Tracing the Trauma of Motherhood: A Reading of Please Look after Mother

This article explores the question of what it means to be a mother. So-nyo, the mothers figure in the novel, Please Look after Mother is a wife and a mother, who has lived a life of sacrifice and compromise. The aim and objective of the paper is an analysis and interpretation of the textual and conceptual essence of the ‘Trauma of a mother’s Psyche’ in the novel of Kyung-sook shin, a most prominent Korean writer. Trauma is often the result of an overwhelming amount of stress that exceeds one’s ability to cope, or integrate the emotions involved with that experience. The novel tracks down the mother’s life of self sacrifice, which coincides with Korea’s dramatic shift from a pre-modern to post modern society, and in the course has restored a place for motherhood in the Korean psyche. This is a trauma of one mother that reveals it to be the trauma of all our mothers: about her triumphs and disappointments and about who she is on her own terms, separate from whom she is to her family. The story of a missing mother and her family, told from the shifting points of view of each of the family members.

The Word ‘Mother’ is familiar and it hides a plea: please look after me. Please stop yelling at me and stroke my head; please be on my side, whether I’m right or wrong - Kyung - Sook Shine.

           

Kyung-sook Shin is the author of numerous works of fiction and is one of South Korea’s widely read and acclaimed novelists. This is a stunning deeply moving story of a family search for their mother, who goes missing one afternoon amidst the crowds of the Seoul railway station. She is the first Korean and first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 for Please Look after Mother.

The relationship between a mother and her children are rarely simple. From the terrifying thought that mother has been missing in a large city for a week to the news that she does not have her handbag and then to the incredible revelation that this sixty nine year old country woman, alone and last in Seoul, cannot read or write.

When the family searches for her, they are swept up in emotions and memories about her. As we read the accounts of three of the children and the father, most of all we learn about mother, whose ghost actually adds her own version of her life? The story opens and closes with the narration of the eldest daughter. She has observed her mother’s failing health and mental instability. Now she is overwhelmed with guilt over how little she actually knew her. When asked how her mother felt about all the time she spent in the kitchen, she replied: you had never thought of mother as separate from the kitchen. Mother was the kitchen and the kitchen was mother. You had never wondered, did mother like being in the kitchen. (57-58)

Please Look after Mother is also a representation of Korea and Koreans. A Korean novel is inevitably going to teach us things about Korean Society, life and culture. Mother is in her late sixties and is illiterate. She was neglected by her own mother after the death of her father and was not sent to school but instead was raised to be a countryside mother and wife. Some history book that is concerned with Korea will have you believe that this was true for many of her generation, especially during the war periods and for those who grew up in the Korean Country side. The book is filled with the descriptions of the everyday lives of Korean Farmers as the characters take turns recalling the sacrifices of their mother. The reader learns about farming and cooking, childbirth, the holding of ancestral rights, and dealing with the poverty that often accompanies an agrarian lifestyle.

So-no, that mother lives and breathes for her family, for her children; “mother liked it when all of her children and grandchildren gathered and bustled around the house” (3). She takes intense pride in all of them and she would do anything to avoid being an inconvenience to them. So-nyo believes that food makes people happy and so she always tries to make sure that she has lots stored and prepared during her children’s childhoods. It teaches us that food in Korea is as important as breathing.

Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband and mother Please Look after Mother is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love. From family, from their memories emerges the portrait of a heroically industrious woman. Mother runs their rural home like a factory, sews and knits and tills the fields. The family is poor, but she sees to it that her children’s bellies are filled. Only after her children grow up and leave their home in the country side does mother’s strength and purpose fullness begin to flag. Questions punctuate the narrative and lead to a cascade of revelations, discoveries that come gradually. Shin’s novel, intimate and hauntingly spare, powerfully conveys grief’s bewildering immediacy a large mystery, that of all mothers and children: how affection, exasperation, hope and quilt add up to love.

For the first time, the husband and children wonder who is a mother, what is her childhood like? Did any of them really know her? Did they realize that she had been illiterate? Could they even remember the color of the scandals she wore around her septic toe? The family strains and became guilt-ridden under these revelations, both introspective and narrative. How little they cherished mother when she was the rock of the family and how much they took her for granted when she is there and miss her when she is not there. It certainly taps the universal tendency to take one’s mother for granted. It illuminates a mother’s sacrifice, a wife who never receives love from her husband, a woman who gave up her own dream to fulfil the dreams of her children.

The eldest son Hyong-chol, vows to treat mom better-if it isn’t too late, guilt tripped by the memories of mother. The daughter, Chi-hon., increasingly sophisticated with age, is a writer and is irritated by her mother’s superstition and stubbornness, and then regrets the distance between mother and daughter. This daughter remembers that mom’s “dark eyes, which used to be as brilliant and round as the eyes of a cow that is about to give birth”, grew dim with pain as mom began suffering the splitting headaches that nobody much cared about. The pressures of traditions and superstitions in Korea are also portrayed in the novel. Each winter, So-nyo and her eldest daughter went out into the snow by the well and skinned skate. Their skin would harden and crack and their fingers Freeze and bleed and they did this because it was important to uphold a tradition.

Father, too, has the biggest reason for despair - he didn’t help mother as she spiralled into illness, both physical and mental and he become increasingly more self-indulgent intolerant of his wife. As a husband he served a guilt trip of a life time for walking too far in front and not caring about what’s behind his back!

“You walked in front of your wife your entire life. Sometimes you would turn a corner without even looking back. When your wife called you from far behind, you would grumble at her, asking her why she was walking so slowly. And 50 years passed. When you waited for her, she stopped next to you, her cheeks reddened, saying with a smile, “I still wish you’d go a little slower.”(152)

The real ending to Please Look after Mother can be found in the fourth chapter. In this chapter Park So-nyo takes the form of a bird flying in the highest heavens, in an intermediate state between death and the afterlife, a concept that come from Buddhism. The reader accompanies Park who, as a bird with human consciousness, visits the homes of those close to her in life so she can understand and embrace their pain before she leaves this world for good. She is the representative of women who are neglected by their husbands and children.

Mom seems to have wandered through Seoul until she became dirty, disheveled and sick. Residents of Seoul recall seeing this lost soul hobbling along on feet that had been cut to the bone by plastic sandals, feel so postulation that they attracted flies. Her real reason for leaving is that the children’s city quarters are too small to have room for her. This psychological trauma occurs as a result of a severely distressing event. A traumatic event involves one’s experience, or repeating events of being overwhelmed that can be precipitated in week, years, or even decades as the person struggles to cope with the immediate circumstances, eventually leading to serious, long term negative consequences.

After the disappearance of the mother from the family, each member of the family realizes how precious she is and they long for her presence. The novel remind us just how much a mother unites an entire family and how they are always part of us even when they might be separated from us. No matter what the culture or what part of the world, mother holds a sacred place in the life of every father, daughter and son.

Penitence is, after all, this book’s whole point. Characters’ eyes begin watering, pooling with tears, brimming over, etc., as each one has the chance to realize that mom was a treasure. Nobody knew that mom was secretly working at an orphanage in her spare time. Mom’s children start to see how wrong it was to abandon ancestral tradition for their busy, new vainly decorated, heartless, stressed-out city lives.

            The marginalization of mother’s and motherhood can be traced in this work. The term marginalizes means ‘to make a person or group feel less important or Powerful’. Those people who are not provided their minimum rights or position in the society or those are exploited can be put into the term marginalized. Marginalized group suffer from a crisis of identity. The story is family’s search for their missing mother and their discovery of the desires, heartaches and secrets they never realized she harbored within.

When sixty-nine year –old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul railway station, and vanishes, their children are consumed with loud recriminations, and are awash in sorrow and guilt. They even realize that none of them have a recent photograph of mom. Now a larger question emerges: do they really know the woman they called mom? Women are simply smothered and Subdued into the acceptance without choice of whatever is offered to them and views and beliefs are forced upon them. The marginalization of mothers and motherhood can be traced in the work of Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please Look after Mother.

Works cited :

Shin, Kyung - Sook. Please Look After Mother. Trans. Jae Won Chung. London: Orion House, 2012. print.

Corrigan, Maureen. “Please Look After Mom: A Guilt Trip to the Big City” 05 Apr 2011.

Abrams, M. H. and Geoffery Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms.New Delhi: Wads-Worth,2012.print.

Jov. “Korean Literature”. Bookragas. Wed. 24 Jan 2014.