Kyung-sook Shin, I'll Be Right There

"So let me ask you this.  Are those of you here today Christopher?  Or are you the child he carries on his back?"

Professor Yoon's story had started out like a single drop of rain amid the hustle and bustle of students preparing for class to end but turned into a sudden midday shower beating down on us.  A clear ray of light from the last of the summer sun slipped in through a classroom window that someone had shut tight.

Professor Yoon studied us expectantly, but nobody offered an answer to his question.  The slogans of student demonstrators outside followed the ray of sunlight through the window and pushed their way again into our midst.  Over his glasses, Professor Yoon's keen and gentle eyes stopped on each of us in turn before moving on. (p. 50)

South Korea for most of the second half of the 20th century was ruled by US-friendly dictators who only slowed eased their grip on the military and police forces.  The 1980s and early 1990s in particular were a time of frequent student protests against the dictatorship and occasionally in the US there would be brief footage of a particularly violent protest or a self-immolated student who would sacrifice his or her life to make a political statement.  As a teenager then, I vaguely recall hearing about these events on the evening "world news" reports, but I do not claim any real familiarity with the causes of these uprisings or their results.

Therefore, it was with keen interest that I read Kyung-sook Shin's second novel to be translated into English, I'll Be Right There, translated capably by Sora Kim-Russell.  Her first translated novel, Please Look After Mom, was an international bestseller, making the New York Times Bestseller List and winning the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize.  I'll Be Right There differs from its predecessor in its more direct social commentary, but it is much more than just simply a "coming of age" story amidst socio-political turbulence.  There is a very real love for literature as a medium of change, as evidenced in passages such as the one quoted above, taken from a time when the first person PoV narrator, Jung Yoon (no relation to the professor Yoon), has just begun taking a literature class with her future ex-boyfriend and two other peers who play important roles in the novel.  In reading it, I was reminded of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, especially in the sense of how the socio-political can pervade (if not actually invade) the "reading spaces" readers like to set up for themselves.

I'll Be Right There goes back and forth from the literary present to the initial events of eight years prior that establish the characters and their life journeys.  In the prologue, Jung Yoon receives a call from her ex-boyfriend, Yi Myungsuh, informing her that Professor Yoon is dying.  This call, the first contact she's had with him in eight years, triggers a series of reflective flashbacks that serve as the basis of the novel.  In expansive chapters punctuated with short, punchy excerpts from Myungsuh's notebook, Shin deftly develops these young adults' characters, utilizing the social unrest at their school to create a contrast to the bookish world of the writers and poets from West and East.  As the story develops, this uneasy confluence of the literary and the real-world leads to unsettling realizations and tragic events. 

In the hands of a lesser author, this story could too readily have become didactic, turgid with its own self-references to both South Korean politics and to literature as a "guiding light."  Yet for the most part, Shin manages to avoid these pitfalls.  Yes, there are heart-wrenching events, especially striking at one of the four core people in Jung Yoon's life, but there is also the realization that transformation, even if it involves moments of acute pain and sadness, may not be such a bad thing after all.  Shin's eloquent yet direct style allows a deeper insight into her characters, creating connections that make it easier for non-Korean readers to understand the import of what is transpiring around the characters.  While there are moments where the narrative tension perhaps eases too much and necessary friction is not present to make certain scenes as vivid as they otherwise could have been, on the whole, Shin manages to build gradually but steadily toward a memorable conclusion.  This can be seen in an early foreshadowing, again from Professor Yoon's comments on St. Christopher to his new students:

"Each of you is both Christopher and the child he carries on his back.  You are all forging your way through adversity in this difficult world on your way to the other side of the river.  I did not tell you this story in order to talk about religion.  We are all travelers crossing from this bank to that bank, from this world to nirvana.  But the waters are rough.  We must rely on something in order to make it over.  That something could be the art or literature that you aspire to create.  You will think that the thing you choose will serve as your boat or raft to carry you to that other bank.  But if you think deeply about it, you may find that it does not carry you but rather you carry it.  Perhaps only the student who truly savors this paradox will make it safely across.  Literature and art are not simply what will carry you; they are also what you must lay down your life for, what you must labor over and shoulder for the rest of your life." (pp. 50-51)

It is in this passage that the germ for the story's ultimate revelations lies.  I'll Be Right Here may take its sweet time in getting to that crucial point where literature, art, and life converge to create something poignant, but when it does, the reader knows that she has read something powerful and moving.  This may prove to be a work that lingers in my mind long after the final words of this review are typed.  If only all stories could prove to be so.

Kyung-sook Shin, Please Look After Mom (2012 Man Asian Prize winner)

Mothers are, for most of us, the most important human beings we will ever know.  They give birth to us, nourish us, scold us when we stray from their teaching, sit down with us and make sure we learn our alphabets/characters and arithmetic so we can do better in class, and when we are adults, they strive to remind us of where we came from and what we can aim to achieve.  That is the Hallmark image of motherhood and although the realities of our lives reveal differences in this image of mother as supporter and enabler, it certainly is a vision that quite a few of us reading this have of our own mothers.

Yet mothers are also often taken for granted, as if they were a nice animated machine that dispensed food, hugs, and money, not necessarily in that order.  For many of us, as we’ve grown older, our mothers fade into the background, unless they call us up an evening or two (sometimes, in the process, annoying us) to see how we were doing and if we would be coming over to visit sometime soon.  Mama can become little more than an old person that gets in our way and we try to “make something” of our lives.  It’s not as though they are hated, usually it is far from that, but they are no longer important to us because they don’t provide for us and many of us just don’t have the time or desire to provide for them as they age.

This is a rather uncomfortable social truth that spans across six inhabited continents and divers cultures.  It lies at the heart of Korean writer Kyung-sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom, which recounts through the points-of-view of a particular mother’s husband and children their memories of her that were reactivated after she turned up missing after she missed connecting with her husband on a commuter train a month prior.  Shin builds through these reminiscences a complex mosaic portrayal of the mother, Park So-nyo, and of the complicated relationships her children and husband (who proved to be faithless to her during their marriage) had with her and with each other.  Below is a memory that the eldest daughter, Chi-hon, had:

A few years ago, your mom said, “We don’t have to celebrate my birthday separately.”  Father’s birthday is one month before Mom’s.  You and your siblings always went to your parents’ house in Chongup for birthdays and other celebrations.  All together, there were twenty-two people in the immediate family.  Mom liked it when all her children and grandchildren gathered and bustled about the house.  A few days before everyone came down, she would make fresh kimchi, go to the market to buy beef, and stock up on extra toothpaste and toothbrushes.  She pressed sesame oil and roasted and ground sesame and perilla seeds, so she could present her children with a jar of each as they left.  As she waited for the family to arrive, your mom would be visibly animated, her words and her gestures revealing her pride when she talked to neighbors or acquaintances.  In the shed, Mom kept glass bottles of every size filled with plum or wild-strawberry juice, which she made seasonally.  Mom’s jars were filled to the brim with tiny fermented croaker-like fish or anchovy paste or fermented clams that she was planning to send to the family in the city.  When she heard that onions were good for one’s health, she made onion juice, and before winter came, she made pumpkin juice infused with licorice.  Your mom’s house was like a factory; she prepared sauces and fermented bean paste and hulled rice, producing things for the family year-round.  At some point, the children’s trips to Chongup became less frequent, and Mom and Father started to come to Seoul more often.  And then you began to celebrate each of their birthdays by going out for dinner.  That was easier.  Then Mom even suggested, “Let’s celebrate my birthday on your father’s.”  She said it would be a burden to celebrate their birthdays separately, since both happen during the hot summer, when there are also two ancestral rites only two days apart.  At first the family refused to do that, even when Mom insisted on it, and if she balked at coming to the city, a few of you went home to celebrate with her.  Then you all started to give Mom her birthday gift on Father’s birthday.  Eventually, quietly, Mom’s actual birthday was bypassed.  Mom, who liked to buy socks for everyone in the family, had in her dresser a growing collection of socks that her children didn’t take.

This passage, which is only but one of several similar flashbacks, goes straight for the jugular.  In reading it, I could remember how my mother and maternal grandmother were in regards to sewing clothing for several in the family, the simple dismissal of attention, and the stoic facing of age while the family grew up and moved into different homes (and in my case, to a different state for two years).  I could easily see myself in a position similar to Chi-hon’s, possibly sitting at a desk or table twenty years from now and wondering about my mother and just how quickly and completely she had faded into the background, despite her being so vocal about my need to learn responsibility when I was younger.  That is the devastating beauty of Please Look After Mom.  Shin utilizes a mixture of first-, second-, and third-person points-of-views to place us right in the shoes of the missing mother’s family.  How easily it could be our own mother who has wandered away, suffering from medical ailments, yet not wanting to interrupt our self-absorbed lives.  If we find ourselves thinking and reacting along with the husband and three children, then Shin’s novel has us utterly in its grasp.  We cannot turn aside, but have to confront the memories that burble up from reading a story just like this.

It is easy to forget how much and how little we understand our own family members until stories such as Please Look After Mom come along to jar us into remembering what we had forgotten or at least had tried to forget.  For that and for how adroitly Shin mixes the four narrative threads together to reveal portraits of each family member and mom, Please Look After Mom may be the best character novel of this year’s Man Asian Prize finalists.  It is difficult to imagine a story that could be more effective that portraying multiple, and sometimes conflicting, images of a family matriarch.  It simply is a moving novel that may lead to a few tears welling up as you read it.

Originally posted in March 2012 on Gogol's Overcoat.

2012 Man Asian Prize nominees

Regrettably, I did not hear about this until today, so it'll be very tough sledding to read the majority, much less all of them, by March 15, when the winner will be announced.  But I was able to buy sic of the seven as e-books through iBooks, so I should find some time to read them, now that I've finished reading all of the National Book Critics Circle Award nominees that I planned to read to in three categories (those reviews, like the ones for these books, will be appearing in the near future on Gogol's Overcoat):

"The Wandering Falcon" by Jamil Ahmad (of Pakistan)

"Rebirth" by Jahnavi Barua (of India) [not available in e-book and hard to find in print in US]

"The Sly Company of People Who Care" by Rahul Bhattacharya (of India)

"River of Smoke" by Amitav Ghosh (of India)

"Please Look After Mom" by Kyung-Sook Shin (of South Korea)

"Dream of Ding Village" by Yan Lianke (of China)

"The Lake" by Banana Yoshimoto (of Japan)

Of these authors, I've only read Yoshimoto beforehand and if her past work is indicative of the quality here, then this shortlist should contain some excellent reading.  If any of you have read any of these stories/authors, care to chime in with your thoughts?