’s headaches stole the smiles from her face. Her headaches jabbed at her soul and slowly ate away at it, like field mice with sharp teeth.
The man you went to for help in printing the flyers is wearing old cotton clothes. Anyone glancing at him would be able to tell that he’s wearing a very carefully sewn outfit. Even though you know he always wears old cotton clothes, you can’t help focusing on them. He has already heard about your mom and tells you that he will design the flyer based on your mock-up and print them out quickly, at a printing shop his business acquaintance uses. Since there aren’t any recent pictures of Mom, you and your siblings have decided to use the family picture that your brother posted on the Internet. The man looks at Mom’s face in the picture. “Your mother is very pretty,” he says.
Out of the blue, you comment that his clothes are very
“You broke jar lids?”
“I couldn’t see an end to it. At least with farming, if you plant seeds in the spring you harvest them in the fall. If you plant spinach seeds, there is spinach; where you plant corn, there’s corn.… But there’s no beginning or end to kitchen work. You eat breakfast, then it’s lunch, and then it’s dinner, and when it’s bright again it’s breakfast again.… It might have been better if I could have made different side dishes, but since the same things were planted in the fields, I always made the same panchan. If you do that over and over, there are times when you get so sick of it. When the kitchen felt like a prison, I went out to the back and picked up the most misshapen jar lid and threw it as hard as I could at the wall. Aunt doesn’t know that I did that. If she did, she would say I was crazy, throwing jar lids around.”
Your mom told you that she would buy a new lid within a few days to replace the one she broke. “So I wasted some money. When I went to get the new lid, I thought it was so wasteful and felt terrible, but I couldn’t stop. The sound of thelid breaking was medicine to me. I felt free.” Your mom put a finger to her lips and said, “Shh,” in case someone could hear. “It’s the first time I’m telling this to anyone!” A mischievous grin hovered on her face. “If you don’t want to cook, you should try throwing a dish. Even if you’re thinking, Oh, what a waste, you’re going to feel so light. Of course, since you’re not married, you wouldn’t feel that way anyway.”
Your mom let out a deep sigh. “But it was nice when you kids were growing up. Even when I was so busy that I didn’t have time to retie the towel on my head, when I watched you sitting around the table, eating, with your spoons making a racket in the bowls, I felt like there was nothing else I wanted in the world. You were all so easy. You dug in happily when I made a simple zucchini-and-bean-paste soup, and your faces lit up if I steamed some fish once in a while.… You were all such good eaters that when you were growing I was sometimes afraid. If I left a pot filled with boiled potatoes for your after-school snack, the pot would be empty when I came home. And there were days when I could see the rice in the jar in the cellar disappearing day by day, and times when the jar would be empty. When I went to the cellar to get some rice for dinner and my scoop scraped the bottom of the rice jar, my heart would sink: What am I going to feed my babies tomorrow morning? So in those days it wasn’t about whether I liked to be in the kitchen or not. If I made a big pot of rice and a smaller pot of soup, I didn’t think of how tired I was. I felt good that these were going into my babies’ mouths. Now, you probably can’t even imagine it, but in those days we were always worried that we would run out of food. We were all like that. The most important thing was eating and surviving.”Smiling, your mom told you that those days were the happiest in her life.
But Mom’s headaches stole the smiles from her face. Her headaches jabbed at her soul and slowly ate away at it, like field mice with sharp teeth.
The man you went to for help in printing the flyers is wearing old cotton clothes. Anyone glancing at him would be able to tell that he’s wearing a very carefully sewn outfit. Even though you know he always wears old cotton clothes, you can’t help focusing on them. He has already heard about your mom and tells you that he will design the flyer based on your mock-up and print them out quickly, at a printing shop his business acquaintance uses. Since there aren’t any recent pictures of Mom, you and your siblings have decided to use the family picture that your brother posted on the Internet. The man looks at Mom’s face in the picture. “Your mother is very pretty,” he says.
Out of the blue, you comment that his clothes are very
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