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.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kyung-sook Shin is the author of numerous works of fiction and is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She has been honored with the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. Please Look After Mom is her first book to appear in English and will be published in nineteen countries. Currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University, she lives in Seoul.
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