“‘Are you here? I’m home!’ … But the house is vacant. It feels deserted, having been left empty for so long.”
Written by widely acknowledged Korean novelist Shin Kyung-Sook, Please Look After Mom encapsulates the bloody sacrifice of a mother and the tragic human habit of taking things for granted, awaking our anesthetized senses to look at our mothers in a different light. This is no common story of a mother and a daughter and their happy reconciliation in the end of the story; this is something more powerful, something more profound that creates a lasting howl in the hearts of readers.
This book was published in 2008 in South Korea and within months, it became a bestseller with over a million copies sold. The book was translated into English by Kim Chi Young, her first book ever to be translated and later published in more than 19 countries. The book is only about a seemingly simple subject matter: a mother. But what is it about this book that makes its readers break into tears?
A mother is lost in a subway station, in Seoul, and soon goes missing from her family. The story unfolds as the children’s efforts to find their lost mother lead them on a different kind of search. From this, the plot provides multiple vantage points: from the daughter, the son, the husband and from the mother herself, creating a powerful disclosure of the reality of motherhood. Her sudden absence weighs like a thousand tons when in the past they thought her presence meant nothing at all. We are then positioned in a place to ask as the characters in the story had to admit and ask themselves: “Do I really know my mother?”
We think we know much about someone until we realize that it was the product of our hubris and indifferent complacency, rather than the product of genuine interest and care. Incomprehensible actions of a mother, her sudden anger and frustrations over things which seem petty to us when we were young slowly start to make sense as we grew older.
The book captivates readers with its universality, that we all need mothers and the secret sacrifices that they take – although the degree of sacrifice differs depending on culture and other aspects – but the fact remains that we all need mothers who would give us a meal when we are hungry and take care of us when we are sick in bed. The mothers in this world are inevitably forced to make a decision that prioritizes their children, leaving their desires behind, miniscule in comparison. The book leads us to believe that no mother in their right mind will throw away her motherly duty. That is why there is a famous saying by English writer Rudyard Kipling: “God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.”
I recommend this book to whoever has their mother on this planet still, because this book rekindles the love directed to our mothers and helps us to realize and appreciate their sacrifices and labors. The painful reality brought up by the book would compel us to say those three simple words “Thank You Mother” before it’s too late, those words that may turn to scars in our regretful hearts one day. The epigraph of the novel by Franz Liszt says it all: “O love, so long as you can love”.
