Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [92]
20. What are the details and cultural references that make this story particularly Korean? What elements make it universal?
For further reading
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying; Ha Jin, War Trash; Eugenia Kim, The Calligrapher’s Daughter; Suki Kim, The Interpreter; Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life and The Surrendered; Marshall Pihl, Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton, eds. Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction; Yom Sang-seop, Three Generations; Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan; Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan; Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress; Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club.
Kyung-sook Shin grew up in a remote village in South Korea, the fourth child and oldest daughter of six. Her parents could not afford to send her to high school, so at sixteen she moved to Seoul, where her older brother lived. She worked in an electronics plant while attending night school, and after graduating from college, published her first collection of stories in 1988, at age twenty-five. She is the author of twelve previous works of fiction and has been honored with the 1996 Manhae Literature Prize, the 1997 Dong-in Literature Prize, and the 2001 Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. Currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University, she lives in Seoul.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kyung-sook Shin is the author of numerous works of fiction and is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She has been honored with the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. Please Look After Mom is her first book to appear in English and will be published in nineteen countries. Currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University, she lives in Seoul.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Contents
1 - Nobody Knows
2 - I’m Sorry, Hyong-chol
3 - I’m Home
4 - Another Woman
Epilogue: Rosewood Rosary
Reading Group Guide
A Note About the Author