“To you, Mom was always Mom. […] it hadn’t dawned on you that she was a human being who harbored the exact same feeling you had for your own brothers […].” 

So-nyo’s family never thought of her as a human being with her own hopes and dreams. Her children simply saw her as a mother and her husband only saw her as a provider of comforts. It’s not until her disappearance that her family wonders who she really was.

“Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them.”

Chi-hon affirms this concept when thinking about her reading at the Braille library. She contends that people believe in fate or the unexpected too easily. If people would look at cause and effect, action and reaction, and trace one moment to what it connects to in the past, people would realize that there’s a causal explanation for most moments.

“When you learned to write your name and mom’s name and read books hesitantly before enrolling in school, your mom’s face bloomed like a mint flower. That face overlapped with the Braille you couldn’t read.” 

Chi-hon took an abrupt trip to her hometown to visit her mother. When thinking about why she chose to visit, she realizes that looking at the Braille on the pages of her translated book reminded her of learning to read and how happy her progress made her mother—only later does Chi-hon realize that her mother couldn’t read.