The struggles and traumas of our ancestors are rarely confined to their generation alone: their learned behaviors, emotions, perspectives, and even epigenetic modifications can carry over and affect their descendants even decades later (Yehuda). Scholars describe this process as intergenerational trauma, in which the second-generation is affected by the remnants of the previous generation’s traumatic life experiences. Multiple modes of this traumatic transmission have been theorized and studied, ranging from biological to psychological, but in her seminal work The Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch suggests that members of the contemporary generation can interact with and potentially “remember” the memories of the previous generation through the “stories, images, and behaviors” among which they grew up (106).
Shin Kyung-Sook’s internationally bestselling novel Please Look after Mom (2009) explores how this traumatic transmission is affected when stories and images are few and far between, which limits the contemporary generation to engaging with behavioral expressions of the past. In addition, it presents behavioral expressions in the form of symptoms and illness, demonstrating their effects on the contemporary generation whilst suggesting potential limitations in their ability to facilitate the intergenerational remembrance suggested by postmemory. Eva Hoffman describes physical symptoms as the “language of the family,” a highly intimate yet vague form of expression that reveals traces of the past through “the sounds of nightmares, the idioms of sighs and illness, or tears and acute aches” (9-10). In a familial relationship affected by unspoken traumas, where narrative or visual depictions of the past are not available, physical symptoms can thus become the behavioral expressions of past traumas that descendants can most readily interact with.
Please Look after Mom opens with the sudden disappearance of So-nyo, or “Mom,” in the Seoul subway station. The surviving family struggles to reckon with this loss, searching for her throughout the city. But in their failure to achieve a physical reconnection with her, they return to memories of their past with her. These intimate memories are communicated with readers through the novel’s polyvocal structure, as each family member reveals episodes from their past in their own dedicated chapter.
The novel opens with the perspective of Chi-hon, the eldest daughter. As the surviving family questions how So-nyo could have gotten lost, assuming that something must have happened to her, Chi-hon’s memories reveal that So-nyo was not the same “old mom” (12) that the family thought she was. Rather, So-nyo suffered from poor health long before she had disappeared and could have very easily gotten lost on her own.
In one such memory, narrated in the second person, Chi-hon revisits her hometown to find her mother collapsed on the floor — eyes bloodshot, forehead dotted with beads of sweat, and face trapped in an expression of misery. Juxtaposed against her childhood memories of So-nyo working tirelessly to raise her family, the sight is shocking and upsetting:
You approached Mom, but she didn’t move…Is Mom sleeping? Recalling that she wasn’t one to take naps, you peered into her face. Mom had a hand clutching her head, and she was struggling with all her might. Her lips were parted, and she was frowning so intently that her face was gnarled with deep wrinkles. (27)
So-nyo’s headaches become the symptoms and behavioral expression that Chi-hon interacts with as she attempts to better understand the challenges that So-nyo faced throughout her life. Visiting a doctor, Chi-hon learns that So-nyo suffered from a stroke a long time ago and that the damage sustained contributed to the recurrence of her debilitating headaches. Yet this information is limited in its medicalization of So-nyo’s symptoms, as readers soon learn of a more correlative relationship between So-nyo’s lived traumas and her symptoms.
In the father’s chapter, the father reflects on his mistreatment towards So-nyo and examines the possible connections between her poor health and the traumatic incidents in her life. The suicide of So-nyo’s brother-in-law, Kyun, was one such incident, leaving So-nyo in physical and emotional agony as she “rip[ped] out her hair and grab[bed] at her chest in grief” (156) for days following Kyun’s death. A traumatic event is defined as any experience that can cause lasting psychological, emotional, and physical harm (Yehuda), and Hirsch describes the intergenerational relationship with trauma as one that includes “personal, collective, and cultural trauma” (5). In So-nyo’s case, she was irreversibly scarred by the psychological damage inflicted upon her, which soon developed into physical harm as her health quickly declined through the sudden onset of newfound symptoms — “a formerly happy person” who now stopped smiling, a formerly fast sleeper who was now an insomniac, a formerly strong and hearty woman who was now riddled by debilitating headaches (158).
While the father is deeply knowledgeable of the connections between So-nyo’s traumas and her physical ailments, he refrains from sharing this information with his children. When Chi-hon asks her father if “there was anything that gave Mom a deep shock” — something that could have caused her headaches (158) — he remains dismissive, feigning ignorance and shaking his head. So-nyo’s personal trauma with Kyun’s suicide developed into the headaches that Chi-hon would examine in an attempt to understand So-nyo’s past, yet in the face of her father’s reticence and a lack of stories or images to elucidate the past, Chi-hon only has the headaches themselves to work with. These symptoms are explicit and visceral, yet simultaneously illegible, as Chi-hon struggles to identify the lived experiences that may have contributed to them.
Nadine Fresco’s interviews with children of Holocaust survivors elaborates upon the explicit yet illegible nature of symptoms, as well as the interactions between descendants and their ancestor’s physical symptoms. The parents lived through the traumas of the Holocaust, losing family members and enduring years of intense fear, and these forbidden memories manifested themselves only “in the form of incomprehensible attacks of pain” (418). Thus, symptoms became the children’s “clues to a drama that [they] were forbidden to witness” (418), the final results of an unknown life story. While these symptoms served as indications of a traumatic past, they alone were not sufficient in allowing the children to better understand that past. Only after discovering photographs of their mother’s past do the children succeed in visualizing what may have happened to their mother that contributed to her current state, finally putting a name on the past that their parents had kept strictly unnameable and allowing for a transmission of traumatic knowledge.
Unlike the children in Fresco’s interviews, there are no photos of So-nyo’s past for Chi-hon to work with, nor is So-nyo even physically present for Chi-hon to learn more about her past from. In addition, the traumas experienced by the parents in Fresco’s interviews were both collective and cultural, attached to the Holocaust, while So-nyo’s traumas were solely personal. Hirsch suggests that stories or photos of collective experiences can allow viewers not intimately related to the subjects to project their own desires onto them, allowing them to better understand their own ancestors’ experiences by virtue of others’ experiences (107). Thus, while Fresco’s interviews presented a scenario where children found personal photos of their parents, Hirsch presents additional narratives of families who have derived meaning from widely available photos or stories, such as Margaret Bourke-White’s famous photograph of the liberation of Buchenwald, to better understand their own ancestors’ experiences with the Holocaust. On the other hand, one cannot as easily project their own desires onto another family’s experiences to better understand their ancestor’s personal traumas, thus limiting Chi-hon from projecting her own desires to better understand her mother’s life onto collective stories or photos.
Thus, Please Look after Mom’s representation of intergenerational trauma differs from Hirsch’s concept of postmemory as well as the broader definition of intergenerational trauma, in which the effects of the previous generation’s traumas carry over to the second-generation. Rather than Chi-hon inheriting So-nyo’s memories or being burdened with the consequences of So-nyo’s traumas, she engages in a process of self-inflicted trauma. Chi-hon revisits memories of her interactions with her mother throughout the entire novel not as a sentimental or self-fulfilling process, but as an act of self-reproach, as her memories are trailed only by feelings of guilt and regret (9) — constant reminders of how little Chi-hon knows about her own mother. At the end of the novel, Chi-hon can only acknowledge this reality with resignation, telling her sister that “I just don’t get Mom. Only that she’s missing” (174).
Thus, Chi-hon’s interactions with the memories of her mother’s illness suggest that symptoms may not necessarily contribute to the process of intergenerational remembrance suggested by the behavioral component of postmemory. Rather, they suggest that relying upon symptoms alone to elucidate the past may generate traumatic affect rather than traumatic transmission, resulting in self-inflicted harm without contributing to a clearer understanding of the traumatic past that contributed to those symptoms. This isn’t to say that survivors of trauma should simply be more explicit and potentially re-traumatize themselves in favor of their children’s lucidity. Rather, while symptoms can be expressive demonstrations of a traumatic past, having the potential to foster a curiosity into the events connected to their onset, there are limits with which physical symptoms alone can serve as representations of the past. Without the additional components of stories and images to elucidate the past, symptoms can merely become murky, illegible signs of an unknown past.
Works Cited
Fresco, Nadine. “Remembering the unknown.” The International review of psycho-analysis 11 (1984): 417-427.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia University Press, 2012.
Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Random House, 2017.
Grossman, Samara et al. “Trauma-informed care: recognizing and resisting re-traumatization in health care.” Trauma surgery & acute care open vol. 6,1 e000815. 20 Dec. 2021, doi:10.1136/tsaco-2021-000815
Pietrzak, Robert H et al. “Posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and perceived needs for psychological care in older persons affected by Hurricane Ike.” Journal of affective disorders vol. 138,1-2 (2012): 96-103. doi:10.1016/j.jad.2011.12.018
Shin, Kyung-Sook. Please Look After Mom. Vintage, 2011.
Yehuda, Rachel, and Amy Lehrner. “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects: Putative Role of Epigenetic Mechanisms.” World Psychiatry, vol. 17, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 243–57, doi:10.1002/wps.20568.
Image credit: Pencil and ink illustration of an angiogram. Sarah Grice. Source: Wellcome Collection.
