My daughter married a Korean man at 21 and left the family, yet every year she sent the same message

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.

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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.