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. The book sold more than 1 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 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,” 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 backbreaking 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 the 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 the 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,” 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 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? 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 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.
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