Please Look After Mom, by Shin Kyung-Sook

Shin Kyung-Sook’s novel, Please Look After Mom, is one of the most tragic books I have ever read. The characters are all flawed human beings, some deeply so. These flaws unintentionally collide when an elderly woman—a mother, a wife—goes missing in a Seoul subway station.

Park So-nyu has always taken care of her family. She turned their rural home into a garden so that, even in the hardest times, there was always something to put on the table. She found ways to make money to put her children through school while their father was roaming the South Korean countryside. Several times in the novel, characters comment on how unnatural it is to see Park So-nyu still during the daytime. Looking back, this is one of the few signs that her health is failing.

Park So-nyu’s oldest son, Hyong-chol, and daughter, Chi-hon, do their best to find her after she goes missing. They contact the police. They put up flyers. They offer a reward and follow up on any possible sighting of their mother around the sprawling city. Sadly, they are always too late when they show up at the last place someone says they saw a woman matching the description of their mother. As time passes, Hyong-chol realizes that all of the places Park So-nyu might’ve been seen are all places where he lived or worked in his first years in Seoul. Chi-hon and Hyong-chol reflect on what they know and remember about their mother as they search, castigating themselves for missing so much about her declining health and for not realizing how much she did for them. Park So-nyu, it seems, is a master at being both ubiquitous and unnoticed.

Her children’s memories create a fascinating portrait of a woman trapped by cultural and her own expectations for herself. I realize that I read Please Look After Mom from a Western perspective and that I am not at all familiar with Korean culture, but the author’s hints and translator Chi-Young Kim’s smooth translation clued me into Park So-nyu’s constraints. She is always the one to do the work for the family’s ancestral rites multiple times a year. She deflects everyone’s comments on her health or how much work she does. She never tried to do anything other than care for her own and other children who needed someone or to work at anything other than cultivating her family’s land. Because Park So-nyu and her husband grew up during the Korean War and the hard times that followed, it’s hard to say if she might’ve become someone who people paid attention to before she went missing.

One last thing about Please Look After Mom: this book is written mostly in the second person. When the perspective shifts from Chi-hon, to her father, to Hyong-chol, to other characters, it takes some time to work out who is speaking. The use of second-person made it clear to me that this wasn’t a mystery novel; it’s an elegy. As the novel continues, I felt like I was floating through the book with whoever was “you” at the time rather than piecing together clues to figure out what happened. The last third or so of Please Look After Mom feel like the take place more in the spirit world than the physical one. It’s a stunning, powerful effect.