Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

This story is about loss. Loss that hurts deeply and suddenly; a loss unpredictable and incomprehensible. Each of the family members in the story go through a form of mourning when the mother is lost in such a mundane way on mass transit that it is too ridiculous and shameful to acknowledge it to others. The children are angry at each other because they are mad at themselves - they can't believe they lost her. The father cannot believe it the most; he is filled with the regret of not being physically and emotionally there for her while she was with him.

Some moments of the poignant novel resonated with me: what it feels like standing in Seoul Subway Station while everyone is rushing past, eating some of the foods mentioned in the book, the connection of the elder brother to the rest of the family, the way the family views education… I also thought about my own grandmother, who lived during the war and my mother who was born post-war. My grandmother fled from her home in northern Korea on a rumor a few days before June 25, 1950. She was a refugee in her own country for three years, living without a home and husband. I couldn't help but remember her as I read this book even though I did not know her well. I only knew her from the stories she could bear to share with her children, which were then shared sparingly with me. I could even hear my parents' voices in the novel, too. I can imagine my mother telling my older brother something that the mother in the novel could be telling Hyong-chol.

But there were also parts that I could not connect with. The overwhelming guilt towards a family member, barely surviving on food grown in the fields, and having a house to return to time after time are foreign to me as some of the Korean culture can be foreign to English readers. I thought that because the book was Korean I would immediately be attracted to it, but I wasn't and it's hard to pinpoint why. Perhaps it is because of my high expectations for a Korean novel, or because I was too familiar with Korean family dynamics within its culture that I tended towards judgment if something was not accurately represented. Overall, I appreciated Shin's dive into a Korean family for its depth and emotional honesty.