Thomas journals

  Please Look After Mom, written by popular Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin, was published in English after selling over a million copies in Korea. Shin is a visiting scholar at Columbia University, and lives in Seoul.  Jeff taught this book in his Grade 10 World Literature Class to explore local culture. It does that and more. It represents the guilt of countless women in Korea of the new generation, struggling with the implications of society modernizing, as Korea careens into a super-modern nation. Korea changing from a war-torn country of farmers to the land of Samsung and Hyundai in one generation is bound to produce the themes explored in this book.  But not just a book for and about Korean families, Please Look After Mom focuses on the universal theme of what it means to be a mother -- in this case defined through self-sacrifice. Mom's duty it seemed to the central character was to put her children, now grown and on their own, as well as her husband before herself. They let