Left Behind

By Kelly Falconer
April 29, 2011

Park So-nyo is sixty-nine years old when she disappears from Seoul's main Underground station; boarding a train, her husband realizes too late that he has left her behind on the platform. This event follows the pattern of their fifty-year marriage: he was always walking too fast for her and she was always asking him to slow down. He returns on the next train but she is nowhere to be found, though the grainy CCTV images show her stooped, dishevelled figure staring bewildered into space, then stopping to squat and rest. Characteristically, her husband does not remember what shoes his wife was wearing; he thinks they were beige slip-ons but in fact they are blue-plastic andals that allow a long-festering sore to breathe. In due course the wound becomes infected and grows so deep that it exposes bone.

Mr Park and his wife were travelling to Seoul to celebrate their birthdays with their four adult children, who have moved away from the countryside where they were brought up and who how believe themselves to be urban and civilized, having thrown off the yoke of the "country-bumpkin". This, like Mr Park's leaving his wife behind, is also reflective of the situation in South Korea, a country which has undergone a rapid and successful modernization since the end of the Korean war. Please Look After Mother, in particular So-nyo's story, begins shortly after the country was divided when its people led primitive impoverished lives. So-nyo's terror of being unable to find the next meal for her children is strong, and we realize how resourceful and hard-working she was to ensure that they never went hungry. When she wasn't tilling the fields, she would breed silkworms and brew malt and help to make tofu.

Sometimes she would sell a tatty lamp, a warm ironing stone or an old jar to people out of town. They wanted the antiques she was using . . . . Mother's labour showed that nothing would be reaped if the seeds were not sown.

But in the twenty-first century, her children seem to have forgotten the past, and So-nyo wenders if "things that are happening now are linked to things from the past and things in the future". Her grandchildren, she thinks, were "dropped out of the blue . . . they have nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me at all".

The novel can be read on several levels, as a metaphor for the impressions of the past as they linger in the present, and as a story of mothers and children, husbands and wives. It describes one woman's self-sacrifice so that the next generation may realize their dreams, instead of putting them to the side as she had to. Indeed, So-nyo had disappeared long before that day on the station platform, and it is only in retrospect that her family understand and appreciate her. Thematically and stylistically, Please Look After Mother has something in common with the filmmaker Yasujiru Ozu's Tokyo Story as it reveals the emergence of a post-war metropolitan society in the twentieth century. Similarly Confucianism, with its rite of ancestor worship and its emphasis on respect for one's elders, struggles to maintain its stronghold when families are dispersed; children are too busy to lay the wreaths of remembrance and the older generation are seen as holding the present generation back. So-nyo is what we might call an Earth Mother, but for her it is out of necessity, rather than choice. It is one of the novel's ironies that her eldest daughter is a successful novelist who does not realize until too late that her mother could not read; this is yet another tragedy of So-nyo's secret, sublimated life.

Please Look After Mother is a captivating story, written with an understanding of the shortcomings of traditional ways and modern life. It is nostalgic but unsentimental, brutally well observed and, in this flawlessly smooth translation by Chi-Young Kim, it offers a sobering account of a vanished past. It is the seventh novel by the much-praised Kyung-sook Shin and the first to be translated into English after a best-selling 1.5 million print run that changed the face of publishing in Korea in 2008. We must hope there will be more translations to follow.