AT age 16, Shin Kyung-sook left her hometown in a small village in South Korea for Seoul, where her older brother had moved earlier. Her mother took the train with her for a few stops to see her off. She looked at the tired face of her mother and made a promise to herself, "One day, I will write a beautiful novel for mom."

At 22, Shin made her literary debut with novella "Winter Fables" (1985), which won some awards.

At 30, she published her second book, a collection of short stories titled "Where the Harmonium Once Stood" (1993), which sold well and allowed her to become a full-time writer.

In the following years, she published five novels and dozens of short stories, and the promise to her mother always remained at the heart of her work.

One night in 2007, when she was 44, a sentence hit her: "It's been one week since Mom went missing."

It became the first sentence of "Please Look After Mom" (2009), a novel about the family trying find their missing mother, lost in a crowd at a train station. They were holding her hand but their grasp slipped and the commuters swept her away. It sold more than two million copies in South Korea, a remarkable success in that country.

The book was quickly translated into English, became one of the few bestselling Korean books, and won the Man Asian Literary Prize last March, when Shin turned 49. She became the first Korean and first woman to receive the prize.

"The relationship between mother and children is both easy and difficult. It is an old theme, but it is also the only theme I felt for, the only one that I felt could change the world. It also changed myself," Shin told Shanghai Daily on her recent visit to the city for the International Literary Festival.

"The modern society is different. Fortunately the role of mom can be divided among many people now. Moms don't have to do all the household work anymore," she said, speaking in Korean with a Chinese translator. "It is changing from a one-way love and sacrifice to a more mutual relationship. But the dilemma between a woman's desire to realize herself and her need to sacrifice herself for her family still persists, no matter how the society has advanced."

This thinking is part of the reason she wrote the book, to remind readers of the role of mothers and to ask them to look after their own.

Shin is not a mother yet, but "I wanted moms to know that they are needed, that they are essential. And not only that. I wanted to show that even moms need moms," she said.

"Please Look After Mom" and her earlier work "A Lone Room" (1995) have both been published in Chinese. The latter is also being translated into English, along with her latest novel.

"Please Look After Mom"

A special edition of the book was recently published in South Korea to celebrate the sale of two million copies.

Shin wrote in the preface, "I hope I can change the first sentence to 'It's been a week since Mom was found.' I hope I become your mom; you become my mom; the society becomes individuals' mom; the individual becomes the society's mom; and we can all act like moms to each other."

The preface coincides with what she once said, "I would like for my work to in a way play a maternal role, of standing by those who feel sorrow, whether it is of social or personal origin."

The true story started when the 69-year-old Park So-nyo went missing in a crowded train station in Seoul, where her businessman son and writer daughter had relocated. She could not read or write, so the search was difficult. Through the process of trying to find Park, the daughter, son and father realized how they had been neglecting her, how they had become unfamiliar with her and how they actually loved her.

"They don't think about her until she is gone. When they lost her, they realized they have also lost themselves," Shin said.

The mother in this book is typical of the Asian mother who sacrifices all her personal dreams and desires for the family and for her children. She never gets recognized as an individual until she was gone. Her children and husband always neglect her because she was always there when needed.

"The generational gap between parents and children is universal, but in Korea or in China, the rapid development in the society has taken the gap to an extreme level so that the parents don't even understand what their children are doing," said Jennifer Lee, an American writer based in Seoul and moderator of Shin's lecture in Shanghai.

"If I have to make a comparison, what happened here in the last 30 years is like industrial revolution in the West, which changed everything," Lee said.

"The love between mother and children is universal. The setting of children leaving parents to work in the city is also common, but this extreme difference and the all-sacrificing Asian mom can be almost incomprehensible to some Western readers."

The story is told through four chapters, each from the perspective of the daughter, the son, the father and finally the mother herself. The chapter of the daughter was written in second person, those of the son and the father in third person, while the mother spoke in the first person.

Shin decided on the narrative voice because "I wanted to show a mom who was a complex and profound human being, so I needed multiple narrators."

She added that she wrote the mother speaking in the first person because when a woman becomes a mother, she no longer speaks or even thinks in terms of "I."

Each voice calmly narrates the facts, with just enough detail and restrained emotions so readers have plenty of space to imagine. The simple statements through second and third persons unfold the regrets and guilt not only of the characters, but probably also the readers who identify with such guilts and regrets.

For example, the daughter is asked by her brother to write a poster in order to find their mother, since she is a writer, but she lost confidence in her ability to write.

"Will your writing help find mom?" she asked herself. While writing the poster, they realized they didn't even know their real mother's birth year, since she received a birth certificate around two years after she was born, typical of her times.

"The novel was not meant to blame anyone for anything," Shin explained. "I planned it more like a camera overhead, panning through and switching between different members in the family."

But many Korean readers commented that the story-telling was so strong that they felt the book was talking directly to them, sometimes even blaming them for neglecting their own mothers.

"It's the mother who goes missing, but that's a metaphor," Shin said. "It doesn't have to be the mom who disappears. It could be anything precious to us that has been lost, as we've moved from a traditional society to a modern society."

Her mother was never found.

"The Lone Room"

Born in 1963, Shin grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Korean War just ended and South Korea was left poor with a baby boom. As the fourth child and oldest daughter of six, Shin left her farmer parents and went to Seoul at 16.

Like many of her age, she repeated simple and boring jobs at the factory during the day and attended evening schools because her parents couldn't afford her high school tuition.

In 1980s, she went to university and studied writing, as the South Korean society evolved rapidly both in terms of political and economic changes. The country was quickly industrialized and modernized to a speed that the older generation in the villages couldn't comprehend. It was also during the same time South Korean writers started paying attention to the sense of woman's identity in the traditionally patriarchic society.

Woman finally becomes individuals rather than the archetypical roles of women as wives and mothers.

Shin novelized her own experience into the context of social changes in "The Lone Room" (1995), which followed a 16-year-old village girl's struggle in Seoul to become a writer, much resembled Shin herself. The protagonist felt the urge to go to the city when she was in the village, and soon started missing the mud as she worked endless in the factory like others.

She came to appreciate the simple village life, the fresh air and the never-changing landscape at hometown after she had gone through the ever-changing city struggles.

Her mom was much like mom in "Please Look After Mom," illiterate, loving and always there. She prepared the complicated South Korean home dishes like sesame-leaf kimchi or fermented bean paste soup all by herself. When she heard about the book Shin wrote for her, she simply said you did well. But she is also a big influence of the writer.

"I'm the product of my mother's influence," Shin said. "My mother would look so happy when she saw me reading a book, so I started out reading to bring more happiness to her, who always looked tired."

When she started the novel, she planned a happy ending and wrote the mother in a more heroic way, but as she wrote more drafts, she realized "I needed to make her into a real human being, a person with flaws, not a hero mother, but a human mom."