Please Look After Mom (29 page)

“Please, please look after Mom.”

Reading Group Guide

Please Look After Mom
by Kyung-sook Shin

About this guide

The discussion questions and topics that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation about Kyung-sook Shin’s
Please Look After Mom
, at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.

About this book

A million-plus-copy best seller in Korea, with publication scheduled in twenty-three countries,
Please Look After Mom
is the magnificent English-language debut of a stunning, brilliant new voice.

The story opens with a mysterious disappearance: On a family visit to the city, Mom is right behind her husband when the train pulls out of Seoul Station without her, and she is lost, possibly forever. As her children argue over how to find her and her husband returns to their home in the country to wait for her, they each recall their lives with her, their memories often more surprising than comforting. Through the piercing voices of daughter, son, and husband, and through Mom’s own words in the novel’s shattering conclusion, we learn what happened that day, and explore an even deeper mystery—of motherhood itself.

For discussion

1. While second-person (“you”) narration is an uncommon mode, it is used throughout the novel’s first section (the tale of the daughter, Chi-hon) and third section (the tale of the husband). What is the effect of this choice? How does it reflect these characters’ feelings about Mom? Why do you think Mom is the only character who tells her story in the first person?

2. What do we learn about the relationship between Chi-hon and her mother? What are the particular sources of tension or resentment between them? Why does Chi-hon say to her brother, “Maybe I’m being punished …” (
this page
)?

3. Why is it significant that Chi-hon is a successful writer, and how does her career affect her position in the family? What does this mean for her relationship to her mother, who is illiterate? How does it happen that her mother begins to treat Chi-hon like “a guest” when she visits home (
this page
)?

4. Mom’s life has been defined by her relationships to others and the needs of her family. When her daughter asks her, “Did you like to cook?” how does Mom’s reply summarize the divide between her own and her daughter’s generations (
this page
)? How is the generational gap between you and your parents, and/or you and your children, at all similar to, or different from, this one?

5. What are some of the reasons for the special bond between the eldest son, Hyong-chol, and his mother?

6. Why does Hyong-chol feel that he has disappointed his mother? Why does she apologize to him when she brings Chi-hon to live with him (
this page
)? Why do you think he hasn’t achieved his goals (
this page
)?

7. Why is food such a powerful element in Hyong-chol’s memories of his mother?

8. How do you explain the fact that Mom has been seen by various people wearing blue plastic sandals, with her foot badly injured, although when she disappeared she was wearing low-heeled beige sandals (
this page
,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
,
this page
)? What do you make of the pharmacist’s story of treating her wounded foot and calling the police (
this page
–
this page
)? Does Mom’s own narrative solve this mystery?

9. The Full Moon Harvest is a festival in which Koreans traditionally return to their family home to honor their ancestors. Hyong-chol reflects that people are now beginning to take holidays out of the country instead, saying, “Ancestors, I’ll be back” (
this page
). What feelings do memories of their mother’s preparations for the festival stir up in Chi-hon, Hyong-chol, and their father (
this page
–
this page
)?

10. Weeks after his wife disappears, her husband discovers that for ten years she has been giving a substantial amount of money—money their children send her each month—to an orphanage where she has taken on many responsibilities (
this page
–
this page
). How does the husband react to this and other surprising discoveries about her life?

11. After Mom has gone missing, her husband says to himself, “Your wife, whom you’d forgotten about for fifty years, was present in your heart” (
this page
). Discuss the pain and regret Mom’s family feels, including in the context of the book’s epigraph from Franz Liszt, “O love, as long as you can love.” Have they followed this edict successfully? Why do you think Kyung-sook Shin chose this quote to open her story?

12. Taking out the burial shrouds his wife had made for the two of them, her husband remembers her wish that he die first: “Since you’re three years older than me, you should leave three years earlier” (
this page
). What is the effect of the way this passage moves from poignancy to humor and back again? Similarly, how do grief and warmth, even happiness, intertwine as he recalls his wife’s generosity and her hands applying a warm towel to his arthritic knee (
this page
)?

13. Do you think Mom’s husband and children would have been able to help her if they had paid her and her illness more attention? Or, given her aversion to the hospital and the way she hid her sickness, was what happens to her inevitable?

14. Discuss the return of Mom as storyteller and narrator in the fourth section. What is inventive about this choice on the author’s part? What surprised you—and what remained a mystery?

15. How does Mom’s feeling for her younger daughter differ from her feeling for Chi-hon? Why was she able to be more attached to the younger daughter than the elder one (
this page
–
this page
)? How is the use of the second person here—Mom addressing her daughter as “you”—different from the use of second person in
chapters 1
and
3
?

16. What do her children and husband discover about Mom’s life only after she disappears? How do her actions express her generosity and benevolence? Do you see some of her activities as ways of seeking self-fulfillment? Was she, through giving to others, taking care of herself?

17. What are we to understand of the fact of Mom’s possibly being spotted, in
chapter 2
(“I’m Sorry, Hyong-chol”), in the various neighborhoods where Hyong-chol has lived in Seoul? In Mom’s own narrative (
chapter 4
, “Another Woman”), what is the connection between herself and the bird her daughter sees “sitting on the quince tree” (
this page
; see also
this page
).

18. At the end of the father’s section, he says to his older daughter, “Please … please look after your mom” (
this page
). How does Chi-hon carry out this directive? How is it related to her feelings about the Pietà and her purchase of “rose rosary beads” at the Vatican (
this page
–
this page
)?

20. What are the details and cultural references that make this story particularly Korean? What elements make it universal?

For further reading

Sandra Cisneros,
The House on Mango Street;
Edwidge Danticat,
Brother, I’m Dying;
Ha Jin,
War Trash;
Eugenia Kim,
The Calligrapher’s Daughter;
Suki Kim,
The Interpreter;
Chang-rae Lee,
A Gesture Life
and
The Surrendered;
Marshall Pihl, Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton, eds.
Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction;
Yom Sang-seop,
Three Generations;
Lisa See,
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan;
Gary Shteyngart,
Absurdistan;
Dai Sijie,
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress;
Amy Tan,
The Joy Luck Club
.

Kyung-sook Shin grew up in a remote village in South Korea, the fourth child and oldest daughter of six. Her parents could not afford to send her to high school, so at sixteen she moved to Seoul, where her older brother lived. She worked in an electronics plant while attending night school, and after graduating from college, published her first collection of stories in 1988, at age twenty-five. She is the author of twelve previous works of fiction and has been honored with the 1996 Manhae Literature Prize, the 1997 Dong-in Literature Prize, and the 2001 Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. Currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University, she lives in Seoul.