Free Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin Page A

lived in when I came to Seoul.”
    He tells his sister to check her cell phone often, that he will call her if he discovers anything. These are unnecessary words at this point. His sister, who never used to answer her phone, now picks up before the third ring. He walks toward the line of taxis. Mom worried about his sister Chi-hon, who is in her mid-thirties but is still unmarried. Sometimes Mom called him in the early morning and fretted, “Hyong-chol! Go over to Chi-hon’s; she’s not answering the phone. She’s not answering, and she’s not calling me, either—I haven’t heard her voice in a month.” When he told Mom that Chi-hon would be holed up at home, writing, or that she must have gone somewhere, Mom insisted that he go over to his sister’s apartment: “She’s alone. She could be sick in bed, or she might have fallen in the bathroom and can’t get up.…” When he listened to the stringof mishaps that might occur to someone living alone, he would be swayed into thinking that any of those things could really happen. Before work or during lunch, he would stop by his sister’s apartment at Mom’s urging and see a heap of newspapers at her door, signaling Chi-hon’s absence. He would gather the newspapers and shove them into a garbage can. When he didn’t see any papers or milk delivered at her door, he would keep pressing the doorbell, knowing that she was inside, and she would poke her unkempt face out and grumble, “What now?” Once, when he was ringing her doorbell, a man arrived, seemingly to visit Chi-hon. The man even said hello to him, awkwardly. Before Hyong-chol could ask who he was, the man said, “You look so much like Chi-hon that I don’t even need to ask who you are.” The man said he’d come by because he had suddenly stopped hearing from her. When Hyong-chol told Mom that his sister seemed to have gone on a trip, or that she was at home and she was fine, Mom would sigh and say, “We won’t know about it even if she dies.” Then she would ask, “What is it exactly that she does?” His sister wrote novels, and to do this she would disappear for fifteen days or sometimes even a month. When he asked her, “Do you have to do that when you write?” she would mumble, “Next time I’ll call Mom.” That was it. Even though Mom was like that, the chasm between the family and his sister continued. Mom stopped asking him to go check on Chi-hon after he ignored her requests a few times. She only mentioned once, “I guess you don’t have time to listen to me.” Because his sister’s abrupt silences continued, he figured someone else in the family must be doing Mom’s bidding. After Mom went missing, his sister muttered to him,“Maybe I’m being punished.…”
    There is a lot of traffic between Seoul Station and Sook-myungWomen’s University. He looks out the car window at the towering gray buildings. He carefully inspects people walking by. In case Mom is in the crowd somewhere.
    “Sir, you said the Yongsan 2-dong office, right?” the taxi driver asks him, turning in front of the university toward Yongsan High School, but Hyong-chol doesn’t register the question.
    “Sir?”
    “Yes?”
    “You said the Yongsan 2-dong office, right?”
    “Yes.”
    He walked this street every day when he was twenty but the scenery outside the car window is foreign to him. He wonders if this is the right way. It would actually be more jarring if the district hadn’t changed at all in thirty years.
    “Since it’s Saturday, the office is probably closed.”
    “I guess that’s right.”
    The taxi driver is about to say something else, but Hyong-chol takes out a flyer from his pocket and pushes it toward him. “If you see someone like this while you’re driving around, please let me know.”
    The driver glances at the flyer. “Is this your mother?”
    “Yes.”
    “How terrible …”
       Last fall, he didn’t do anything even though his sister called to say that Mom was acting