I don’t think I’ve ever done a review of a book review before–but here goes.
Kyung-sook Shin’s bestselling Korean novel, Please Look After Mom, has been translated into English. And while I’ve only read an excerpt of the novel, I have read Maureen Corrigan’s review of it. At first, it pissed me off. Then it made me thoughtful, if still a little angry. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis provided by me):
If there’s a literary genre in Korean that translates into “manipulative sob sister melodrama,” Please Look After Mom is surely its reigning queen. I’m mystified as to why this guilt-laden morality tale has become such a sensation in Korea and why a literary house like Knopf would embrace it. (Although, as women are the biggest audience for literary fiction, Please Look After Mom must be anticipated to be a book club hit in this country.) But, why wallow in cross-cultural self-pity, ladies?
Having just read Patti Smith’s award-winning memoir, Just Kids, for the second time, I’d urge you to pick her empowering female adventure tale about getting lost in the city instead. Smith will get your book club on its feet and pumping its collective fists in the air, rather than knocking back the wine and reaching for the cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction.
It’s not the fact that Corrigan dislikes the book that bothers me, because I’ve hated my fair share of books. It’s that condescending tone, that culturally insensitive attitude that led to a comment like “kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction” that got to me. I mean, really? What are you, lady, in elementary school?
Here’s the part that makes me thoughtful, though: Please Look After Mom is a novel about a family’s search and self-reflection after its matriarch goes missing. It’s told in four voices: the daughter’s, the oldest son’s, the husband’s, and finally the mother’s. According to Amazon.com, the novel paints an “indelible portrait of a woman whose entire identity, despite her secret desires, is tied up in her children and the heartbreaking loss that is felt when family bonds loosen over time.” Which actually makes Corrigan’s scathing remark about its anti-feminism sound a little more sensible to me. I’m not a big fan of having my entire identity tied up in my (hypothetical) children and how well I raised them, because, well, that’s where women are “traditionally” supposed to be, right?
But at the same time, “family bonds” and family in general are a very, very central part of my identity. I love my family. Who I am, what I do–it’s been influenced, in large part, by my parents and my relatives. I embrace learning about family history and family trees. The thing about my family tree, though, is that only the men’s families are recorded. The women only have their name listed, and nothing else. Even my grandfather remembers very little about the women on our family tree, because, as he explained, they would marry off and become part of another family. And it frustrates me, because here I am, learning about family history, wanting to embed it in my memory so that I can pass it on to the next generation–and yet, if I marry a man, my children will have his last name, not mine, and the family tree on my side ends there.
So how do I reconcile this family-centered identity with my feminist ideology? I have no idea, honestly. All I can say is that while Corrigan has a point, she’s exaggerating it too much. Being family-centered is not the antithesis of being feminist. Being feminist doesn’t mean that I’m obligated to give up my filial pity, which is inextricably tied up in my culture. Feminism, I’ve learned, is much more complicated than the usual white, upper-middle-class version paints it to be. Ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic condition–all of these things tangle up the concept until it becomes problematic to view feminism as one single, homogeneous ideology. And I guess that’s what angers me most about Corrigan’s review: that in her privilege, she fails to consider that complication, and what it could mean to navigate the waters between familial culture and personal feminism.
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