Poet & Columnist While tidying up the shoe cabinet at my country house, I spotted a single, exquisitely small women's shoe. Covered in dust, it was clearly neither my daughter's nor my wife's, but one someone had long since discarded. The small flat, adorned with a floral pattern, belonged to my late mother. The tiny shoe, about a size 150mm, had lost its owner and spent its days meaninglessly inside the cabinet. Though a shoe stripped of its utility and value should have gone into the trash, I carefully placed it in my mother's keepsake box.

From the shoe that once held my mother's entire being, I began to envision her feet. Memories of my mother's feet were like salmon, a journey of return to my earliest childhood. The memories, laboriously swimming upstream towards my childhood, left behind a spawning of countless recollections amidst the gravel beds of the river, much like salmon.

Though my mother carried me on her back, I remember it was her feet that lulled me to sleep. While her lips sang "Hush, hush, my baby," her feet kept a rhythmic "dong dong dong." That gentle sway allowed me to fall asleep.

When my mother prepared laundry, she would first place the fabric on the stepping stone and then pound it gently. I must have been about three or four years old, so perhaps I was only as tall as the stepping stone when lying down. That's when I remember resting my chin and gazing at my mother's feet for a long time. And then came the clear, resonant sound of the laundry bat. "Tok tok tok tok." In an era dominated by patriarchal customs, that sound, which seemed to naturally dissolve a woman's sorrows, yearnings, and joys, must have been as blue as the stories it held. And that sound of the laundry bat, germinating from a distant memory, was like the sound of approaching footsteps.

My mother's feet were also in the furrows of the fields. When she weeded barley fields or tilled bean fields, my mother, along with other women working together, left long footprints as she walked along the ridges. Like the dense tracks left by myriapods such as centipedes, my mother's footprints extended from one field to another. I could read from the weary expressions after finishing field work that countless drops of sweat and sighs were absorbed into those tracks.

And then there were my mother's feet, running along the field ridges, saying she had to feed her children, her head laden with a basket of vegetables. When I went to school in the city, I would visit my country home on Saturday afternoons. While going to the fields to find my mother, I would often see her running towards me from a distance. Each time, I wondered if it wasn't the boundless love that made my mother's small feet appear so busy and hurried.

My mother's small feet that carried the joyous gaze of a mother watching her child. Thus, my mother and her feet were the sole objective correlatives that flowed through the source of my memories, symbolizing my longing.

After my mother passed away and her body was being prepared for burial, I dressed her feet in hemp shoes. It was only then that I realized that until her last breath, my mother had carried me. Therefore, it must not have been just memories that my mother's small feet carried. My own age, past seventy, and my life as a poet were also carried by my mother's small feet. And so were my grandchildren, who had grown so tall.

On a rainy day in early November that year, my mother walked towards heaven with her small feet, and I was left alone. To guide my mother's steps through the dark underworld, I bought a turtle from the market to guide her ten paces and released it into the water. Then, recalling my mother's retreating figure walking softly, I would wipe my eyes without warning.

The following April, it was in the patch of scallions by the house, just about five or six steps away. It was the patch of scallions my mother had cultivated the autumn before she passed away. Spring grass was growing alongside them. I went out with a hoe. As I was weeding somewhere in the middle, I suddenly discovered a faint footprint among the scallion clumps. A small footprint, about 150mm. It was the small footprint left by my mother's feet, the same ones I had gazed upon and touched countless times since childhood.

The moment I realized whose footprints they were, I felt as though a high-voltage current was surging through my spine, as if I had been electrocuted. I checked them again and again, and with trembling hands, I caressed the footprints. Then, I lay down over the footprints. Rubbing my face against the footprints, and engraving them deep within the heart of an unfilial person, I called out a beloved name. Ah, Mother.