This opening line, intriguing as it is, is also an announcement of an emotionally-fraught journey that awaits the reader and the gamut of possible arcs that this journey could take. Stunned by the possibilities, you wonder if this would be just another novel that promises the moon but crash lands with an insipid ending. After all, the success of this book would depend on whether the author does justice to the prospect of handling the missing mom. But once you yield to the allure of that first line, the narrative folds you in itself, revealing layer after complex layer of the intense human story, convincing you that the plot has indeed taken the best possible arc from start to finish.
Please Look After Mom captures the dynamics of a South Korean family scalded by steaming hot guilt in the wake of their mother's mysterious disappearance. Park Son-yo, a sixty-seven year old mother-of-five, disappears from a busy Seoul station while on her way to visit her children. An unaccountable grief accumulates in the family with the physical absence of the mother, drifting them into an infinite loop of remorse. The novel tackles the guilt that plagues the ethereal relationship between a mother and her children, and the various emotions that are unplugged in the family as they frantically try to find her. Four unique voices put together the story of the mother's life - that of a daughter, a son, the father, and then the mother herself.
The disappearance of the mother here is also a figurative representation of a mother's absence from the everyday lives of her busy grown-up children. The author explores the idea that mothers can be the most obscure beings, never understood, taken for granted by her children and husband. "Speaking at a symbolic level, many mothers of our generation, I believe, have gone missing or remain neglected," says the author in an interview, "What we know about our mothers doesn’t always tell the whole story of who they are."
Kyung-Sook Shin's choice of telling this story through multiple perspectives lends a thoroughness to the plot, and the story comes a full circle in the portrayal of the missing mother's voice. The children spend an eternity believing in their own perspective about their family, without realizing how starkly different the perspective of a sibling or parent could be. As it happens, people can go through their entire life convinced that their mother favors another sibling over them; this ignominy might agonize them no end as a child and shape their behavior as an adult, but in their mother's heart might reside an entirely different way of looking at things. By writing the mother's point of view, the author exposes the folly of relying on just a single perspective to look at things. Guilt indeed goes two ways, flying back and forth between a mother and her child, in futility, both regretting things said or unsaid, the things done or not done.
"Did Mom know? That I, too, needed her my entire life?"
"Did Mom know? That I, too, needed her my entire life?"
Not only is this novel transportitive, but it also speaks directly to you, across cultures, as an intense personal experience, igniting a yearning for your own mother. Every page feels like a portrayal of the maternal figures you have known up-close. Even the cultural aspect isn't alien; their tradition of ancestral rites, and the concept of rebirth as a bird, has unearthly similarity to the shraddha rituals followed in certain sects in India.
It is hard to make out that this is a work of translation; the narrative flows smoothly and there is not a word out of place. Even the Epilogue - which is usually a halfhearted scramble to tie up the loose threads of the story - reflects the dedication with which it has been conceived and written. Cathartic as it is for the daughter, it is an ideal closure for the reader as well.
This book is worth reading and re-reading for the rich, raw emotions that it strokes.
