I’d been told that survival rates were lower for cancers that returned. The second time around, it was easier to let go. Neither mother nor son was alarmed when we were told that they were taking out part of her liver and biliary tract where the cancer had metastasized, or when Umma had to go through her fifth round of treatment, or when we heard she had less than a 20 percent chance of living for another year. I had to again quit the company I was working for. My boss told me to come back if things ever got better, but I was thirty years old now, no longer naive enough to believe such promises.
The long-term care hospital where Umma was now staying was about fifteen minutes from home. She had been in a different hospital, on the outskirts of Gyeonggi Province, for half a year, but we had moved her when a lung cancer patient around her age whom she had been close to had suddenly passed away. I guess the new hospital was more of a hospice. The wards, the facilities, everything was as immaculate as a hotel. Professional caretakers and healers provided round-the-clock care that included mainstream and alternative medicines, and I had much less to do once Umma moved there. The fees were much more than my monthly salary, but I thought that we should spend our last days together in a place where she was most comfortable. Umma gave up fighting against her cancer and instead received alternative treatments for her pain while diligently taking up yoga and mindful meditation. Her cancer, being equally diligent, spread all over her body. The areas and forms of her pain kept changing by the day.
Umma told me she needed to go to the bathroom. I took her to the disabled booth in the public bathroom, sat her down on the toilet, and turned away. Ever since the cancer had spread to her bladder, she’d been complaining of increased pain when she urinated. Getting up from bed or coughing, any action that put pressure on her stomach, gave her so much pain that she had to call for my assistance. I stared at the bathroom door as I listened to the weak trickle of her going to the bathroom. I’d been in this situation several times before, but I still couldn’t get used to it. Umma seemed unperturbed despite death’s being so close and all. She simply grabbed the toilet paper from my hand, wiped herself, and pulled up her underwear and trousers. While I closed my eyes and took care of the rest of it, she remarked, “I should’ve had a daughter,” a sentiment thirty years too late. She left me standing there bemused while striding off on her own, confident as anything. You wouldn’t believe she’d had trouble using the toilet on her own just a moment ago. Outside, all the while exclaiming how refreshing the air was, she clapped her hands hard to aid her circulation, a sound so loud I thought the dirt path would lift itself off the ground.
—What are you talking about? The air quality report says fine-dust levels are well over a hundred today, that’s “Very Bad” according to the app.
The cancer hadn’t seemed to have affected her lungs or breathing, thank God. Umma saw my annoyed expression and launched into one of her rants.
—I washed all of your shitty diapers while I raised you, I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss about a little pee now. Well, what else would I expect from you? You were just like this when your grandmother had cancer. When you could barely walk, you crawled to where she was lying down and slapped her in the face! I would put you down somewhere and you would still go and slap her. If I closed the door on you, you’d push it open to go and slap her. That was the kind of kid you were. A mean little bastard.
—Jesus, when are you going to stop talking about that?
—When I die, why?
She’d played the death card so many times that I was pretty sure I’d predecease her from the sheer repetition. In a voice too loud for anyone who’d been informed of how many days they had left in this world, she shouted that I should “do better by your mother while she’s still alive, this is all for your own good!” This rant, once begun, segued into how I was never getting married. She pretended to ask after my friend Jaehee, who had recently found a husband, about some acquaintance’s son who already had two sons of his own, and about some former bachelor who’d been a complete idiot before getting married and was now buying an apartment in Pangyo—her same old repertoire from beginning to end. I was sick of this lament for marriage, but I could understand where she was coming from. This particular drive was how she had kept me fed and sheltered throughout my whole childhood.
When I was eleven, Umma bravely divorced my father, who had not only stepped out of their marriage numerous times but also bankrupted his business. Suddenly the new head of the household, Umma got a job as a couples manager at a Scandinavian matchmaking company that had just opened a Korean branch and was struggling with personnel issues. The matchmaking industry in the late nineties (consisting mostly of “Madame Du” freelance matchmakers) was hit hard when the sophisticated Scandinavian system arrived on the market. Umma carried a bag full of charts on members’ schooling, professions, fortunes, height, weight, and ranking of looks (how would you even . . . ?), everything quantified and stratified by percentile. On the back of the charts were results of personality tests, like the Enneagram or the MBTI. Through this system, the most appropriate match according to social conditions and personalities would be found. The market really took off when men and women from the affluent Gangnam and Songpa districts, who had almost ended up forever single after the upheavals of the Asian financial crisis of the late nineties, began turning their attention to the idea of marriage. Umma used her disarming personality, her wide-ranging connections, and her societal sensibilities to quickly rise in the ranks as a popular “couples manager” and was able to strike out on her own in less than three years. Later, she entered an online degree program in psychology, determined to become the absolute best in her field. She plagiarized the psychology charts used by her previous employer, adding a few categories and moving around a couple more to conceal the theft, set up an unregistered company she called “Hatfield Korea” (a pseudo Western name that sounded like it could belong to a famous psychiatrist), and created business cards for herself that fraudulently proclaimed her to be a “psychological counselor.” I remember how, when I was little, she would slap me on my back for scribbling on the backs of her charts with crayons. As long as the unmarried men and women of Gangnam ate steak and pasta and drank coffee and tea on their arranged dates, my flesh and bones grew too, just as they should. Umma was absolutely convinced in those days that if our family put its best foot forward, we could end up in society’s top percentile and live the dream of a beautiful Scandinavian lifestyle.