Books

Go to the archives

Please Look After Mom

Kyung-Sook Shin

By Jill Switzer
Published: Sep 23, 2016
Category: Fiction

GUEST BUTLER JILL SWITZER has been a member of the State Bar of California for 40 years and now is a full-time mediator. She writes a weekly column called Old Lady Lawyer at Above the Law, where she rants without interruption. She also contributes to Legal Ink and other legal publications.

It was the title that told me I had to read it.

“Please Look After Mom,” translated from the Korean, is the story of a family that suffers a dramatic change in the Seoul Station subway.

The novel was published five years ago. I read it then, and I haven’t been able to let go; upon rereading, that’s even more the case. There are so many true lines, true sentences, true paragraphs in the novel; Kyung-Sook Shin, one of Korea’s most popular writers, took Hemingway’s advice to write one true sentence and has written a book full of them. Just one example:

“Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual–if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through.”

The book has particular meaning for those of us whose mothers left us before we were ready to let go. That forever loss of a beloved parent, especially the parent of the same sex, isn’t one you get over — you just go on, because what choice do you have?

The mom in this novel is the glue that holds the family together, and when she disappears the father and children are fragmented. Their searches take them throughout Seoul, to places Mom knew and didn’t know; they hunt down anyone who has seen her. Even when weeks pass, they pass out flyers and track down leads. All fail. Meanwhile, at home, the father awaits her return. 292 pages fly by. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

As the elder daughter says, “Either a mother and daughter know each other very well, or they are strangers.” As the story progresses, the truth is that even if you think you know your mother very well, you really don’t. Use of the word “Mom,” says the elder daughter, hides a plea:

“Please look after me. She’s the person to whom you say, ‘Stop yelling at me and stroke my head; please be on my side, whether I’m right or wrong.
You never stopped calling her Mom. Even now, when Mom’s missing. When you call out ‘Mom,’ you want to believe that she’s healthy. That Mom is strong. That Mom isn’t fazed by anything. That Mom is the person you want to call whenever you despair about something in this city.”

This novel touches important issues: choices made and unmade, roads taken and not, regret, sorrow, the wish to unspool the tape and play it back again, things said and unsaid, love spoken or unacknowledged. The stories told by several of the children and the father are stories of surprise — they never thought that she’d leave. And why would they? Here was a mother who worked hard, raised the children, took care of them and her husband. But she never was able to have a life of her own. Everything was for her family. She was tough, perhaps even a “tiger mom” in the time before that phrase was coined, and the love she had for her family showed in everything she did for them and the sacrifices she made. Her children thought that she was “born as Mom.”

Reviewing their marriage, the father remembers that his wife had always complained that he walked so fast she had trouble keeping up, but selfishly he never considered how his walking so quickly affected her until that fateful day when he got on the subway before her. He took her for granted, regarding her only as their children’s mother and not as his wife until he left her behind at the subway. He realizes that “he walked in front of his wife his entire life.”

One of the stylistic touches that make the book so compelling is that the various points of view of the father and the children are told differently. Some are in the second person, which takes a little getting used to. Others are in the third person, distancing the reader from the person whose story is told. And, most affecting, Mom tells her own story because, after all, it is her story.

There are so many unanswered questions. What did Mom want to do with her life? What were her dreams? Her ambitions? Her goals for her life, separate and apart from those for her family? What did her sacrifices for her family do to her? Why did they never give a thought to her dreams?

For those whose maternal relationships either were or are fraught with anger, tension or hostility, this may be more the book for you than you’d imagine. This novel recounts a universal story in an extraordinary and unique way, delivering a well-worn truth: don’t wait to tell those you love that you love them. I dare you to read the book and not have it haunt you as it has me for the past five years.