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A motherhood mystery
By Mythili G. Rao |
April 10, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
PLEASE Look After Mom," by the South Korean writer Kyung-sook Shin, opens with a family in disarray. Mom is missing, separated from Father by the closing doors of a subway car in a busy train station in Seoul. A day, a week, then nearly a month goes by. Mom's husband and adult children are not only worried, but crippled with guilt and regret, fumbling "in confusion, as if they had all injured a part of their brains." Each privately wonders if Mom is punishing them.
The eldest daughter, Chi-hon, is the writer of her family, and she is persuaded to draft the missing-person fliers. "Appearance: Short, salt-and-pepper permed hair, prominent cheekbones," she writes, "last seen wearing a sky-blue shirt, a white jacket and a beige pleated skirt." When Chi-hon thinks back on the Mom of her childhood, she sees a woman who "strode through the sea of people in a way that would intimidate even the authoritative buildings looking on from above." The strangers who respond to her ads paint a different picture: "They saw an old woman walking very slowly, sometimes sitting or standing vacantly." Could it be the same woman?
Shin's novel, her first to be translated into English, embraces multiplicity. It is told from the perspectives of four members of the family, and from their memories emerges a portrait of a heroically selfless and industrious woman. She runs their rural home "like a factory." She sews and knits and tills the fields, and raises puppies, piglets, ducklings and chickens. The family is poor, but she sees to it that her children's bellies are filled, their tuition fees paid.
Only after her children grow up and leave their home in Chongup does Mom's strength and purposefulness begin to flag. When Chi-hon visits unannounced, she finds the house in shambles and Mom suffering private anguish. The daughter is stunned: "Mom got headaches? So severe that she couldn't even cry?" These are some of the many questions that punctuate her narrative and lead to a cascade of revelations. Mom's debilitating headaches are the byproduct of a stroke she told no one about. Other discoveries come gradually. After one of Chi-hon's older brothers leaves the village for Seoul, she is responsible for writing letters to him, dictated by Mom. For years, Chi-hon assumes this is just an additional chore. The reality is revealed in another question she asks of herself: "When was it you realized that Mom didn't know how to read?"
Shin's prose, intimate and hauntingly spare in this translation by Chi-Young Kim, moves from first to second and third person, and powerfully conveys grief's bewildering immediacy. Chi-hon's voice is the novel's most distinct, but Father's is the most devastating. Returning to the house in Chongup, he is "bludgeoned" with Mom's absence as he realizes that he never fully appreciated her, this "steadfast tree" at the center of his life - and that all this time he had been in denial over her health's deterioration.
"The word 'Mom' is familiar," Chi-hon observes, "and it hides a plea: Please look after me." Passages of the novel may cause the grown children among Shin's readers to cringe. ("You were the one who always hung up first," Chi-hon mournfully remembers of her own behavior. "You would say, 'Mom, I'll call you back,' and then you didn't.") And yet this book isn't as interested in emotional manipulation as it is in the invisible chasms that open up between people who know one another best. Who is the missing woman? In this raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood, only Mom knows.
?2011 The New York Times (Distributed by NYT Syndicate.)
The eldest daughter, Chi-hon, is the writer of her family, and she is persuaded to draft the missing-person fliers. "Appearance: Short, salt-and-pepper permed hair, prominent cheekbones," she writes, "last seen wearing a sky-blue shirt, a white jacket and a beige pleated skirt." When Chi-hon thinks back on the Mom of her childhood, she sees a woman who "strode through the sea of people in a way that would intimidate even the authoritative buildings looking on from above." The strangers who respond to her ads paint a different picture: "They saw an old woman walking very slowly, sometimes sitting or standing vacantly." Could it be the same woman?
Shin's novel, her first to be translated into English, embraces multiplicity. It is told from the perspectives of four members of the family, and from their memories emerges a portrait of a heroically selfless and industrious woman. She runs their rural home "like a factory." She sews and knits and tills the fields, and raises puppies, piglets, ducklings and chickens. The family is poor, but she sees to it that her children's bellies are filled, their tuition fees paid.
Only after her children grow up and leave their home in Chongup does Mom's strength and purposefulness begin to flag. When Chi-hon visits unannounced, she finds the house in shambles and Mom suffering private anguish. The daughter is stunned: "Mom got headaches? So severe that she couldn't even cry?" These are some of the many questions that punctuate her narrative and lead to a cascade of revelations. Mom's debilitating headaches are the byproduct of a stroke she told no one about. Other discoveries come gradually. After one of Chi-hon's older brothers leaves the village for Seoul, she is responsible for writing letters to him, dictated by Mom. For years, Chi-hon assumes this is just an additional chore. The reality is revealed in another question she asks of herself: "When was it you realized that Mom didn't know how to read?"
Shin's prose, intimate and hauntingly spare in this translation by Chi-Young Kim, moves from first to second and third person, and powerfully conveys grief's bewildering immediacy. Chi-hon's voice is the novel's most distinct, but Father's is the most devastating. Returning to the house in Chongup, he is "bludgeoned" with Mom's absence as he realizes that he never fully appreciated her, this "steadfast tree" at the center of his life - and that all this time he had been in denial over her health's deterioration.
"The word 'Mom' is familiar," Chi-hon observes, "and it hides a plea: Please look after me." Passages of the novel may cause the grown children among Shin's readers to cringe. ("You were the one who always hung up first," Chi-hon mournfully remembers of her own behavior. "You would say, 'Mom, I'll call you back,' and then you didn't.") And yet this book isn't as interested in emotional manipulation as it is in the invisible chasms that open up between people who know one another best. Who is the missing woman? In this raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood, only Mom knows.
?2011 The New York Times (Distributed by NYT Syndicate.)
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