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 every­thing 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.