november's soul searching

엄마를 부탁해

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

the much acclaimed and award winning writer Kyung-Sook Shin

"Please Look After Mom" has been published in more than 20 countries, and in the United States it has been reprinted five times since its debut in April and the book has sold 1.5 million copies in South Korea alone. source : online.wsj

my say :

always wanted to read this book .......... and at last find some time to read it....5 words to describe it : glad that i read it. though it's just a fictional story but there are moments that makes one heart, felt so stuffy and tears making it's way. ok..i'm being emo. since i do watched lots of korean drama and was smitten by it, more or less i can declared myself as someone who is quite exposed to their culture. so when reading this book i could somehow visualize the story. eg. the ancestral rite, farming, the dishes that she cooked, the hardship that she have to endure.....and the list goes on.....

as always we used to take certain things for granted and when something do happen, all the ???? keep popping up in our brains.  it's good that this book somehow or rather have made me to realized that i'm not appreciative enough. sometimes when i ought to, i just let it drift away

one of the excerpt that i like and i can relate too. we always taught mom is mom, she ought to be strong. we almost forgotten that they are human beings with the same feelings as we too
one day, your mom heard someone push the gate open and enter, saying, "sister are you in?" mom, who was inside eating tangerines with you, threw open the door and ran out. it happened so quickly. who was it that got her so excited? curios, you followed her out. mom paused on the porch, looking at the gate, shouted "brother!" to the person standing next to it, and ran to him - not caring that she was barefoot. it was your uncle. your mom, who had run out like the wind, beat his chest with her fist and cried, "brother! brother!" . you watched her from the porch. it was the first time you had heard her call someone "brother". when she referred to her brother, she always called him "your uncle'. you don't understand why you were so surprised when you saw mom run to your uncle and call him "brother" in a delighted nasal tone, when you had known all along that you had an uncle. you realized, oh, mom has a brother too!. sometimes you laughed to yourself when you remembered what your mom like that day, your aging mom jumping down from the porch and running across the yard to your uncle, shouting "brother!" as if she were a child. mom acting like a girl even younger than you. that mom was stuck in your head. it made you think, even mom... you don't understand why it took you so long to realize something so obvious. to you, mom was always mom. it never occurred to you that she had once taken her first step, or had once been three or twelve or twenty years old. mom was mom. she was born as mom. until you saw her running to your uncle like that, it hadn't dawned on you that she was a human being who harbored the exact same feeling you had for your own brothers and this realization led to the awareness that she, too had had a childhood. from then on, you sometimes thought mom as a child, as a girl, as a young woman, as a newly wed, as a mother who had just given birth to you.

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The book consists of four chapters in which the narrators are the daughter, son, husband, and finally, the mother. In each chapter, the narrators tell of their memories and experiences.

chapter 1 ~ Nobody Knows

The first chapter told by the eldest daughter, tells of how the family begins to blame each other for the loss of the mother. They also don't understand why she (mom) cannot call them and get to them.The daughter's memory is about her mother's illiteracy. She remembers that when she was a child, her mother used to ask her to read letters from her brother in Seoul. The daughter also finds that the mother often suffered from bad headaches. When she took her to hospital, a doctor said she had suffered a stroke and the aftereffects triggered the headaches. All these memories strike her suddenly, reminding her of how much she and her other siblings don't know much about their mother. Hiding the pain, the mother gave her a good education because she didn't want her daughter to live like her.

 

chapter 2 ~ I'm Sorry, Hyong-Chol

The eldest son tells his story in the second chapter. After his mother's disappearance, he goes out to distribute her picture to people. He tries to jog memories about his mother, who was particularly devoted to him as he was the eldest. She sent him to Seoul to go to college and later to find a job. Since then, she had sometimes visited him, but on the day she went missing, he couldn't pick his parents up at the station. "Why didn't I go there as usual?" he laments. Some witnesses say they had spotted her in the neighborhood that he previously lived in. They said she was wearing a pair of blue slippers with the top of her foot severely injured. But when he got there, he couldn't find her. He was the light of her life. When the mother left home after the father brought in a mistress, the son persuaded her to return by promising he would become the prosecutor she wanted him to become. He cries for reneging on his promise.

 

chapter 3 ~ I'm Home

In the third chapter, the husband of Park tells the story about his missing wife. As he waits for her to return, he learns more about her. He learns that she has supported orphans for 10 years without letting him know. He remembers she also underwent breast cancer surgery and suffered frequent headaches that were getting worse. But he didn't care much about her because he took it for granted that she would take care of him. 

chapter 4 ~ Another Woman
In the final chapter, the missing mother tells her story about her children and husband. In the chapter, she confesses a personal story never told to the family that she was also a "woman" with dreams and emotions, not just a mother and wife. She talks to the family in a soliloquy about her state of mind, which connects the others' stories. Wandering the streets, she at last sees her dead mother, implying her own death. She says, "I desperately needed a mother my whole life."

epilogue : Rosewood Rosary

In the epilogue, nine months after the mother goes missing, the daughter tells her story again. She is visiting the Vatican, accompanied by her husband-to-be. She remembers her mother asked her to buy a rosary made from a rose tree. She buys it and finally reaches the Pieta Statue, which depicts the body of Jesus in the lap of his mother Mary after his crucifixion. She suddenly senses her mother might be not alive anymore, and thinking of her mother whispers, "Take care of my mother" to the statue.

source : hanbooks.com