Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

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 therice 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. Somehowyou 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