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Kyung-sook Shin has won the $30,000 Man Asian Literary Prize for her novel, Please Look After Mom. The South Korean novelist is the first woman to win the award.

Publishers nominated 90 books for the prize, and the final shortlist counted seven books. The Complete Review has more about the winning novel. Translator Chi-Young Kim also received US$5,000.

Here’s more from the release: ‘Please Look After Mom’ is a deeply moving story of a family’s search for their mother, who goes missing one afternoon amid the crowds of the Seoul Station subway. It offers the reader an insight into traditional family life in contemporary South Korea and has already sold 1.93m copies in South Korea alone – a country with a population of just under 50m people. Following the shortlisting, the novel is now set to be published in 32 countries.” (Author photo via Lee Byungryul)

 

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The Man Asian Literary Prize longlist was announced today. For your reading pleasure, we’ve collected links to free samples of the books on the prestigious list.

The shortlist will be revealed in January and the winner will be announced in March.

Here’s more: “The Man Asian Literary Prize was founded in 2007. It is an annual literary award given to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English, and published in the previous calendar year … The winning author is awarded USD 30,000 and the translator (if any) USD 5,000. Submissions are invited through publishers based in any country.”

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Among the many extraordinary young people in my most recent class at the University of Pennsylvania was a freshman from South Korea with a philosopher's soul. K went at projects in his own fashion and earned our lasting respect for the ways in which he'd quietly, politely defend his literary outposts. He moved fearlessly outside the confines of form and foundation to suggest a new approach, at one point earning J's highest encomium, "That took balls, man." K was unafraid of dreaming out loud, unafraid of hoping, unafraid of expressing his deep, abiding affection for his mother. K wrote not of disdain and fractures, but of love and sacrifice, of the "whistle of the wind through the open window." That open window was in our own classroom. He wrote movingly, too, of its walls, its soul.

What had shaped this young man? I often wondered, and when I read of Kyung-sook Shin's Please Look After Mom, I knew I had to read it—had to see South Korea through the eyes of one of its most famous working novelists.

Mom is the story of lostness—of a South Korean woman who is somehow not right there, with her husband, when the train they are to ride together pulls out of the Seoul Station. The woman had been beset by blinding headaches and some amnesia. She was getting on in age. She had, to be honest, been largely taken for granted. But now Park So-nyo is gone, and desperation sets in as her husband and adult children set out to find her.

We learn the story through the voices of Park's novelist daughter, her eldest son, her husband, and a younger daughter (before hearing, finally, from Park herself). We understand, throughout all the pained and poignant remembering and reassessing, that it is not just that Park's family doesn't know where she is and cannot find her. It's that they may never really have known her at all.

This simply-told story embodies haunting, complex truths. It yields a devastating but gorgeous portrait of South Korea.  It reminds us that mothers were children once, mothers have dreams, mothers are wrecked and salvaged by their secrets. This is a book that I didn't want to part with. It's a book that I will read again.

I quote from this letter tucked inside the book, written by the younger daughter. I choose this passage because it is Mother's Day and, while I am not this daughter, I was a daughter. I honor today those things that I will never know fully about my own mom, those things she dreamed and wanted.

I know one thing. I can't do it like she did. Even if I wanted to. When I'm feeding my kids, I often feel annoyed, burdened, as if they're holding on to my ankles. I love my kids, and I am moved—wondering, did I really give birth to them? But I can't give them my entire life like Mom did. Depending on the situation, I act as if I would give them my eyes if they need them, but I'm not Mom.... She didn't have the opportunity to pursue her dreams and, all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn't do anything about her life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom's dreams?

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I stumbled across a critique of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin at NPR by Maureen Corrigan There are so many unnecessary classless adjectives, it's beyond ridiculous, inappropriate and unprofessional. Corrigan tops it off with a nice little racial dig at the end. I am so disgusted and trying to calm down to start from the beginning.

Please Look After Mom is Shin's English language debut. It sold over a million copies in South Korea. A few weeks back, I told Vasilly another Color Online contributor about Please Look After Mom. Vasilly started reading it first and said it was amazing. I quickly added it to my reading queue. I finished the book in three sittings and loved it.



There's a lot of buzz around this release, so I decided to search for a few literary reviews to link to when I did my review this coming week. This lead me to the NPR, whatever that is, I refuse to call it a review and I barely want to call it a critique.

Part of me is screaming inside because I felt Please Look After Mom was so beautifully done. Though I understand everyone isn't going to feel the same way. So I can easily put that aside. Even if I hadn't yet read Shin's novel I would still take offense to what Corrigan wrote. I am not the only one. It's received 59 comments. Many have noted the line of the last paragraph.

"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"

How in the hell was kimchee-scented Kleenex, even allowed to see the light of day. That's some serious racial BullShit

Even before that last line there was so much bitterness and uncalled for personal jabs. As well as inaccuracies.

"Did you catch the anti-city, anti-modernist, anti-feminist messages in that passage?"The lost mother clearly stands for values that are fading from Korean culture as industrialization and urbanization triumph."

If you've read Please Look After Me, you know that's incorrect. Corrigan only shares what she hopes will prove her point. While clearly dismissing the strength of the mother and her desire for her children to have more opportunities than she did.

Corrigan and NPR also felt the need to include a photograph of the author.

Now every time Shin looks at that photo she may be reminded of this ugliness.
As far as I know neither Corrigan or NPR as issued a statement of apology. Not even a half ass one, where they simply claim ignorance.

Is the NPR Review of Please Look After Mom Racist? @ Ask a Korean (a must read)

Corriagan's critique of Please Look After Mom went up on Apr 5 the same day Kyung-Sook Shin had her American Debut Celebration. Do I think this is a coincidence? Hell NO. Just more ugliness.

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