MOTHER

In 1935, she was born into a landowning family in Sacheon-myeon, Gangneung, yet wealth was never once permitted to be part of her life. As the second daughter among five daughters and one son, she learned labor from her mother’s hands instead of protection, simply because she was a girl. Before sunrise, she swept the yard; even after sunset, the endless housework and farm work continued. Neither the village school nor formal education could ever belong to her. Unable to learn letters, the young girl instead learned how to read people’s moods, how to remain silent, and how to endure. In 1950, when she was fifteen, the Korean War broke out. Her family, unable to flee, hid in the mountains during the day. In the cold dirt-floor darkness of a cave, she survived each day while barely daring to breathe. At night, when the gunfire and smoke had briefly subsided, she would return home to cook rice and take care of the household. Daytime meant hiding; nighttime meant survival. For nearly three years, she made that journey again and again, risking her life every day. More terrifying than hunger was the fear of being discovered, and deeper than sleep was the anxiety of never knowing when it would end. The girl’s youth quietly grew old inside that cave. At the age of twenty-three, she married a man four years older than her, a university-educated refugee who had come from Japan. As the eldest son of ten siblings, her husband brought not stability but the beginning of yet another burden. He was educated, but the times were too harsh for learning alone to overcome poverty, and the couple’s life was constantly shaken by the struggle to make a living. She gave birth first to two daughters, then to two sons, raising them while living every day without rest. Her own life was always postponed as she placed her children’s meals and futures before her own. Her love and investment in her eldest son, in particular, were almost relentless, as if they were a form of compensation for the education she had been denied all her life. In every book and every coin of tuition was not merely a mother’s ambition, but a desperate wish to continue, through the next generation, the possibilities that had been cut off in her own life. In this way, she lived by choosing her children’s future over her own name. This novel follows the difficult life of one woman and casts light on the shadows of modern Korean history, from Japanese colonial rule, war, poverty, and industrialization to the threshold of the age of artificial intelligence. The life of a woman who endured in silence and quietly supported the next generation—her survival becomes one of the strongest testimonies of an era.