The narrator’s relationship with her mother

The narrator’s relationship with her mother is built from intimate routines that offer comfort and impose obligations at the same time. The mother misses her after she moves out, and the narrator continues to visit, sleep beside her, and share meals and bathing rituals. Yet the daughter also resists expectations about marriage, appearance, and eating. Their closeness is neither simple harmony nor estrangement: it is a bond in which physical care and emotional pressure repeatedly occupy the same space.

Shared Home and Continuing Attachment

The mother lives above the loading bays at the port, in an inexpensive apartment reserved for fishmongers. It is also the narrator’s childhood home, noisy and closely tied to the work and movement of the harbor. After moving out to the guest house, the narrator visits on Sunday evenings and stays until Monday, her day off. The mother has difficulty sleeping alone since her daughter left, and the visits preserve an old domestic arrangement even as the narrator has begun a separate life.

That attachment is registered physically at night. The mother sleeps with her head on her daughter’s stomach, her weight pressing down as her chest rises and falls. The narrator, accustomed to sleeping alone at the guest house, lies awake through her mother’s snoring and counts drops of saliva falling onto her skin. The scene makes their intimacy palpable but not wholly restful: the daughter is close enough to feel and count the details of her mother’s body, yet she experiences that closeness as something that keeps her awake.

The mother’s concern also takes the form of imagining a settled future for her daughter. When the narrator is twenty-four, the mother laments that she is still unmarried. The narrator promises that they will become officially engaged in a few months, and the reassurance allows the mother to return to her work. The promise shows the force of her mother’s hopes, but the narrator’s account does not present it as a simple declaration of her own desire. Marriage becomes one of the expectations through which the mother tries to make her daughter’s future legible and secure.

Care, Food, and the Daughter’s Body

The mother and daughter care for one another through food and touch. At the jjimjilbang, they take turns scrubbing each other’s backs. Later, in the shared mixed section, they lie on the floor with their heads on wooden blocks, sipping barley porridge and peeling hard-boiled eggs. These gestures are ordinary and reciprocal; care is something they do together, not merely something the mother gives. But the same encounter exposes a persistent strain. The mother tells her daughter that she has lost weight and needs to eat more. The narrator’s hands begin to shake, and she hates the recurring comments that she is too thin and should eat, but must not become fat. Such remarks turn concern into a source of distress, making the daughter’s body a subject of family attention rather than a private matter.

The mother’s offer to fund an operation extends that attention from eating to appearance. After hearing about a guest-house worker with bandages, she says she has savings if her daughter wants surgery, suggesting that an operation might help her find a better job in Seoul. The narrator challenges the implication by asking whether her mother thinks she is ugly. She says she is not seeking another job, and mentions that working at the guest house lets her meet people and that an artist there has work she likes, while withholding that he is French. The exchange reveals both the mother’s practical hopes for her daughter and the limits of what the daughter chooses to share with her.

The narrator recalls that, when she was young, she and her mother mainly watched television and went to the beach. Her mother did not stop to talk with other mothers at the school gate, and classmates soon began asking why the narrator had no father. As soon as she was old enough, she took the bus home by herself. This recollection gives their closeness a history of social isolation: mother and daughter had shared time together, but the narrator’s childhood also included questions about her family that she had to encounter beyond their private world.

Protection and Conflict Over Appearance

At a family gathering, the mother explicitly rejects the idea that her daughter should be altered to satisfy other people’s preferences. The aunt discusses the narrator’s outfit and make-up, criticizes her glasses, and offers to pay for an operation. The mother answers that her daughter is lovely as she is, glasses included, and does not need changing. Her defense stands in marked contrast to her earlier suggestion that surgery might improve the narrator’s employment prospects. The difference matters: the mother can imagine appearance-altering procedures as a route to opportunity, yet when another relative treats the daughter’s looks as a defect to correct, she insists on accepting her as she is.

That protection does not prevent the meal from becoming painful. The aunt asks why the narrator is eating so much, and the mother panics, telling her sister not to make such a remark when the narrator is eating for once. The daughter grips her spoon, watches scraps of kimchi land among the dishes, and finally puts on her coat and leaves for the guest house. Her mother gives her a pleading look, but the narrator has decided not to be swayed. The mother’s defense is real, yet the daughter still has to leave the gathering to end the scrutiny. In this scene, affection does not erase the harm of a family conversation organized around her body and appetite.

Boundaries and Acts of Reciprocity

The narrator’s growing independence appears most clearly when she refuses to go home with her mother after their bath. She says she has work to do at the guest house; the truth is that she can no longer bear sharing a bed. She finds her mother’s disappointment painful but holds to her decision. The moment marks a limit within a relationship that has depended on repeated visits and shared sleeping arrangements. Love makes the separation difficult, but it does not make the boundary less necessary.

Later, after dinner, the two watch television in bed. The mother sits behind her daughter with her legs around her hips and massages her neck, remarking that this is the first time the narrator has visited on a Saturday. The narrator explains that the guest-house manager is going to Seoul the next day and she must stay there. The visit is therefore shaped by work as much as by family desire, but the mother’s massage renews their familiar physical closeness. When the mother brings out a tube of persimmon jelly saved from a gift by the aunt, she is eager to share it. The narrator reminds her that she dislikes its texture; seeing her mother’s disappointment, she takes the tube and begins to suck the jelly down. The small act reverses the earlier pattern of care: this time the daughter accepts something unpleasant to spare her mother’s feelings.

A Bond of Care and Pressure

Across these episodes, the relationship is sustained by concrete acts—visits, shared beds, back-scrubbing, food, a neck massage, and the saved jelly—rather than by uncomplicated understanding. The mother’s longing for company and hopes for marriage coexist with suggestions about surgery and repeated comments on eating. The narrator both withdraws from her mother’s demands and responds to her sadness, sometimes keeping important details to herself and sometimes accepting what she does not want in order to comfort her.

The relationship’s defining tension is that care can feel like closeness or intrusion without changing its source. The mother defends her daughter’s glasses and beauty, yet also imagines surgery as a practical advantage; she notices weight loss, yet her concern intensifies the narrator’s distress around food. The daughter, in turn, does not simply reject her mother: she visits, shares rituals, and makes small concessions, while refusing a bed and leaving a meal when she needs distance. Their bond remains active through these competing gestures, with affection expressed not as perfect agreement but as repeated negotiation over how near they can be.