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.
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.
The ground floor was like a fancy furniture shop. It was sparkling clean, and lifeless. There were no keys lying on the countertop, no shoes at the entry point, no coats hanging in the hall. It did not smell of food or perfume but only of bleach. The countertops in the kitchen were empty. When I opened the huge refrigerator, there were only some water bottles and one packet of ramen noodles.
Fear began to overwhelm me and I ran up the stairs, where I found three doors.
The first one was a bedroom, but it contained only one small single twin bed. I tore open the closet, finding only some plain women’s clothing arranged in rows. There was literally nothing in this house that belonged to any man. No suits, no men’s footwear, no cologne. Kang Jun was not living here, nor had he lived here in a long time.
The second room was totally empty.
Then, I opened the third door at the end of the hall, and my jaw dropped. The room was stacked with heavy cardboard boxes. A few were taped shut, but the open ones were filled to the brim with neat, banded stacks of American hundred-dollar bills. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, just sitting in a dark, empty room.
My mind raced through the worst-possible scenarios. Was my daughter involved in any criminal activities? Was she in danger?
And then I heard someone opening the front door.
Someone asked a question in Korean, and then in English. “Who’s there?”
When I turned around, I finally saw my daughter. She was then 33 but looked like a 50-year-old woman.
“Mary Lou, what is this?” I asked, unaware of what was going on. “Where is your husband? What is all that money?”
And then she collapsed on the floor and started crying before telling me everything. The first year in Korea, she learned her husband was a gambling addict. Not long after that, he vanished and was nowhere to be found. She was left to pay for his debt.
Mary Lou didn’t even speak the language. She was scared and completely lost.
“Why didn’t you come home?” I kept asking, and she said she didn’t return because she knew I was right when I opposed her marriage. She was embarrassed and didn’t know how to tell me that she made a mistake marrying that man.
“Oh, mom, I remembered how stubborn I was. I couldn’t bear the thought of crawling back home to our small town as a total failure, letting everyone say they told me so. I couldn’t do it.”
She cast a glance toward the room with the money. “And I wanted to take care of you. I made a pledge to myself that no matter what happened in my life, I would fulfill my promise of giving you a wonderful one. I took three jobs, Mom. Worked sixteen hours a day, everyday, for twelve years straight. Everything I earned I spent on you.”
That eighty thousand dollars a year was not her rich husband’s pocket change. That was my daughter’s youth, her health, her blood. She starved herself in an empty house only to make sure that I was living comfortably. Those boxes with cash upstairs were her savings; she converted all of it to US dollars and planned a single enormous transfer right before coming back to me.
I saw those tired hands of hers and experienced a deep wave of guilt.
“My silly girl,” I whispered, kissing the top of her head. “I did not want anything else but you.”
We spent the rest of that day talking, and we took a flight home first thing in the morning. As the plane lifted off, I held her hand tight, knowing I was finally flying home with the only fortune that ever mattered.
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Bored Daddy
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