Please Look After Mom (엄마를 부탁해), by K. Shin

On Thursday at 10:09 p.m., an e-mail notification arrived that a book in my queue had arrived at my local NYPL branch.  After work the very next day, carrying half gallons of ice cold milk and OJ in a loud crinkly Food Emporium bag, I checked out this hardback copy of Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After My Mom. I went straight home and did a load of wash.  As soon as I hung the last bra to air dry, I grabbed the book, a plate of mini banana muffins, and a cup of that ice cold milk.   (Do you know that organic milk really does taste more milky?  Scary to think why).  Aside from exchanging a few texts with Soeur, for the next few hours, I would do nothing but read clear through to the last page. 

It was the first book I had started and finished in one sitting - in years. 

It was the first book I had read by a Korean-Korean (read: not Korean-American) author - ever.

It was the first book I had read that was originally written in Korean - ever.

It was the first book I had cried through - ever.

This last fact is a big one.  I don't really cry.  For writing that I didn't find exceptionally compelling in one way or another, I can only come up with one explanation for my tears: I got caught up in the emotional tumult of the main character and its distressing parallels to my own family's living narrative.

Shin's novel is a simple story simply told.  A mother travels to Seoul from her home in a small village to visit her children.  At a subway station, she disappears, and the story revolves around her city-dwelling children's collective journey to locate their uhmmah.  The author is a bestselling novelist in Korea, but I would guess that the English version, released only this spring, will not be well-received by the American market.  (This, for example, is an amusing NPR piece).  So much of the Korean way relies on the painfully unspoken.  (Or maybe that's just my parents' way?)  Inference is paramount, a cultural nuance Americans might hesitate to identify as an acceptable form of communication: this lack of transparency might suggest that there is more behind the clean and uncomplicated words of this book's English version.  It's clear that some of the plot's basic rhythm gets lost in translation.  For example, "Aunt Peggy" is much easier than "second eldest aunt's husband." If it weren't for my hazy familiarity with some common daily aspects of Korean life like nursery rhymes and foods, I would have been left scratching my head instead of dropping big salty tears on the couch.  

I won't say more, but will leave you with five words on why 엄마를 부탁해 made me flood tears: resilience, survival, sacrifice, duty, and desperation.  It might be glorious, but there's a whole lot of grief that comes with that glory.