?
Thankfully, my mother was still asleep, snoring. She must’ve dozed off right after lunch. I quietly stepped inside, slid the caregiver bed out from underneath hers, and sat down.
Umma’s things began to multiply in the hospital room as she kept extending her stay. Side dishes and fruit in the fridge, a fruit knife in a drawer, a bag of peppermint candies, a little framed picture on the nightstand. The picture was of me at ten and her at thirty-eight. Umma wore the cap from a graduation gown and stood next to some statue, and I stood next to her wearing denim overalls and a sour expression. Every photo of me from around that time has me frowning. Maybe I was born with a shitty attitude. Next to the photo were copies of the two books I had published this year. They were for visitors; Umma never read my books. In fact, she’d never read a single word I’d published—a denial that bordered on the obsessive. She claimed it was because her aging eyes made every letter look like a tiger about to pounce, but I knew there was a different reason.
When I was nineteen, I won a literary prize given out by a college newspaper. The winner would get a million won in scholarship money, and a friend who was on staff happened to pass onto me that there were very few applicants that year. I was always short on money for drinks, so I wrote about a woman in her fifties who’d always had an inferiority complex about her education, who went on to get two bachelor’s degrees at an online university and threw everything she had into her son’s education; it was the only story I could write at that time, and the judges declared it the winner on the strength of its “dynamic rendering of its main character.” Umma heard the news (from her church, no doubt, the source of all evil rumor in this world), got a copy of the paper, and read the story. Then she cried for four days straight. I could hear her sobs and lamentations through her bedroom door. “I can’t believe I hurt you so much, I can’t believe I exploited you like that!” “Umma, for God’s sake, fiction is just fiction! It’s all made up!” She refused to listen to me and from then on avoided anything I wrote, even notes or school reports I dropped on the living room floor.
—Myoung-hee loved your book. She said she’s read every-thing you’ve published so far. You know she’s the smartest of all my friends. A Sookdae grad, no less. She said your writing made her think you’d grown up into a very fine young man.
The fiction I’d put out over the past three years was all about getting drunk, stealing things, illegally committing homosexual acts in the military, prostitution, cheating on -boyfriends—what on earth was in there to cast the author as “a fine young man”?! If he was any finer, he’d murder someone. In any case, you had to hand it to the church ladies—they -really were consummate spin doctors.
Umma paused her patented soft snoring and sat up, complaining about how she hadn’t slept well the previous night. Yawning, she mentioned that the pain from chemotherapy made it hard for her to sleep. Her snoring had already scared off two previous roommates, so for better or worse she’d had the two-person room all to herself for the past three months. Before, she’d complained about having to share a room, but now she ranted in a most un-Christian, shamanistic way, for someone who had devoted the past forty years of her life to her church, about Death coming to visit her in the night.
—Umma, do you want me to peel an apple for you?
—There’s a bitterness in my mouth. Unwrap a candy for me instead.
She had never eaten sweet things in her life, but ever since her tumor removal surgery, all she craved was peppermint drops. I once made her spit out her candy when I found her picking at her lunch. They said her digestive system was unable to work properly. I sprayed Febreze on the sheets to cover up that sickly hospital-ward smell.
Five months ago, I’d been dismayed but not surprised to learn that Umma’s cancer had returned. She’d been in remission for years, but I had been worried it might come back. And I was sick of this repetition of joy and pain, comedy and tragedy—nothing good ever came of it. I’d already been through everything the relative of a cancer patient could possibly experience, except the funeral. And perhaps now it was time to prepare for this final step as well.
?
It had been six years since the cancer was first discovered in my mother’s body.
I was an intern in my mid-twenties. The ten interns who had started out had been whittled down to three. Rumor had it that only one would score a permanent contract, and as the only male remaining, it was likely to be me. The research team I assisted investigated the correlation between political leanings and the health of people in their fifties, calling over a hundred people a day. But it was truly a first when a certain center-right woman in her fifties called me out of the blue. I hung up on her twice, but she refused to stop calling. I ended up sneaking in a call though the company phone.
—Hello, I’m calling from Korea Research—
Umma interrupted me, her voice filled with joy.
—Your mother has cancer! In the uterus! Hallelujah.
She was so excited about it, you’d have thought she’d won the lottery instead of being diagnosed with cancer. Two weeks ago, she’d had a dream about azaleas blooming in her stomach and had had “a bad feeling,” leading her to get a check-up, where she learned she had uterine cancer. Several of the church ladies sold insurance, and the various cancer policies she’d taken out so as to stay on their good side were due to pay out over 200 million won—enough money to pay off the mortgage on our Jamsil-dong apartment. Umma seemed genuinely happy as she went on about how the surgery costs were being reimbursed through the cancer insurance, explaining that we would come out in the black thanks to the rent we collected from the retail units in Suwon and Anyang. She added that because she, my grandmother, and my aunt all had cancer, I was sure to get it myself, and happily proposed that I take out two cancer policies in my name.
My boss was curious as to why I was quitting.
—Did you get a job at a better company?