“Be strong,” my mother said.
I didn’t have time to consider the matter further, as just then I was distracted by a flash of pain. The bleeding turned out to be the result of a damaged blood vessel between my eyes. The doctor had given me an injection to stop the bleeding, but it didn’t work. In the end, they inserted a roll of cotton gauze into my nose up to my eyes, and the bleeding stopped.
Once I left the hospital, my wife came to see me at my parents’ house. Her stomach was very big, and it looked as though she was having difficulty walking.
“Please divorce me. I don’t want to give you any more trouble. But our baby . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence. I was wondering how she planned to raise a baby by herself.
My father leaped in. “Don’t worry!” he said. “We’ll bring up the baby.”
It would be his first grandchild.
My first son was born on March 25, 1972. We named him Ho-chol. He-suku gave birth to him in our home. She left shortly after he was born. I want to say that I was sad to see her go, but we had hardly known each other. Perhaps it was for the best. Besides, I had more pressing concerns. I had a son to look after. Of course, there were no soft towels and no powdered milk—not much of anything, really. Even as I focused on meeting my son’s immediate daily needs, I couldn’t help but think about this tiny, innocent baby’s future. He wouldn’t be given much. His life would be full of struggle and heartbreak. I should have been thrilled to be a father, but I couldn’t see much to be happy about. I felt pained that his life would be so full of suffering. My parents and youngest sister were pleased, however, and I was happy to move back in with them.
Two months had passed since the birth of my son, and my mother was preparing breakfast in the kitchen. She had once been quite tall, but she’d shrunk over the years. Her work pants had holes in them where her skin showed through. She was only forty-seven years old, but she looked ancient.
Suddenly she seemed to lose her balance. She turned and staggered toward me as I held my son.
“I need to take a little rest,” she said to me as she sat down beside me. She looked at my son and me with a little smile on her lips. I noticed she was struggling to breathe, and I started to panic.
“When you go back to Japan, please take my ashes with you,” she said in a thin, raspy voice. “Take them to your grandparents. Put them in their family grave.”
“What are you talking about? Stop talking like that. It’s a bad omen. You have a new grandson.”
But her face only grew more flushed. I knew then that something was very wrong. Her breathing grew shallow and labored, and her face grew paler by the second.
“I’m going to take a little nap,” she said, lying down.
I started to rub her back since I knew that she liked that. “Are you in pain? Do you feel sick?” I asked, unsure what to do.
But she didn’t respond. I shook her, but she didn’t react at all.
“Mother!” I shouted. “Mother!”
But there was no answer.
And then the baby started wailing.
My father and sister rushed into the room, disturbed from their sleep.
A trail of tears trickled from the corners of my mother’s eyes.
My father put his hand to her mouth.
Then he looked at me with a blank expression.
I could hear what he was saying, but his words made no sense to me.
“She’s dead.”
The only person who came to our house when word of my mother’s death spread through the village was Mrs. Chon, the wife of the man who’d helped us build our house so many years ago after the fire. She rushed in and shook my mother’s body, tears streaming down her face.
“You just became a grandmother! Why did you have to die?” she wailed.
My son, worn out with crying, was sleeping in my arms.
That night, Eiko and Hifumi came over. Eiko took the baby from me. She could see that I was numb and distracted.
“You’re the first son. You have to be strong,” she said to me.
Hifumi said the same thing.
As I looked at my mother’s frail body, I was struck by her ratty, hole-ridden pants. I felt so sorry for her. I mean, she had died in those decrepit, tattered work pants. I couldn’t bear it.
I walked out into the dark night. It was a cloudy evening, so the stars and moon were completely obscured. I wandered around the village for about an hour, and then I went past a house where I saw a pair of pants hanging out to dry. Whispering to myself that I would never do such a thing again and begging forgiveness for my actions, I grabbed those pants and shoved them under my shirt.
I ran home, washed my mother’s body, and put them on her. And guess what. Those pants turned out to be ratty too.
We placed her in her coffin the following afternoon. I tried to hammer the lid down, but the stupid nails were inferior and wouldn’t go in straight. To me, that said it all. As for my mother, she hadn’t enjoyed a single luxury since she’d moved to North Korea. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Had she experienced a single good day in her entire life? Or had her whole life been no better than her ragged work pants? Tattered pants . . . wretched life. Even as I carried her coffin, I mulled over whether she’d been granted a single day of pure happiness. But I couldn’t think of one. Maybe she could finally be happy in death.
We buried her on a mountainside near a fruit farm and put up a simple piece of wood to mark the spot. “Here lies Miyoko Ishikawa,” it said. My father couldn’t speak. He just sighed with grief.
When we got back to our house, the villagers who’d had helped carry her coffin as far as the mountainside were there, partaking enthusiastically of the food and drink that Eiko had provided. It made me sick. When my mother was alive, they never gave her the time of day. Now, here they were, eating and drinking in honor of her death. I couldn’t bear the hypocrisy of their actions—why didn’t they just go and dance on her grave?
I went back to my mother’s resting place. I lit a cigarette and placed it on her grave instead of incense. And I sang a children’s song that my mother used to sing to me called “Red Dragonfly.” She would sing it while looking up at the sky, saying that only the sky connected her to her mother country. She always cried when she sang it. I could barely get out the words through my sobs. Overwhelmed by grief and despair, I wanted to sink into the ground with her.
Life went on. It wasn’t the same, but my father, my youngest sister, Masako, my son, and I remained together. Masako became a farm laborer. My father, nearing sixty at the time, was still in charge of the boiler in a fruit-processing factory. Meanwhile, I continued my work on the farm.
We usually got up at five o’clock. For breakfast, we ate Chinese cabbage that we grew in our garden. It was boiled in water and thickened with cornstarch. Sounds pretty ghastly, right? It was. But if we could get down a bowlful of the stuff, it made our stomachs feel full.
My father used to leave the house first. Then I’d carry my son off to try to find someone who could breast-feed him. I’d go from house to house, asking for help. I couldn’t pay anything, so all I could do was hope to find some kindhearted soul. People sometimes shouted at me. I burned with shame, but what else could I do? Let him starve? So I never gave up. After that, I’d take him to the day nursery at the farm and start work.