Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, and Some Thoughts on Culture-Specific Modes of Reading

Last semester, a student of mine gave me a paperback copy of the English translation of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. It was a very kind gesture, and I appreciated it very much. This whole culture of gifting professors–sometimes before exams, which is a little uncomfortable, but more often after–is rather nice.

I’ll be honest, though: while some mainstream Korean literature I’ve found enjoyable, a lot of it leaves me kind of cold, for reasons that remind me of things my own students say when I ask them to interpret texts. I find that the standard mode of reading, even among literature students, is one that puzzles me. That is, they tend to want to find a take-home message, and they tend to be satisfied with limiting a reading of a given text to that, as if all literature were essentially, at root, such Aesop fables: Men are untrustworthy. Women should be careful. Korea must be reunified. Power is dangerous.

(This isn’t necessarily all bad, mind: they seem, in fact, very much aware of what some Western students have to learn to recognize: that characters are not people, and cannot be discussed only on the level of plot and who they are. I’ve even seen graduate students back home in North America who’ve gotten themselves caught up in that kind of approach, which is comparably problematic. Korean students grasp at least that in the end fictional constructions differ from the real world; but they also tend to isolate it from the world, and read it in pretty limited modes. There’s a middle ground that readerly peopple seem to grasp, but which comes naturally to neither group generally speaking.)

Of course, what students compelled to read a text do, and what texts themselves are doing, are two different things. The majority of literature majors in Korea are not literature majors but English literature majors, with the emphasis being fundamental. One of the things I learned when I was studying up on the literature onm creativity a few summers back was how important motivation is. One experiment that sticks out in my mind is of a maze that test subjects were asked to solve–the usual type of maze puzzle on paper, where they had to find an exit. Some people found a single, simple exit, and in doing so, completed the puzzle as quickly as possible and declared themselves finished, while others spent some time in the leisurely tracing-out of multiple pathways through the maze.

Why the difference in behaviour? The surprising thing is that it’s not intelligence: it’s motivation. All external conditions being equal, if people are (for whatever reason) intrinsically motivated to learn about something, they tend to actually explore and search for interesting, multiple solutions to problems; when they are extrinsically motivated, on the other hand, they seek to achieve the task-completed state in the simplest, quickest way possible.

This should be familiar to anyone teaching TEFL: the students who actually want (and like) to speak and to learn English keep discussing long after other groups have declared themselves “Finished!” But, I’d suggest, this is also why Korean English literature majors are so often so devoted to the Aesop mode of reading narrative: the “moral of the story” formula is simply the easiest reading to construct for any text in the world. (Even when you need to squint to ignore all the contradictory or complicating evidence in the text.)

But when I read a book like Please Look After Mom, I can’t help but think that maybe this lack of intrinsic motivation to explore literature isn’t the only problem.

After all, the reviews I’ve seen online seem to suggest that the novel, in the end, is all about, well, I’ll let this review say it:

I cant imagine that my mother will be gone. I know she will die but It seems that she is always with me. Afther reading this book I can understand the devotion of mothers. maybe this book is typical and not new to some people. but Mothers cant be new things. mothers are good and Family is the most precious thing in life. These are valuable.

영어로 이책을 읽지는 않았지만, 영어로는 한국어의 표현을 담아낼 수 없다고 생각한다. 어떤 사람들은 자부심이라고 말할지도 모르겠다. 하지만 한국어의 세심한 표현이야말로 이 책을 더 완벽하게 만들었을거라고 생각한다.

Which, you know, sort of seems to come from the TV-melodrama mode of narrative reception. Me, I feel more like some of the other reviewers over on Librarything, whose reactions include words like “wallowing” and “misery” and whose frustration with the book and its tearful guilt-fest became impossible to ignore within the first fifty pages.

Which form of reading is appropriate for a text like Please Look After Mom? That’s the question that I am grappling with now, as, having reached page 80, I feel as if I know exactly how the rest of the book is going to play out. In fact, it’s eerily like the stereotype of Asian-American literature that Minsoo Kang once ranted about in an interview with Jeff Vandermeer:

Does your book have any socially redeeming qualities? If so, what are they?

(…)

Minsoo Kang: Breaking the stereotype of the Asian writer writing in the United States. ‘Oh look, he’s Asian and he’s written stories in the experimental-fantastic mode, not on how-my-Asian-mother-drove-me-nuts-until-I-found-out-all-the-terrible-things-she-went-through-in-the-old-country-and-learned-to-be-less-neurotic-about-my-Asian-identity-and-married-a-white-man-because-Asian-men-are-too-uptight. And he writes so fluently in English! I wonder how long he’s been in the country, and I wonder if his spoken English has a strong accent.’

Kang is understandably annoyed by the heavy-handed, deeply-predictable, and annoyingly familiar tropes he satirizes. Another author I know–with Asian heritage, I’ll add–refers to this tendency as the act of “chinking up” one’s fiction: to add those things that make the narrative characteristically and recognizably Asian-American. Kind of like using pentatonic scales when composing the music for the original film score of the cinematic adaptation of one of these books.

(Which, as I consider it, kind of makes me think of the literary representations of Asians in the pulp tradition: the opium dens and the Fu Manchu moustaches and the women who could be divided up between the pure-hearted dutiful (if put-upon) daughters and the… other sort of women.

(This occurs to me because Kang’s criticisms here of mainstream Asian-American fiction–its formulaic qualities and predictability, its dependence on melodrama, its almost-obsessive valorization of the suffering of the parents in the old country, its inherent fixation on one issue (identity) to the exclusion or subjugation of other kinds of plot, story type, and so on–makes me wonder whether Asian-American fiction really isn’t just another form of pulp literature, though one perhaps in part built up out of Asian/Asian-American narrative sensibilities, dressed up in the trappings of “respectable fiction,” but actually straightforwardly a form of pulp complete with its own marketing category. Not that all work by Asian-American authors would fit here, of course… but maybe this would help explain the narrowness of this marketing category.)

In any case, Shin’s novel doesn’t have the stuff about marrying a white man–that, I think, would be somewhat radical and weird in a Korean novel, though doubtless someone has touched upon the theme somewhere–but the rest? It’s all there, in a big way. Whether or not Asian-diasporic fiction has had any influence in Korea, I wouldn’t know, but I can say that the book is in a melodramatic mode that, well, I’ll be frank: it dominates almost to exclusion other popular narrative forms in Korea.

I’m about halfway through Shin’s novel, and even fifty pages ito the book she was already with the tears, and the guilt, and especially the long-winded discussion of mom’s cooking. No, really:

Mom wasn’t used to fish. She didn’t even call fish by their proper names. To Mom, mackerel and pike and scabbard fish were all just fish. But she differentiated between types of beans: kidney beans, soybeans, white beans, black beans. When Mom had fish in her kitchen, she never made sashimi or broiled or braised it, but always salted and steamed it. Even for mackerel or scabbard fish, she made a soy-based sauce with red-pepper flakes, garlic, and pepper and steamed it on a plate over rice that was cooking. Mom never put sashimi in her mouth. When she saw people eating raw fish, she looked at them with a distasteful expression that said, What are they doing? Mom, who had steamed skate from the time she was seventeen years old, wanted to steam octopus, too. Soon the kitchen was filled with the smell of radish and octopus. As you watched Mom steaming octopus in the kitchen, you thought of skate.

Oh, one reflects, I thought of skate.

Wait, what kind of fish is skate? Why would I think of it?

Sure, the next paragraph explains it, but for me, it was a struggle to read on past the specificity of the soy-based sauce with red-pepper flakes and the smell of radish and octopus and the stern distaste for sashimi: all this stuff means very little to me. And this is one paragraph in a series of almost four pages about food, cooking, and Mom. I’m sure it has some kind of resonance for at least some Korean readers–after all, in every conversation course I teach, when I ask students what they want to talk about, they always say, “Food.” I always ask them why they would want to talk about food for an hour. But it’s a Korean thing. Korean people love to talk about food.

(In certain places, like down in Jeonju and Iksan, that’s justified. In Seoul, often I get the feeling people love to talk about food more than they actually love the food itself. But I digress…)

I’ve observed that almost every Korean film features–with a regularity that makes one playfully wonder whether it’s a national film rating requirement–a scene where people eat a meal together. Meals are highly significant, ritualistic scenarios in Korean narrative. Occasionally, they’re even powerful or revealing scenes, such as the meal in the film The Host, where the longing for a missing child is expressed very poignantly.

But more often, we just end up seeing people eat, mostly talking with their mouths full, or we spend five minutes learning that a family is rich or poor, truly Korean or tainted by Western cultural influence, through how such information is indicated in the size of their table, the food they eat, and how they conduct themselves during a meal.

Maybe for Korean audiences, there is some meaning I’m missing.

That’s fine, and I am happy for them. But I get bored, in the same way I get bored reading Ann Tyler or John Updike. I’ve tried. I could joke and say that it’s a lack of rocket launchers, but you know, that’s not really it. I like the work of, say, Kim Young-Ha. It’s not the rocket-launchers I miss, its just a certain sensibility, one that turns to things a little less conventional in order to find the source of the energy, tension, and purpose of the story.

But I don’t think it’s even that that turns me off this book so heartily: rather, it’s that the novel seems to attempt the same kind of emotional manipulation one sees in a Lars von Trier movie, except that it feels to me as if the only way a mother can be humanized in the world of this novel is for her to have been an all-wise, long-suffering (in secret) saint. That is: Mommy needs first to be dehumanized, and then raised up onto a pedestal. So far, this book doesn’t read as being about a family so much as it reads as being about archetypes. We all treat Mom and Dad like shit, and we should feel guilty because they are the long-suffering saints of our society.

Except they aren’t. Korean mothers are like anyone else: some are generally kind and generous, others are genuinely cruel and selfish, and most of them–like most people–occupy a space between those extremes, oscillating toward one or the other as the circumstances of their lives unfold. The kind of hagiography I can feel already overwhelming this story–the flood of guilt and tears, the regretful longing, the love-experienced-as-misery-that-binds-us… all of that is precisely the stuff in Korean culture that gets celebrated and upheld for reasons I cannot fathom, though not-fathoming doesn’t stop me from thinking maybe life would be better for all concerned if misery didn’t have to be the tie that binds.

Which may just be, you know, my struggle with a foreign literary aesthetic, but I think not. The thing is, my it’s hard for me to separate my feelings about the mom in the book who is being valorized, as compared to the people like her whom I encounter out in the world. While the Mom character in the novel is elderly during the present-day action, most of what happens in the novel is in flashbacks, when she is middle-aged, and I know plenty of middle-aged Korean women. Some are lovely people, but the Mom character in this book doesn’t remind me of them very often. She’s the sort of middle-aged woman who chains a dog to the wall of her house using a two-foot long chain. She’s the sort of middle-aged woman who throws temper tantrums like a little kid, and then bitches her children out for not handling her tantrums with infinite patience. Sure, I know the author is going to pull a Joy-Luck-Hitchcockian-Shyamalan twist out at the end, and we’ll realize Mom was all about self-sacrifice and kindness, though the kids never realized or appreciated it.

But there’s something really, really dehumanizing about that. Moms are never simply (even if only occasionally) thoughtless assholes? Moms are never straightforwardly selfish? Gimme a break. That’s tantamount to saying that Moms aren’t human. That, even more than the simplification and the overblown melodrama, really turns me off.

I don’t know whether I’ll actually finish this book. I’m torn between a sense of not caring and being tired of all the food-description, and wondering whether Shin might find a way to make me care about anything that’s going on here. There’s been just enough bait-and-switches so far that I don’t trust the story, but I suppose I can’t totally pan the novel (fairly) if I don’t finish it. But then, life is too short.

All I know is that when I told Miss Jiwaku I was reading the book, and then told her the original Korean language title, her eyes widened a little and she said, “That’s a really popular book here.” She said it as if this would self-evidently explain her shock at the fact I was bothering to  read it–because neither she nor I tend to enjoy the kinds of books that end up being ridiculously popular here… books that lend themselves to being read the way one reads Aesop.

(Note: I’m not decrying all Korean literature. There’s some of it I really have enjoyed. But the stuff that seems to get most popular, like in other forms of narrative, always seems to be the stuff that doesn’t interest me. I’m not criticizing those who like it, necessarily. Just sayin’…)

2 thoughts on “Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, and Some Thoughts on Culture-Specific Modes of Reading

  1. Hey Gord. It’s Steve C. Backtracking from the plagiarism news and I have to admit I’m not surprised by her reaction. When you’ve written a chinked-up telenovela/primetime K-soap in book form, why bother defending it?

    I’ve noticed that Aesop fable reading style here too, but I have to add that (having taught uni-level lit in the U.S.) roughly 9 out of 10 American kids showed up in my class doing the same. This is a decent uni too, supposedly attracting top-tier kids. They just don’t develop a next-level toolkit in high school.

    The problem here though is that (from what I hear) Korean profs don’t break them of that habit. Maybe it’s the idea of the canon as a set codex of transmittable knowledge rather than texts with shifting, negotiable ‘meanings,’ or maybe it’s the teaching to a multiple-choice test system. Not sure. Whatever it is, that habit doesn’t bode well for the future of the industry here.

    As for whether Asian American literature is a form of pulp: there are AA authors who’d agree with you. The tag ‘AA lit’ is like a prison, a ghetto of same-same immigrant narratives tucked away in the corner of the store. There’s the question of what books are *allowed* to be published though. Does a predominantly White audience want to read about Americans who just happen to be Asian? For about 100 years, the answer was No. Amy Tan, exoticism, and ethnic tourism were the big sellers.

    Pandering to the audience, serving up the same formulas, reinforcing stereotypes, etc.: these issues were all touched upon maybe 30-ish years ago in a battle for the soul of AA lit between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston. Obviously, Kingston won, which is why we still get AA book covers with cherry blossoms, porcelain, and silk shoes and etc. while you’re probably wondering, ‘Who’s Frank Chin?’

    Things have been getting better though.

    That said, I grew up in a generation starting to turn on our literary predecessors concerning the ubiquity of ‘identity.’ but now that I’m older I get it. 1. Again, what’s allowed to be published? 2. The politics of identity was a fight for the future of Asian-American vs. Asian American 3. so I think of how White audiences criticize Black comedians for always talking about race. ‘Why don’t they talk about life?’ Well, maybe being able to disentangle race from life is a luxury. Not that those authors always got it right about ‘identity,’ but… i understand the preoccupation.

    The food thing though…. man. You’ve seen how the top TV shows here are disproportionately of people cooking food and just eating it. That’s it. Like 삼시세끼 and that stuff. Then there’s 먹방. I have my theories, but I’ll stick to the subject of AA lit and its pandering to the cultural tourism of a White audience. If Shin had an international audience in mind (likely) then her food writing falls in line with a history of Chinatown tours and menu samplers, for example: “First, waipuo (italicized) chopped scallions and ginger into soy sauce as a dipping sauce for the baozi (italicized), fluffy white rolls of… (description of the dish).” This is in first person. Food she’s eaten all her life. What is she, describing it to herself?? It’s a problem David Wong Louie riffs on in his very self-aware and quite good “The Barbarians are Coming,” with a Chinese chef protagonist willingly chinking it up for a TV show.

    The philosophy of ‘How will it play in Peoria?’ explains a lot of this nonsense. I haven’t read Shin, but feel like I have, dozens and dozens of times

    1. Hi Steve!

      Backtracking from the plagiarism news and I have to admit I’m not surprised by her reaction. When you’ve written a chinked-up telenovela/primetime K-soap in book form, why bother defending it?

      Sure. but she seems rather po-faced and earnest about her melodrama junk. I expected her to be a little more defensive. I tend to read non-apology apologies as (a) a sign of assholehood, and (b) as a tacit admission of vague self-awareness of assholehood, without any concern over whether one should try do better.

      I’ve noticed that Aesop fable reading style here too, but I have to add that (having taught uni-level lit in the U.S.) roughly 9 out of 10 American kids showed up in my class doing the same. This is a decent uni too, supposedly attracting top-tier kids. They just don’t develop a next-level toolkit in high school.

      The problem here though is that (from what I hear) Korean profs don’t break them of that habit. Maybe it’s the idea of the canon as a set codex of transmittable knowledge rather than texts with shifting, negotiable ‘meanings,’ or maybe it’s the teaching to a multiple-choice test system. Not sure. Whatever it is, that habit doesn’t bode well for the future of the industry here.

      Yeah, the thing is, I think most recent high school grads start out like that when they get to Uni, despite at least some of their teachers in school having said, “Well, what do you think?” The Aesop moral thing is common. But the problem, I find, is that this method of reading—”X symbolizes Y, A means B, and the lesson of this story is Q”—is what is explicitly modeled in lit classes here. (That is, when lit classes go beyond, “Translate this English passage to Korean.”) A Korean Lit major told me it was de rigeur that students go to the library, read their prof’s published analyses of texts on the syllabus, and then regurgitate, if they wanted a good grade. Their own interpretations differing from the prof’s meant a lower grade. If I pulled that in Canada, most of my profs would have found it weird and stupid, and the fact is, it never occurred to me or any of my classmates. Shrug.

      As for whether Asian American literature is a form of pulp: there are AA authors who’d agree with you. The tag ‘AA lit’ is like a prison, a ghetto of same-same immigrant narratives tucked away in the corner of the store.

      Oh, sure, author pigeonholing is something I’ve attacked before, too. I certainly have friends who are Asian-American or Asian-Canadian authors who feel that way. (And I’ve heard the same about the African-American section of bookstores/libraries, too. This seems slightly less so in the SF world, where those tags don’t get applied as explicitly, but even there, there is a certain amount of pressure on nonwhite authors to write manifestly “nonwhite” SF. (Even when we’re talking about other worlds where our notion of race doesn’t map, or some point deep in the future where you wouldn’t have the same specific racial designations that dominate now.)

      There’s the question of what books are *allowed* to be published though. Does a predominantly White audience want to read about Americans who just happen to be Asian? For about 100 years, the answer was No. Amy Tan, exoticism, and ethnic tourism were the big sellers.

      Well, yeah. Amy Tan started out literally a lifetime ago, though. And it’s sad to say that there was actually some debate about whether Bill Cheng ought to be writing a novel like Southern Cross the Dog, which is about black folks (especially blues musicians) in the American South. “Shouldn’t he be writing about yella folks?” wasn’t the complaint, either: it was, “Shouldn’t he be writing about us, underrepresented Asian-Americans?” (That was the saddest part: seeing other Asian-American writers talking about imposing the duty of racial representation on him instead of celebrating him breaking the damned boundaries.)

      Pandering to the audience, serving up the same formulas, reinforcing stereotypes, etc.: these issues were all touched upon maybe 30-ish years ago in a battle for the soul of AA lit between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston. Obviously, Kingston won, which is why we still get AA book covers with cherry blossoms, porcelain, and silk shoes and etc. while you’re probably wondering, ‘Who’s Frank Chin?’

      Things have been getting better though.

      I have to admit I haven’t read much Asian-American(*) lit: neither Chin (who I’d never heard about till your post, though he looks interesting) or Kingston (who doesn’t interest me particularly)… I did try to read Amy Tan, but didn’t get very far. Same goes for Chang-Rae Lee, whose earnestness turns me off. (I couldn’t get very far into Native Speaker, and about halfway through The Surrendered I just found I’d had enough. I’ve also heard negative things about On Such a Full Sea. I have read a few other authors, mostly not famous ones, but loved them. Rattawut Lapcharoensap is funny and sharp. And I get a kick out of

      (*) I’ve read somewhat more of the “Asian”-Canadian fiction coming from authors with a background in South Asia: Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry, for example. Or, if we include Brits, Hanif Kureishi, whose The Buddha of Suburbia was a revelation for me last year, in part because of how it both embraces and rebukes the racialization of the “half-caste” protagonist and the novel alike.

      That said, I grew up in a generation starting to turn on our literary predecessors concerning the ubiquity of ‘identity.’ but now that I’m older I get it. 1. Again, what’s allowed to be published? 2. The politics of identity was a fight for the future of Asian-American vs. Asian American 3. so I think of how White audiences criticize Black comedians for always talking about race. ‘Why don’t they talk about life?’ Well, maybe being able to disentangle race from life is a luxury. Not that those authors always got it right about ‘identity,’ but… i understand the preoccupation.

      Sure, I suppose. It’s really more the earnestness and agenda of it that I find makes for bad literature. Great literature isn’t compatible with an overt agenda. It’s something I struggle with in writing, so I know it intimately: I am very political, and that finds expression in my work, but it shouldn’t just be overt: it should be deeper, more thoughtful critique. Self-interrogating and self-critical, including being critical of one’s own conscious agenda. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four works because Orwell was a socialist himself, where all the fascist criticisms of socialism (and socialist defenses of socialism) have gone by the literary wayside.

      The food thing though…. man. You’ve seen how the top TV shows here are disproportionately of people cooking food and just eating it. That’s it. Like 삼시세끼 and that stuff. Then there’s 먹방. I have my theories, but I’ll stick to the subject of AA lit and its pandering to the cultural tourism of a White audience. If Shin had an international audience in mind (likely) then her food writing falls in line with a history of Chinatown tours and menu samplers, for example: “First, waipuo (italicized) chopped scallions and ginger into soy sauce as a dipping sauce for the baozi (italicized), fluffy white rolls of… (description of the dish).” This is in first person. Food she’s eaten all her life. What is she, describing it to herself?? It’s a problem David Wong Louie riffs on in his very self-aware and quite good “The Barbarians are Coming,” with a Chinese chef protagonist willingly chinking it up for a TV show.

      Yeah, definitely people here are obsessed with food talk. (More than with food itself, I find.) I don’t know if Shin is pandering to Western audiences with that—I don’t know if she actually had a foreign audience in mind, since the novel I quoted was her breakout hit in English—but she certainly was pandering to Korean audiences, and not just in the food thing. That said, the creative arts in general have a problem regarding self-presentation of Asian artists. It comes up in a book I just read (for a review in Kyoto Journal) about Japanese artist expats in New York City: the pressure to paint cherry blossoms and samurai, versus doing whatever art one would be doing in Japan (which manifestly would NOT be that kind of stuff.) The question of whether cherry blossoms = sellout, or just smart business thinking and a commitment to doing art as a career in a racist western setting, is interesting and complex. This is the book, incidentally.

      I’ll have to look for the David Wong Louie, it sounds funny. And a bit in the spirit of someone like Tom King, who does similar sarcastic schtick with First Nations Canadian/Native American characters in stories.

      The philosophy of ‘How will it play in Peoria?’ explains a lot of this nonsense. I haven’t read Shin, but feel like I have, dozens and dozens of times

      Oh, I’m sure you have. Or, at least, seen the story play out on TV. A stomach-turning naturalization of abusive, toxic family relationships… which somehow gets interpreted as a moving story about discovering your sick, abusive, toxic parent really is a nice person, deep down, somewhere under all the apparent nastiness. You can do without reading it, trust me.

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