For twelve years straight my neighbors would stop by at my house telling me I was the luckiest woman alive. “Oh, Theresa, you’ve raised a saint,” they’d say. And honestly, they weren’t completely wrong. Year in, year out, never a day off schedule, eight thousand dollars in bank transfers came into my account from South Korea.
But you can’t ask bank statements how their day was, can you?
I lost my husband years ago and I raised my daughter, Mary Lou, on my own. She was everything to me, but then she turned 21 and met Kang Jun, a Korean man twenty years her senior. She told me he was the one and I tried to fight it. Not much because of the fact that he was Korean but because the age gap and the fact they lived on two separate sides of the world. But my daughter was as stubborn as she always has been. When she made up her mind, that was it.
Following the wedding, I watched her go through airport security checkpoints. Both of us were crying, but I told myself not to get too emotional because she would come visit as often as she could.
But I was so wrong, because she never did.
Eventually, the years seemed to melt into one another. The phone calls became briefer, the lies longer. Instead of her voice on the other end of the line, I received my annual eighty-thousand-dollar payment along with the exact same text: “Mom, look after yourself. I’m doing well.”
The word “well” felt like she wasn’t telling me everything.
On the rare occasions we did video calls, she was always in a rush to cut it short. Whenever I asked her why she wasn’t visiting, she’d say she was too busy working. One thing I knew was that she didn’t sound or act like her old self.
Eventually, I just stopped pushing.
You know, at times, mothers are cowards. We don’t ask the tough questions since we are afraid of the answers. So, I preferred the easy way out. I accepted her money, renovated my home, and spent all my Christmases putting out food for an empty seat, making her favorite beef stew, and crying into the towels.
By year twelve, my loneliness turned into anger and I decided to visit her in Seoul without telling her. For someone my age who has never left the country, it felt like a huge deal, and honestly, I was a bit scared, but I was determined to see my daughter.
Unsplash
The flight was hellish, and arrival at Seoul was overwhelming. I somehow found the strength to tell the taxi driver the address Mary Lou provided to me and was taken to a suburb where the houses were heavily protected by gates.
The taxi driver dropped me in front of a stunning, very contemporary two-story house. I approached the door and pressed the button. Silence. I pressed it again. No answer. As I tried to open the gate, I realized that it was not even locked.
I entered the house. “Mary,” I called out. There was no response.
