Filial Piety
I let the bus to Incheon carry me, leaned my head against the window, and for a little while I thought of Mom.
Mom... I wonder if she's getting by all right.
She had been born and raised in Pyeongtaek. She met my father, married him, and moved to Incheon, and I was born there.
My memories of him are not fond ones. He was always talking about romance and castles in the air. A man like that took up stocks, failed, left the house under a crushing debt, and vanished without a word. We sold off everything we owned and went to my mother's family with our hands out, and even that fell short. What remained was a hundred million won, a sum so large we had to run ourselves ragged just to pay it back.
Still, thank God I found a job and we finally cleared it.
Mom had poured her whole life into the little banchan shop she built with her own hands, setting aside one coin and then another until the debt began to shrink. My sister and I both went to work and kept paying, and last year, at last, we finished off the principal.
...There was a time we nearly broke ourselves just to repay a mere hundred million.
The only reason I had joined a construction company was that the paycheck was bigger. That was the whole of it. It was the same reason my sister had skipped college entirely and gone straight to work.
I turned my phone on again and opened the finance app.
Add in what I had taken on yesterday's short, and I was sitting on close to four hundred million won.
A day's work, and I'd made half a year's salary...
I lowered the phone, closed my eyes, and let the thought settle.
With just this much...
With just this much, our family could go all the way back to the life we'd had before my father disappeared. My sister wouldn't have to work anymore. The university she used to sing about wanting to attend—I could send her, as many times as she liked. The same went for my younger sister. But what mattered more was this: my ability was not some small vessel meant to stop here.
If I want to, I can grow this money without end.
That was how enormous it was. Even I felt a flicker of fear at how far it might carry me.
...Mom will still be glad to see me if I show up without a word, won't she?
Come to think of it, I had left in such a rush that I never called. I had mentioned, last time we spoke, that I would come on the weekend, but I had said that and then failed to show because of work more than once or twice, so until now I had always phoned again once I was actually on my way. I glanced at the screen, then pictured Mom getting my message late and hurrying out to buy groceries. Better to surprise her. I set the phone back down.
"Mom, I'm home."
"Oh? Oppa's here? It's been forever~"
The first person I saw, the moment I stepped inside, was none other than my youngest sister.
"Yeah. Long time. School out? I brought jokbal."
"Ooh, jokbal."
The late-born baby I had all but raised on my back had grown, somewhere along the way, into a high schooler who wore her uniform well. She had an ice cream in her mouth and was about to toss off a half-hearted hello and slip into her room, but the smell of the braised pork hocks stopped her mid-step. She took the bag and shouted into the house.
"Mom!!! Oppa's here!!!"
"Hm? Seong-ho's here?"
Mom came limping out from the inner room.
"Well, look at my boy~ It's been ages~ Why'd you come without calling? If you'd told me, I would have made something."
"...Your back is still like that?"
"What can I do? It isn't as if this started yesterday. I need the surgery, and I need to look after it, but if I do, who watches the shop and who cooks? Enough empty talk. Get in here."
"...All right, Mom. I brought jokbal. Where's Ji-soo?"
I asked after my older sister by name, but Mom only shook her head.
"Ji-soo? Who knows. Lately she comes in a bit late after work, like she's been up to something... She won't tell me."
...Nothing's wrong, is there?
I had drifted into the worry when Mom took my hand and drew me inside.
"Never mind that. What's going on? It's good to see your face after so long."
"Nothing. I came to see whether my mom was still alive and well."
"...Did something happen at work?"
I couldn't hold it in. A short laugh slipped out of me.
Happen at work? Nothing but good things.
I had made a pile of money and earned the department head's recognition besides. Even thinking it over again, last week had been like a dream.
"It really isn't that, so don't worry. Listen, the other day the department head..."
Mom and I talked for a long while over the jokbal, leaving out only the part where I had started trading and made a fortune. My youngest, who had been rolling around in her room, found the story interesting enough to wander over, pick at the meat, and listen in earnest. Before I knew it a bottle of soju had appeared, and the evening slowly came to a simmer.
"...And that's how it went."
"Why does that Assistant Manager Ryu only act that way with you? That's really strange."
"Right? With how timid Oppa is, I can't imagine he did anything worth hating..."
Mom spent a good long while cursing Assistant Manager Ryu, saying the ones you had to watch most carefully were the men whose mouths were all gloss and nothing underneath. My sister took my side point by point, ticking off everything he had done wrong.
I had deliberately left out the fortune I'd made in stocks, but the talk drifted that way for a moment all the same.
"Still, that Assistant Manager Kim must be over the moon. He landed a clean hit on the person who used to mock him, didn't he?"
"Pfft. What does it matter that Assistant Manager Kim succeeded? If Oppa had just copied him, the money..."
"Hey! Don't you talk like that. Stocks aren't something you poke at so lightly!"
As expected. Because of Dad, Mom was still endlessly grim about the market.
Actually, Assistant Manager Kim was the one copying me.
The awkwardness sent me reaching for another glass, but my sister snatched it, knocked it back in a single swallow, and declared:
"Soju is banned! Oppa, you drink every single day! It looks way too natural on you!"
"...Never mind that. You're a minor. You drinking is the bigger problem, isn't it...?"
"Want me to scold both of you?"
We laughed and talked for a long time, and before I knew it night had fallen. Midnight passed, the numbers rolled over, and I went to Mom.
I glanced over the account and, passing by, looked into my sister's open room. One glass of soju had been enough to make her wobble, and now she was out cold on the bed. For some reason my eye caught the phone still clenched in her sleeping hand, its screen spiderwebbed with cracks.
...Soo-ah's phone is ancient.
Not even an iPhone. A Samsung, and a budget model at that. She had used the same one since middle school without a single complaint. A child who had noticed how hard the house was struggling and grown up far too soon.
But now we have money.
Thinking that, I crossed the living room toward the master bedroom.
Knock, knock.
"Mom, may I come in?"
"Oh~ Come in, hurry!"
Inside, Mom had an old heat pack laid across her lower back and was groaning under it, the pain clearly getting the better of her. Something bitter caught in me at the sight, and I spoke.
"Ahem... Mom, sit up for a moment. There's something I need to tell you."
"What is it?"
She straightened and looked at me, and I said it.
"Mom, you said you needed money, didn't you?"
She went still.
Her face hardened all at once. Maybe I had just called up Grandmother's condition, the thing she had been trying so hard not to look at.
"If we had it... that would be good, of course. Mm. But Seong-ho, you don't need to strain yourself helping me. I'll just have to earn more somehow. A mother holding her hand out to her own child—that isn't right either."
"Mom, check your phone."
Tap, tap.
I worked the app and sent her a hundred million won.
A hundred million puts us over the gift-tax deduction, so some tax will come due, but that hardly matters. The moment the market opens I can make more than enough to cover whatever this costs.
Yes. Right now, something mattered more than the tax.
Ding!
An alert chimed from the phone in front of me, and Mom's eyes flew wide.
"You... where did you get money like this..."
"It's nothing, really. They gave me a bonus at work for doing well, and I just put it together with what I'd saved."
If I told her I had made it in stocks, she would start with worry and end by forbidding it. So I brushed past the truth.
"Even so... this is far too much. No. It's money you earned. Spend it on yourself."
"Mom, this is me spending it on myself."
Assistant Manager Kim had said something similar—that your first profit ought to be spent on yourself. But where was there anything worth more than money spent on family?
"With this, take a short rest from the shop and get your back surgery. Get Grandma's surgery done too, and buy Soo-ah a new phone."
"...No. Even so, this isn't right. I'll take sixty million, and you take the rest back. How could I swallow money you sweated blood to earn?"
Watching her refuse even now, I felt a small tightness in my chest, and I said it anyway.
"Seong-ho..."
"Honestly, next to everything you went through raising us, I don't think this is anything at all."
We talked for a long time after that. Stories from the company. Things that had happened at home. We were a blunt family, but while we caught up on everything that had piled up between us, the smiles never left our faces.
Ah. It's only the difference between having money and not, and ordinary life changes this much.
The four hundred million or so I had made on day trades and shorts was not just four hundred million. Not at the company, and not at home. Maybe that money was what had taken me out of the wheel—a replaceable part—and made me a person.
I need to live looking after my family, too.
With that thought, my one night at the family home came to an end.
Saturday lunch the next day. I had slept in, long and luxuriously, for the first time in ages, and when I got up I took my youngest—back early from outside—to buy a phone.
"Oh... Oppa, you're really getting me a new one?"
"Yeah. Get the latest Apple phone. If you need an iPad, get that too."
"But... iPads are so expensive..."
I grinned.
"Oppa makes a lot of money."
"...So this is what they mean, that a man changes once he gets a job?"
I took my muttering sister from the phone shop all the way through the department store. By the time the circuit was done, her eyes had melted completely, and she was looking at me as if I shone.
"Oppa, you're not about to suddenly die, are you?"
"What are you talking about..."
"They say when a person changes all at once, it means they're going to die. Just in case."
"...If you're going to say weird things, go return those clothes."
She burst out in a bright peal of laughter and fled with a shopping bag in each hand. The sight of her back was a good one.
"Oppa, Oppa, is it okay if I go show my friends what I bought??"
"Sure. Go ahead."
"Thanks, Oppa!"
So when she asked whether she could brag, I nodded without a second thought. It was the brightest I had seen her in a very long time.
I thought that was enough. That is, until I was walking home alone and happened to catch sight of Ji-soo.