For once, you were peacefully talking about Mom with your brother, but then you raised your voice, asking why he wasn’t doing more to look for her. “Why are you talking about Mom as if she won’t be able to come back?” you yelled. He said, “Tell me, how am I supposed to find her?” In his frustration, he ripped open the top few buttons of his white shirt under his suit jacket, and ended up showing you his tears. After that, he stopped answering your calls.
Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom’s everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn’t think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves. You realized that her position in life hadn’t changed even after the war was over, and even when the family could afford to feed itself. When the family got together for the first time in a long while, sat around the table with Father, and talked about the presidential elections, Mom would cook and bring out the food and wash the dishes and clean and hang damp dishrags to dry. Mom took care of fixing the gate and the roof and the porch. Instead of helping her do the work that she did nonstop, even you thought of it as natural, and took it for granted that this was her job. Sometimes, as your brother pointed out, you thought of her life as disappointing—even though Mom, despite never having been well off, tried so hard to give you the best of everything, even though it was Mom who patted your back soothingly when you were lonely.
Around the time tiny new leaves started to sprout on the ginkgo trees in front of City Hall, you were squatting under a large tree on a main road that led to Samchong-dong. It was unbelievable that spring was coming without Mom here. That the frozen ground was thawing and the trees were starting to wake up. Your heart, which had sustained you throughout this ordeal with the belief that you would be able to find Mom, was crushed. Even though Mom’s missing, summer will come and fall will come again and winter will come, like this. And I’ll be living in a world without Mom. You could imagine a desolate road. And the missing woman plodding down that road, wearing blue plastic sandals.
Without telling anyone in the family, you left with Yu-bin for Rome, where he was going to attend a seminar. He’d asked you to come with him but didn’t expect you to say yes. When you actually decided to go with him, he was a little taken aback, though he patiently made a few changes in his schedule. The day before you were to leave, he even called to ask, “Nothing’s changed, right?” As you got on the Rome-bound plane with him, you wondered for the first time whether Mom’s dream was to travel. Mom would always worry and tell you not to get on planes, but when you came back from somewhere, she would ask you detailed questions about the place you’d visited: “What kind of clothes do Chinese people wear?” “How do the Indians carry their children?” “What was the most delicious food you had in Japan?” Mom’s questions would spill out onto you. You would always reply curtly, “Chinese men take off their shirts in the summer and walk around like that.” “The Indian woman I saw in Peru carried her child wrapped in a sack on her hip.” “Japanese food is too sweet.” When Mom asked more questions, you got annoyed and said, “I’ll tell you later, Mom!” But you had no opportunity for these conversations later, because you always had something else to do. You leaned back in your airplane seat and heaved a deep sigh. It was Mom who’d told you to live someplace far away. It was also Mom who’d sent you at a young age to live in a city far from your birthplace. Mom back in those days—you realized, painfully, that Mom was the same age as you are now when she brought you to the city and left, taking the night train back home. One woman. That woman disappeared, bit by bit, having forgotten the joy of being born and her childhood and dreams, marrying before her first period and having five children and raising them. The woman who, at least when it came to her children, wasn’t surprised or thrown off by anything. The woman whose life was marred with sacrifice until the day she went missing. You compare yourself with Mom, but Mom was an entire world unto herself. If you were Mom, you wouldn’t be running away like this, running away from fear.
The entire city of Rome is literally a historical site. All the negative things you heard about Rome—there’s a transit strike every other day, and they don’t even apologize to the passengers; people will grab your arm and steal your watch right under your nose; the streets are blighted with graffiti and garbage—you didn’t care about. You just observed everything passively, although you were ripped off by a cab driver, and someone grabbed the sunglasses that you had just placed next to you at a café. You went to various ruins by yourself, during the three days when Yu-bin was at his conference. To the Foro Romano, the Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla, the Catacombs. You stood listlessly in the spacious ruins of the large city. Everything about Rome symbolized civilization. But although traces of the past were spread out in front of you wherever you went, you didn’t keep anything in your heart.
Now you are looking at the statues of saints in the round piazza, but your eyes do not pause anywhere. The guide explains that Vatican City is not only a country in the secular world, but also God’s country; that the territory is only forty-four hectares but an independent state with its own currency and stamps. You aren’t listening to the guide’s explanations. Your eyes jump from person to person. Even if there are only a few people around, your eyes leap among them, unsettled, as you wonder, Is Mom here somewhere? There’s no way Mom would be among Western tourists, but even now your eyes don’t know how to settle on a single object. Your eyes meet the eyes of the guide, who’d said that he came here seven years ago to study choral music. Embarrassed that you’re not even wearing the earphones, you pull them up and plug them into your ears. “Vatican City is the world’s smallest country. But thirty thousand people visit it in a single day.” As you hear the guide’s commentary transmitted to your ears, you bite the inside of your lip. Mom’s words come to you in a flash. When was that? Mom asked you what the smallest country in the world was. She asked you to get her a rosary made of rosewood if you ever went to that country. The smallest country in the world. You suddenly pay attention. This country? This Vatican City?
With your earphones still on, you wander away from your group seated at the foot of the marble stairs, away from the sun, and go inside the museum alone. A rosary made of rosewood. You walk by the majestic ceiling art and a row of sculptures whose end you can’t see. There has to be a gift shop somewhere, which might have a rosewood rosary for sale. As you weave quickly between people in your quest to find this rosewood rosary, you pause at the entrance to the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo hung from the beams of that high ceiling every day for four years to work on the fresco? The sheer size of the fresco overwhelms you, so different from the way it looks in books. Yes, it would have been strange if he didn’t experience physical problems after finishing this project. The artist’s pain and passion gush down like water onto your face as you stand under the Creation of Adam. Your instincts are right; when you leave the Sistine Chapel, you immediately see a gift shop and bookstore. Nuns in white are standing behind display cases. Your eyes meet those of one particular nun.
“Are you Korean?” Korean comes out of the Sister’s mouth.
“Yes.”
“I came from Korea, too. You’re the first Korean I’ve met since I was sent here. I arrived four days ago.” The Sister smiles.
“Do you have rose rosaries?”
“Rose rosaries?”
“Rosaries made of rosewood?”
“Ah.” The Sister takes you to one part of the display case. “Do you mean this?”
You open the rosary case the Sister hands you. The scent of roses bursts out of the airtight rosary case. Did Mom know this smell?
“It was blessed by a priest this morning.”
Is this the rosewood rosary Mom talked about?
“Is this the only place you can get this rosary?”
“No, you can get it anywhere. But since it’s the
Vatican, there is more meaning to it if it comes from here.”
You gaze at the sticker on the rosary case: fifteen euros. Your hands shake as they give the money to the nun. Still holding the rosary case, the nun asks if it’s a gift. Gift? Could I give this to Mom? Could I? When you nod, the nun takes from the inside of the display case a white envelope with the image of the Pietà printed on it, puts the case inside, and seals it with a sticker.
Holding the rosewood rosary in your hand, you start walking toward St. Peter’s Basilica. From the entrance, you look inside. Light cascades from the dome above the majestic bronze ciborium. Angels float among the white clouds in the ceiling fresco. You set one foot in the basilica and look beyond the large, lacquered halo. As you walk down the center aisle toward it, your feet pause. Something pulls at you, intensely. What is it? You wade through the crowd, toward the thing that is pulling at you like a magnet. You look up to see what people are looking at. The Pietà. The Holy Mother holding her dead son is ensconced behind bulletproof glass. As if you are being dragged forward, you push through the crowd to the front. As soon as you see the graceful image of the Holy Mother holding the body of her son, who had just breathed his last breath, you feel as though you are frozen in that spot. Is that marble? It seems that her dead son still has some heat in his body. The Holy Mother’s eyes are filled with pain, as her head tilts down at her son’s body laid across her lap. Even though death has already touched them, their bodies seem real—as if a poking finger would dent their flesh. The woman who was denied her motherhood still gave her lap to her son’s body. They are vivid, as if alive. You feel someone brushing against your back, so you look swiftly behind you. It’s as if Mom is standing behind you.
You realize that you habitually thought of Mom when something in your life was not going well, because when you thought of her it was as though something got back on track, and you felt re-energized. You still had the habit of calling Mom on the phone even after she went missing. So many days, you were about to call Mom but then stood there, numbly. You place the rosewood rosary in front of the Pietà and kneel. It’s as if the Holy Mother’s hand, cradling her dead son under his armpit, is moving. It’s hard for you to look at the Holy Mother’s anguish as she holds her son, who has reached death after enduring pain. You don’t hear anything, and the light from the ceiling has disappeared. The cathedral of the smallest country in the world falls into deep silence. The cut in the tender skin on the inside of your lip keeps bleeding. You swallow the blood that pools in your mouth and manage to raise your head to look up at the Holy Mother. Your palms reach out automatically to touch the bulletproof glass. If you can, you want to close the Holy Mother’s sorrowful eyes for her. You can sense Mom’s scent vividly, as if you two had fallen asleep under the same blanket last night and you embraced her when you woke up this morning.
One winter, Mom wrapped her rough hands around your young, cold ones and took you to the furnace in the kitchen. “Oh my, your hands are sheets of ice!” You smelled the unique fragrance of Mom, who huddled around you before the fire, rubbing and rubbing your hands to warm them.
You feel the Holy Mother’s fingers, which are wrapped around her dead son’s body, stretching out and stroking your cheek. You remain on your knees in front of the Holy Mother, who barely manages to raise her son’s hands, clearly marked by nail-inflicted wounds, until you can no longer hear footsteps in the basilica. At one point you open your eyes. You stare at the Holy Mother’s lips, beneath her eyes, which are immersed in sorrow. Her lips are closed firmly, with a grace that nobody could disturb. Deep sighs escape your lips. The Holy Mother’s dainty lips have moved beyond the sorrow in her eyes toward compassion. You look at her dead son again. The son’s arms and legs are splayed peacefully across his mother’s knees. She is soothing him even in death. If you’d told anyone in the family that you were going on a trip, they would have taken that to mean that you had given up on finding Mom. Since you had no way to convince them otherwise, you came to Rome without telling anyone. Did you come here to see the Pietà? When Yu-bin suggested that you join him in Italy, you might have unconsciously thought of this sculpture. Perhaps you wanted to pray in this place, pray that you could see for one last time the woman who lived in a small country attached to the edge of the vast Asian continent, to find her, and this is why you came here. Then again, maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe you already understood that Mom didn’t exist in this world anymore. Maybe you came here because you wanted to plead: Please don’t forget Mom, please take pity on Mom. But now that you see the statue on the other side of the glass, sitting on a pedestal, embracing with her frail arms all of mankind’s sorrow since the Creation, you can’t say anything. You stare at the Holy Mother’s lips intently. You close your eyes, back away, and leave that place. A line of priests passes, probably on their way to celebrate mass. You walk out to the entrance of the basilica and look down, dazed, at the piazza surrounded by long cloisters and enshrined in brilliant light. And only then do the words you couldn’t say in front of the statue leak out from between your lips.
“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 th
at 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?
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