Title: Please Look After Mom
Author: Kyung-Sook Shin
Translator: Chi-Young Kim
Published by: Knopf
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Where I got the book: Public Library
Content warning: Domestic violence, marital affair, death
“When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, and vanishes, their children are consumed with loud recriminations, and are awash in sorrow and guilt. As they argue over the “Missing” flyers they are posting throughout the city – how large of a reward to offer, the best way to phrase the text – they realize that none of them have a recent photograph of Mom. Soon a larger question emerges: do they really know the woman they called Mom?
Told by the alternating voices of Mom’s daughter, son, her husband and, in the shattering conclusion, by Mom herself, the novel pieces together, Rashomon-style, a life that appears ordinary but is anything but.” (Source)
Please Look After Mom has been on my TBR for a while and for reasons I don’t understand I never felt super compelled to pick it up. But Women in Translation Month rolled around and I decided to get my hands on a library copy since it’d been on my Goodreads shelf for a couple years. I didn’t expect to get drawn in to quickly and to fall in love with the book.
This story grips you. Told from four different character perspectives, a daughter, a husband, a son, and the missing mother, Please Look After Mom is a character story in absence. So-nyo is narrated in pieces by her family members as they search for her. Slowly the pieces begin to come together, revealing a family filled with struggle.
One of the central themes of the book is obviously motherhood but I was struck by the emotional labour attached to motherhood and womanhood through out So-nyo’s life. The adage “you don’t know what you had until it’s gone” rings true as So-nyo’s children and husband grapple with the reality that they never really knew her and the sacrifices she made for them.
For this reason I found Please Look After Mom a difficult read in parts. Yes, it’s about the unacknowledged labours of motherhood, but it’s so hard to read about things you tend to think of as abstract fact. The devaluation of emotional and household labour is a terribly real thing that impacts huge numbers of people, primarily women. And it was hard in parts to read about character’s reflecting on their terrible treatment of So-nyo and the fact that in the end they didn’t pay enough attention to her in order to form full relationships. It was just assumed that she’d always be there and that assumption is what lead to her being lost.
Please Look After Mom is one of the best books I’ve read this year. Kyung-Sook Shin’s prose draws you in with a lightness that balances the darkness of the subject matter. It’s so easy to get wrapped into the story and the characters that the book was suddenly over before I knew it. Put this on your TBR because it’s worth reading.
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