“Even though I’m a
mother, I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my
childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven’t forgotten a
thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning?”
Some books help us pass time. Some other books possess the
power to look through the time passed in our lives and call attention to things
we have taken for granted.
Korean novelist Shin Kyung-sook’s novel, Please Look After Mom
(originally published in 2008 and translated to English by Kim Chi-Young in
2011), which won the Man Asian Literary Prize, clearly belongs to that later
category of books. The novel is a haunting tear-jerker, which reminds us to
appreciate and reciprocate the never-ceasing, unconditional love one receives
from his/her mother. Although set in Seoul, South Korea, Shin Kyung-sook’s
devastating tale deals with universal themes like motherhood, loss, tradition,
loneliness, and familial roles.
A large part of this international best-selling novel is
told in second-person narration which is initially off-putting, but gradually it
achieves an eloquence that adds to the reading experience. Carefully divided
into four chapters, Please Look After Mom opens with the mysterious
disappearance of a 69-year-old woman named Park So-nyo in a crowded Seoul subway
station. She’s accompanied by her husband both having arrived from
the countryside to the big city where their four children are living. The first three chapters
are narrated by the woman’s elder daughter (Chi-hon), elder son (Hyung-chol),
and the husband respectively. While the family desperately searches for her, wandering
around the streets and putting up ‘missing’ posters, the aforementioned family
members reflect upon the sacrifices she has made for them although they never
truly appreciated or acknowledged it.
The journey down the memory lane is littered with small
details and events which after mom’s absence looms large and deepens each
character’s guilt. The novel’s strength lies in the way it skilfully juxtaposes
the specific Korean history (the Korean War, dictatorship, etc) and culture
with the universal theme of ever-changing family dynamics. Park So-nyo grew up in
the country in an era when war and poverty threatened to topple people’s lives.
She’s illiterate yet a very hard-worker, and helped all her four children to
study and lead a successful life in the city. The central question that haunts
the characters’ mind, when they piece together the selfless nature of Park
So-nyo, is why they only saw her as the ‘Mother’? Why didn’t they comprehend
that she was once a child and a young woman with dreams and aspirations of her
own? (“To you, Mom was always Mom. It
never occurred to you that she had once taken her first step, or had once been
three or twelve or twenty years old. Mom was Mom.”) She has meticulously
co-ordinated each and every part of their lives, yet only when she has slipped
out of their lives they come to value her existence.
It takes time to get accustomed to the different narrators
and their own unique voice. Furthermore, the memories are interweaved in a
manner that’s a bit meandering. Yet the emotions derived from the meandering
thoughts -- such as despair, regret, shame, helplessness, etc -- strongly
resonates with us because we are able to reflect on our own memories of our altruistic
parents. Kyung-sook’s prose is very simple, lacking lyricism. However, the
scenarios and the memories described here are so devastating to emotionally
overwhelm us. Although the tone of the novel could be described as gloomy, the
author finds great beauty in evoking the details of long-dormant memories. Despite
an occasional passage of sentiment and melodrama, Please Look After Mom deftly
examines the suffering and frustration of a self-sacrificing maternal figure (and this tale has originated from a society that’s quite similar to my own).
No comments:
Post a Comment