Please Look After Mom

Kyung-sook Shin

4 ideas

1. The mother lost at Seoul Station

   Park So-nyo, 69 and in failing health, is separated from her husband on a crowded Seoul Station subway platform when he boards a train and she does not. As her husband and four grown children search, putting up flyers and following sightings of a woman in blue sandals with a wounded foot, they learn things they never knew. She could not read, which the family had half-known and looked away from. She had also secretly supported an orphanage for years and had a long, private friendship with a man in her village.

2. Caregiving roles erase the caregiver's personhood

   When one person absorbs a household's needs, the others come to know her only by what she does for them: meals, harvests and parcels sent to the city. Her wants, illnesses and inner life fall below their notice. It takes her absence to show the family that the function had a person behind it, and by then she cannot be asked.

3. Second-person address as moral indictment

   This forces the reader into the position of the one who took the mother for granted. The accusation cannot stay with fictional characters: the reader is made to replay their own small neglects of a parent. Guilt becomes an experience the reader goes through, not a theme they watch.

4. Rural parent's sacrifice underwriting urban children

   The children's move to Seoul and their middle-class careers as a writer, a real estate executive and a pharmacist were paid for by their mother's farm labor and self-denial in the countryside. Their success takes them physically and socially out of her world. What results is a debt that grows as they rise, and that they cannot repay because rising is what put the distance between them and her.

Save and mark ideas in the app