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Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin
(Translated by Chi-Young Kim)
Review 1: The New York Times
A Mother’s Devotion, a Family’s Tearful Regrets
By JANET MASLIN
Published: March 30, 2011
“Please Look After Mom” is the work of a popular South Korean novelist, Kyung-sook Shin, who is being published in English for the first time. It sold more than a million copies in South Korea, where there may not be a dry hankie left in the land.
The book is about the selfish family of Park So-nyo, a woman who got lost in the crowd at a train station in Seoul and has not reappeared. Shocked into decency, her husband, two sons and two daughters find themselves replaying all the button-pushing, tear-jerking moments that illustrated this woman’s love and devotion. It would be a grievous understatement to call her a mere martyr.
“Mom,” as she is jarringly called throughout the book’s English version (translated by Chi-Young Kim), was much more than that. But we need to learn about her saintliness in stages. So the book is divided into sections, each devoted to the browbeating of a particular character. Mom’s high-strung careerist daughter and Mom’s faithless husband are both addressed by the author as “you,” as if Ms. Shin means to give each a highly personalized scolding.
Here are the circumstances of Mom’s disappearance, just to give a sampling of the book’s Dickensian extremes: Mom seems to have wandered through Seoul until she became dirty, disheveled and sick. Residents of Seoul recall seeing this lost soul hobbling along on feet that had been cut to the bone by plastic sandals, feet so pustulant that they attracted flies. Step by agonizing step, Mom was limping her way to the place where her favorite child settled in Seoul 30 years earlier.
That favorite child is Hyong-chol, her first-born son. Oh, what a favorite he was. “If she could have, Mom would have come to see him with eggplants or pumpkins tied to her legs,” Ms. Shin writes, using the book’s constant motif of contrasting Mom’s rural, hands-on, family-centric life with the modern, soulless city lives that her children have chosen.
When Mom makes one of her back-breaking day trips to Seoul for a wedding, she typically makes kimchi out of salted cabbage she has brought, scrubs the pots, cleans the stove, sews blanket covers, washes rice, makes bean-paste soup and serves supper. She puts pieces of the meat she has stewed on each of her grown children’s spoons, insisting that she herself is not hungry. Then she picks up and goes home, claiming that she must work in the rice paddies the next day. Her real reason for leaving is that the children’s city quarters are too small to have room for her.
Guilt-tripped by these memories, Hyong-chol vows to treat Mom better — if it isn’t too late. And the family’s older daughter, a snappish writer, realizes that she too has ignored Mom’s needs. This daughter remembers that Mom’s “dark eyes, which used to be as brilliant and round as the eyes of a cow that is about to give birth,” grew dim with pain as Mom began suffering the splitting headaches that nobody much cared about. Two other aspects of Mom’s life that went unnoticed: She was illiterate and had cancer.
The daughter remembers how she was too busy with city life to make anything more than a perfunctory phone call home. She remembers that Mom sold her only ring to pay for tuition, and that when she, the daughter, wanted a book, Mom even sold a favorite puppy. What did this wretched daughter want more than the puppy? A book by Nietzsche: that’s what she wanted.
Mom didn’t always suffer in silence. She was capable of whipping the kids, throwing a table and walking out on her heartless husband after he brought home his girlfriend and installed this woman in the household. Because Mom was always more sensible than anybody else, she rethought this last decision, came back for the sake of her children and kicked out husband and girlfriend. Then she forgave him when, some months later, he came creeping back — alone.
“You spoke politely with others, but your words turned sullen toward your wife,” Ms. Shin intones from atop her very high horse. “Sometimes you even cursed at her. You acted as if it had been decreed that you couldn’t speak politely to your wife. That’s what you did.” “Please Look After Mom” is going to make you pay for that, mister.
Penitence is, after all, this book’s whole point. Characters’ eyes begin watering, pooling with tears, brimming over, etc., as each one has the chance to realize that Mom was a treasure. (Bonus sobbing cue: Nobody knew that Mom was secretly working at an orphanage in her spare time.) Mom’s children start to see how wrong it was to abandon ancestral traditions for their busy, newfangled, heartless, stressed-out city lives.
As Ms. Shin points out, the ancestral rites that used to hold families together are now neglected if they coincide with travel plans. “When people started to hold ancestral rites in time-share vacation condos, they worried about whether the ancestral spirits would be able to find them,” she writes, “but now people just hop on planes.”
So part of this book’s popularity in Korea stemmed from its cautionary powers. But how well will it work elsewhere? Ms. Shin has anticipated that problem by ending the book with a not-to-be-believed scene set in Rome, where Mom is compared to the most sacred of maternal figures. And let’s not underestimate how viscerally the sanctity of motherhood can be exploited as a narrative device. By the end of the book Ms. Shin has been canny enough to make even Mom feel pangs of tearful love for her own Mom. And she has turned the book’s title, which initially sounded like an order, into something much more powerful: a prayer.
A version of this review appeared in print on March 31, 2011, on page C8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Mother’s Devotion, a Family’s Tearful Regrets.
Review 2: opinionless.com
Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom
The Setup: A million-plus-copy best seller in Korea–a magnificent English-language debut poised to become an international sensation–this is the stunning, deeply moving story of a family’s search for their mother, who goes missing one afternoon amid the crowds of the Seoul Station subway.
Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.
You will never think of your mother the same way again after you read this book. (from the hardcover edition)
Hand shaking, you click and begin to read the review of Please Look After Mom that slowly loads in Netscape Navigator on your 13” monochrome monitor and you’re instantly confused. You think to yourself, these aren’t my thoughts, get out of my head interloper. You glance away from your screen momentarily, and then back as if to reset either the signal being sent from your optic nerves to your brain, or the text displayed on the webpage, or perhaps both, but it’s a futile endeavor. When you glance back you’re still looking at your review of the book. The review you didn’t write. You’re amused to find that you liked the book, even though you have no recollection of having ever actually read it.
Hungry, you decide to leave the computer for a bit and have pizza for lunch. You enjoy it, but later it gives you a massive case of diarrhea, which in turn leads to an embarrassing situation in a public unisex restroom. Three rolls of 2-ply later, intestines finally empty, you emerge from the stall and declare to yourself that never again, so long as you live, shall you choose pepperoni as a topping. This of course is the fourth time in three weeks you’ve made this exact decree internally, but you’re confident that you truly mean it this time.
Shit. That’s what second-person narrations generally tend to be. They immediately feel fake because they’re presented to you as if they’re your own thoughts and experiences when you know for a fact that they’re not. You have to have to really want to suspend belief to buy into them as a narrative device, and let’s be honest; even then they rarely come across as 100% successful.
There are two problems when it comes to Please Look After Mom’s use of this storytelling technique. First, the cultural differences are instantly off-putting. With no frame of reference with which to relate, it becomes extremely difficult to believe that “you” are performing ancestral rites, eating seaweed soup, weeding a field from dusk until dawn, or any number of other things. Second, the novel choses to narrate its entire opening section this way, thrusting “you” into the action, once again, without any frame of reference.
Oh no, “your” mom is missing! Maybe the real you wishes that she was, making it extremely difficult for you to believe it when “you” proclaim that “you’re” devastated by her disappearance. Maybe the real you never knew your birth mother and years later when she tracked you down, desperate for some form of connection, you turned her away because it was too little, too late. Point being, maybe the author shouldn’t be so quick to jump to conclusions when it comes to defining what she considers to be universal feelings of unconditional love towards a parental unit.
Instead, second-person narration works best when it’s introduced into an already well-established story, one where the reader feels comfortable and familiar with the characters and setting, and even then it must be used sparingly. See Paul Auster’s Sunset Park for a perfect example of the technique used to its fullest to invoke the desired response from the reader. After that, avoid all other novels told in second-person at all costs.
However, even with the false assumptions that are made and the strange narrative techniques that are used in the first half, the novel does surprisingly make up a fair amount of ground in the second half. Here Shin examines both the husband to wife and parent to child relationships successfully, as she slowly takes mom and converts her from the one dimensional character viewed through the eyes of her children and turns her into a multifaceted individual.
As this transformation takes place, Shin opens the reader’s eyes to the way in which they perceive those around them. We all cast the people that our in our lives into nice, tidy, easily manageable roles whether it be daughter, father, co-worker, mother, etc. Rarely do we look beyond our narrow focus to explore what else the person is capable of or what other experiences they have lived through or do live through on a daily basis. We tend to only see them as they relate directly to us, and that’s a shame, because the truth of the situation is that not only are they a unique individual with hopes, dreams, fears, desires, and aspirations just like us, but who they are is a sum of the very experiences we choose to ignore.
Sadly, the novel again misfires in its closing epilogue where it attempts to introduce Catholic faith into the equation, with comparisons made to the mother of Jesus. It’s a strange direction to go in, considering that for the bulk of the novel all of the talk of ancestral rites would lead the reader to believe that the family members are all practicing Buddhists. It’s an awkward attempt at clearing up some lingering plot threads that probably didn’t require a resolution.
Overall, Please Look After Mom does explore some interesting themes, but puts several potential roadblocks in place when it comes to the reader’s ability to explore them properly. Please consider yourself warned.
Review 3: whisperinggums.wordpress.com
Kyung-Sook Shin, Please look after mom
(Review for the Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011)
January 18, 2012
Am I right in thinking that mothers are more often the subject of novels and memoirs than fathers? Or, is it just that I’m a woman and am subconsciously (or even consciously, if I’m honest) drawn to the topic? Of course, with the Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize reviewing project I didn’t really have a choice. Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please look after mom (or, mother in the British edition) has now been shortlisted for the prize. So, here I am again, reading about a mother!
And I liked it – for a number of reasons. But, before I explain that, a quick overview of the plot. The book commences with the line “It’s been one week since Mom went missing”. We learn pretty quickly that the mother and father had been in Seoul to visit some of their children and had become separated when trying to board the subway together, with the mother being left behind. The rest of the book chronicles the family’s search for the mother and, as they search, their reflections on her life and their relationship with her.
So, what did I find fascinating? Firstly, of course, is the fact that it is set in South Korea. I haven’t been there, and I don’t think I’ve read any Korean literature before, so I was predisposed to be interested before I started it. I wasn’t disappointed. The novel is contemporary but spans a few decades, decades in which many of the current parental generation were still living fairly traditional rural lives while their children were being educated and moving to the city to chase “bigger” dreams. Through flashback reflections of the various characters we learn about this time of transition, and the challenges both generations faced in coping with the change. We learn of the mother’s determination that her children be educated, the lengths she went to to obtain the money to pay for this education, and her disappointment when one daughter trained to be a pharmacist but then married and had three children in pretty quick succession. It’s a story that’s been repeated around the world over the last century or two, and the usual universals are there – the economic challenges and all those big and little conflicts that attend social change – but each situation has its particularity. In this book it’s in how this specific family functions – the mother’s determination springing from her own lack of education, the self-centred father’s unreliability resulting in increased poverty for the family, the sibling relationships characterised by a mix of mutual responsibility, love and exasperation.
The next thing of interest is the form. Readers here know I like books which play around with form and voice, and this is one of those books. The story is told in five parts, using four points of view and three different voices. Got that? To make it easy, I’ll list how it goes:
“Nobody knows”, told by the elder daughter (but second eldest child), Chi-hon, in second person
“I’m sorry, Hyong-chol”, told by the eldest child, son Hyong-chol, in third person
“I’m home”, told by the father/husband, in second person
“Another woman”, told by the mother, Park So-nyo, in first person
“Epilogue: Rosewood rosary”, told by Chi-hon (again), in second person.
As is common in multiple point-of-view novels, the main narrative, the story of the search, progresses more or less chronologically through these parts, with each part also incorporating some back-and-forth flashbacks in which we learn about that person’s relationship with “mom”. This multiple point-of-view technique provides a lovely immediacy to the different perspectives. The choice of different voices – first, second and third – though, is an intriguing one. Here is how I see it. First person for “mom” makes sense since she is the subject. Second person feels like a half-way house between the intimate first person and the more distant third person. Using it for Chi-hon and her father, to speak about themselves, subtly conveys a tension between their responsibility for “mom” (which would be expected of their roles as elder daughter and husband) and their regret and guilt for their failings. Third person, on the other hand, seems appropriate for Hyong-chol who, as the oldest in the family, carries the major weight of familial responsibility into the future. It’s the most distant voice and gives, I think, a layer of gravitas to his role.
And last is the theme – or, should I say, themes? The lesser, if I can call them that, themes include the country-vs-city one, particularly in relation to values; literacy and education; and our mutual responsibility for others (something, the family discovers,”mom” took seriously for friends and strangers as well as her family throughout her life). The overriding theme, though, is that of guilt and regret, of having taken “mom” for granted. They all assumed she liked cooking and being in the kitchen, day in day out. The children forgot to call her regularly and didn’t always come home for special occasions. Her husband remembers all the times he failed to help her, while she would put herself out repeatedly for him. It’s a pretty common story but the way Kyung-sook Shin tells it – the form, the reflective tone, the characterisation, the setting – makes this universal story about, really, respect a very personal one. I admit to being a little choked up at the end!
I have one little query though, and that relates to the invocation of Catholicism in the end. “Mom” does, early in the novel, ask about a rosewood rosary, thus providing a link to the the Epilogue, but where did this interest in the rosary come from, given the frequent references to the more traditional ancestral rites during the book? Mom doesn’t explain it – “I just want prayer rosary beads from that country”, “the smallest country in the world”, she says. I assume it has something to do with the recent growth of Catholicism in South Korea. It didn’t spoil the book for me, but it provided a somewhat odd note. All I can say is read the book for yourself, and see what you think.
Please click on my Man Asian Literary Prize page link for reviews by other members of the team.
Review 4: The complete review's Review
Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook
Please Look After Mom has a simple, devastating premise: a family loses Mom (and wife) Park So-nyo. Not as in she passes away, but rather literally loses her. One moment she's on the crowded Seoul Station subway platform with her husband and then, when he's on the train, he suddenly notices she didn't manage to make it on. Add in the fact that he's carrying her bag -- and then, as we soon learn, that Mom is illiterate -- and she's not really equipped to be wandering about on her own. But when the family go look for her they can't find her; her fate and whereabouts are a mystery. It's like she vanished into thin air.
While the story begins with the search for Mom (already going on for a week by that time), the novel is less a mystery about what happened than a chance for the different family members to reflect on what they suddenly find themselves missing. Divided into four parts (plus a short epilogue), Please Look After Mom presents the perspectives of different family members in turn -- daughter and writer Chi-hon, eldest son Hyong-chol, the husband, and then Mom. Several of these are written in the second person, amplifying the in-your-face-feel of the guilt-trip on offer, and trying to make the reader complicit in the characters' failures (apparently quite successfully, to judge from many of the reviews ...).
Mom turns out to have been incredibly selfless -- in all senses of the word. The characters realize they don't really know her that well, and often didn't pay that much attention -- barely realizing she was illiterate for example, or not even knowing her precise age. But then Mom always put everyone else first -- eventually not even bothering to celebrate her own birthday, since it's so close to Dad's .....
Mom was always busy, toiling in the fields and doing what she could to help her kids. Sure, she "bred silkworms and brewed malt and helped make tofu" -- but that's just the tip of the iceberg. And once the kids are out of the house she still keeps busy doing what she can (and often not telling anyone about it), like helping out at the local orphanage .....
Her husband wasn't much of one, and for a while they were separated, as he hooked up with another woman, but they wound up together again -- and only when she's gone does the husband realize how much he misses her. Similarly, it only begins to dawn on the kids how selflessly Mom devoted herself to them -- so Hyong-chol:
When she was younger, Mom was a presence that got him to continue building his resolve as a man, as a human being.
As to her own suffering -- those headaches ! those stomach pains ! -- well, no one pays them too much heed (and Mom of course never asks for help or attention).
Treacly sentimental though Please Look After Mom is, it does at least offer rich local color, and an interesting contrast between the rural Korea the children were born into (the family lived in a countryside town) and urbanized modern South Korea -- centered around Seoul (and with Chi-hon, for example, frequently abroad -- a jet-setting novelist). Mom is all about traditions and an established (but increasingly obsolete) way of life; her illiteracy is only the most obvious marker of her remove from the fast-paced modern times her children are immersed in.
The different perspectives and narratives make for some interesting variety -- though the second-person voices can be a bit much to take. Its many jumps between past and present (and the shifts in voice and perspective) also can make it somewhat difficult to follow parts of the family-story, or get a true sense of some of the characters. The book is also undermined by Mom's too-good-to-be-true selflessness -- there's nothing she won't do for her kids in her maternal overkill -- and Shin lays it on pretty thickly, right down to a Vatican (holy mother of god !) epilogue .....
Please Look After Mom is an odd book -- quite accomplished, in many respects, but also far too reliant on cheap (or at least cheaply presented) sentimentality. Ultimately, it is simply too reverent.
- M.A.Orthofer, 11 December 2011
Review 5: amazon.com
Please Look After Mom
A moving novel, both powerful and fragile, March 4, 2011
By PT Cruiser "PT Cruiser"
Kyung-Sook Shin has written an exceptional novel and I can see why it is a bestseller in its native language, in Korea. It is a story about relationships, about families and those close to us. The story is about a mother who is separated from her husband when boarding a train in Seoul, South Korea,on the way to visit her eldest son and her family's search for her. It is told in four voices, a daughter, a son, a husband and a mother. The story unfolds in mostly second-person narration, from the point of view of each these characters. The translator, Chi-Young Kim did an excellent job with the translation and made it seem as though it were originally written in English.
Rather than being given a lot of intimate details about each of these people, the author brings us into the drama of the mother disappearing at the station, and although we come to know a little more about the mother, there are really more questions than answers about the other family members. I normally like stories with a lot of character development, but somehow, this really worked and I was quickly drawn in, perhaps in the way of an accident or other tragedy where you don't want to look, but somehow need to know how and why it happened and how the people involved are affected. In many cases Kyung-Sook Shin gives only a few details and it is up to the reader to fill in the blanks. It gives a glimpse into the culture of present day South Korea both in a large city and in a rural area and we can see how much things have changed in only a single generation. It only took a few pages to become very involved.
This story is about complex emotions and interactions between family members. It was striking how differently each member of the family handled the disappearance. There are emotions that most of us could identify with in some way: helplessness, guilt, impatience, sadness and also joy. It was powerful and fragile at the same time. There are lessons to be learned and questions about how we view our relationships. It's the kind of story I'll be thinking about for a long time.
Try not to read too many spoilers if you're planning to read this book. The story needs to be uncovered layer, by layer, just as it was written. Two thumbs up for this moving novel. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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