She was so excited about it, you’d have thought she’d won the lottery instead of being diagnosed with cancer. Two weeks ago, she’d had a dream about azaleas blooming in her stomach and had had “a bad feeling,” leading her to get a check-up, where she learned she had uterine cancer. Several of the church ladies sold insurance, and the various cancer policies she’d taken out so as to stay on their good side were due to pay out over 200 million won—enough money to pay off the mortgage on our Jamsil-dong apartment. Umma seemed genuinely happy as she went on about how the surgery costs were being reimbursed through the cancer insurance, explaining that we would come out in the black thanks to the rent we collected from the retail units in Suwon and Anyang. She added that because she, my grandmother, and my aunt all had cancer, I was sure to get it myself, and happily proposed that I take out two cancer policies in my name.

My boss was curious as to why I was quitting.

—Did you get a job at a better company?

No, my mother is a widow with cancer, she needs someone to take care of her, was what I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Umma liked to keep things to herself, even things there was no real need to hide, because it was “common” to let others know your business. Her extroverted personality concealed how uncomfortable she was with shame, and she seemed to be very ashamed of her sickness. She fobbed off the clients she’d been managing for twenty years with a story about taking a sabbatical to tour the Holy Land; not even her friends or my aunts were let in on the secret. I had no idea what was so shameful about cancer, but I went along with her wishes all the same. And that’s why, to my boss’s question, I smiled and said I was planning on becoming a writer after I quit. I even added that it had been my lifelong dream.

—Dreams are all well and good. But remember this: opportunities are like trains. Once you miss one, it will never come again.

Is this guy a fucking idiot, doesn’t he know trains come again and again like clockwork? In any case, I quit my job, and two weeks later my mother lay down on the operating table of a Gangnam hospital said to specialize in uterine cancer, where she asked the doctors not to anesthetize her because she wanted to participate in the pain of Jesus Christ, a declaration that (finally!) prompted her doctors to add some psychiatric treatment to her prescription.