I think it is no coincidence that the most notable Korean novels on the theme of family have the mother narrative at their core. A mother’s worldview and the values she instills in her children play a defining role in a child’s life. What is the image that comes to mind when we think of mothers? One who protects me, one who will stand by me to the end, one who will sacrifice everything for me. We have been harboring so many selfish prejudices and unjust fantasies of what a mother should be. People often forget that a mother is also a woman, a human being, someone’s daughter, and someone’s wife. People tend to seek relief from the duties of reciprocal relationships in this world by expecting to take and not give back in mother-child relationships.

(photo: Yonhap News)The National Library of Korea hosted Park Wan-suh's venu for the memory of her authorship in 2011 (photo: Yonhap News).

Our lives consist of being born into a family, creating a new one, and saying goodbye to each member as we grow older and die. The coining of the term, “single-person family” is a testament to how quickly the concept of family is changing today. As the institution of family begins to shrink and disintegrate, people develop and yearn for increasingly romantic and idealistic conceptions of happy families. While it appears as though the family is disintegrating, family is still the most basic building block of society, as well as a source of literature from which literature is born.

Park Wan-suh's Mom’s Stake is set in the distant past when people bought into the idea that anyone who tries can succeed. We see a mother who sees her child’s success as her own success. The mother, who received no education herself and lost her son in the war, seeks to vicariously make all her dreams come true through her daughter. This novel depicts an uncanny portrait of motherhood as a symbol of control and oppression and well of frustrated dreams. The maternal instinct rears its head in the worst form as the mother forces her daughter to be an educated woman and marry a rich husband.

(photo: Yonhap News)Ho Won-sook, Park Wan-suh's daughter, introduced her mother's novel series at a conference in January 2012 (photo: Yonhap News).

One of Park Wan-suh’s talents is her stark uncovering of the unexpected yet fatal wounds and filthy desires hiding behind the happy façade of the middle-class family. The ugly selfishness and materialistic desires lurking behind the perfect housewife façade keeps the tension taut in Park’s novels, which always revolve around the mother figure. Park seems to be gifted in depicting her ambivalent feelings toward her mother who grew up too soon in the throes of war and then lost her husband and son to yet another war. Her life as a lonely widowed mother and grandmother was much longer than her life as a free, young lady. Mom’s Stake is a story of a daughter who belatedly understands her mother by enduring the same pains, which only a mother can understand.

Shin Kyung-sook's Please Look After Mom is the number one best-selling Korean novel of the past decade. A story about a mother who disappears one day after a lifetime of sacrificing herself to keep the family together, Please Look After Mom created a “Mother Syndrome” in Korea and put the issue of defining “family” on the table. Lately, Korea has seen an increase in the number of people who wage lonely battles to protect themselves as the societal safety net begins to disintegrate. Welfare has taken a turn for the worse, and a general anxiety that “no one is looking out for us” continues to rise. Fathers, to make matters worse, have proven unable to overcome obstacles in the face of various financial crises in recent decades, further disseminating the subconscious message that “mothers are our only hope.”

(photo: Yonhap News)Shin Kyung-sook talked about her novel, Please Look After Mom, at a 2011 conference (photo: Yonhap News).

Though Please Look After Mom is a controversial novel that draws a moving picture of a sad, unsettling neo-matriarchal society, some pointed out that Please Look After Mom failed to break free from a hyper-mythologized and sanctified idea of motherhood. If everyone turns to mothers for help, whom should mothers turn to? Please Look After Mom reminds us of the fact that a woman who has spent her life sacrificing herself for the family has another life we do not know about, and that mothers also need mothers and someone’s tender, loving care. Even the most ardent critics of the traditional idea of motherhood confess that they read Please Look After Mom with a tissue in hand. The mother is still very much a figure of pathos and the only one we can count on in a world where no one is to be trusted. Please Look After Mom is one of the best novels of the 21st century to explore the limits and possibilities of the Korean family.

By Jung Yeo-ul

*Article from Korea Magazine (October 2012)