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.
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.
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.”
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)