Literally, no sooner had she emerged above the screen (or in between the sliding subway door) than she was gone.
Nevertheless, it is only when she is missing, perhaps dead, that she is seen, read, and known. The whole book is a saddened, heavily guilt-ridden eulogy which gradually discloses the multi-layered life of the missing mother.
Kyung-sook Shin’s internationally acknowledged novel Please Look After Mom asks the above questions upfront and answers immediately: “Nobody Knows.” A mother is missing the given information from the very basic fact, like the date of birth, is no less inaccurate and unknown than a splitting headache, breast cancer, or her secret male friend. The notion of Mother as Other－the impossibility of knowing her－renders the very ground for still vigorous feminist’s inquiries: what is a mother? Are there mothers, really? If so, where? So we have been insatiably trying to imagine and define what a mother is what mother is, how she creates, destroys, has an eternally-impossible-to-know relationship with her child or children, naming her Abject for the sake of the economy of words.
Since this is part of the human experience, it begs the fundamental question, “What is a ‘mother’?” This question is as necessary, and even obligatory, as one that has opened up a new generation of feminist discourses in the latter half of the twentieth century: “What is a woman?” As we were so carefully taught by our feminist mothers, “to state the question” is already a preliminary answer because the performance of asking itself is momentous. All humankind, despite countless differences and diversities, has one thing in common: we come from a woman’s body we call “mother.” This may no longer be true someday in the future, but for now it is still a universal human truth.
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