There are now more than 130 million immigrants in China — people working away from home to support their families; parents work in urban factories while their children and aging parents remain in remote villages.
Once a year, over the New Year's holiday, they are reunited — if they are able to buy a ticket and make it on the train.
Peter Hessler's book "Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Factory to Farm," which I reviewed in a previous column, examined this migration in depth.
What the film highlights, though, is the changing parent/child dynamic in this massive population shift.
Visually, we can see the longing of the parents to be with their children, to simply touch them. But even as their hands reach out, their mouths are asking to see report cards and class rankings. There must be some return for their sacrifice.
Oddly enough, a book I had been waiting for came in about the same time. "Please Look After Mom," by Kyung-Sook Shin, is the English-language debut of a best-selling Korean author. The reviews I had seen led me to think that this might be a fun title to review around Mother's Day.
The rural-to-urban migration in South Korea has been somewhat different than that in China. Korean parents labor in their ancestral villages while their children compete for educational opportunities. If they are successful, the children will leave the village for the big cities.
In Kyung-Sook Shin's novel, Mom has raised five children, all of whom have left the village for Seoul. Parental birthdays are important in Korea, but as time passes, the children stop coming home, and the parents travel to Seoul instead.
This is why Father and Mom were at the Seoul Subway Station one busy Saturday. Father gets on the subway to go to his eldest son's home for a birthday celebration. At the next stop, he discovers he is alone. Mom has gone missing.
The family reports this to the police, but they also get to work themselves, trying to find Mom. They prepare flyers with the most recent picture they can find and distribute them at the subway station. People report seeing a disheveled, confused old woman in blue plastic sandals, but no one has seen the woman they describe. Eventually, the family must confront the discrepancy between their description and reality.
I admit my initial interest in this book was a bit mischievous. Mothers are famous for their ability to inspire guilt, and Mom was a typical mother: selfless, industrious and relentless. It sounded like the perfect Mother's Day gift — for the children, of course.
This novel turned out to be much more. It would be unlikely that anyone could read it without at least a few twinges of guilt, but it is also profoundly moving, offering as many glimpses into one's own heart as it does into the culture of Korea.
The story is told through four voices. The first is that of the eldest daughter, a successful novelist whose failure to marry and whose willingness to ride in airplanes were equally distressing to her mother.
The second voice is that of Hyong-chol's — the eldest son. Hyong-chol passed the civil service exam and took the first job offered. He is doing well, but his Mom's dream of college for him never came to pass.
The third voice is that of the father. Coming of age after the Korean civil war, he longed for something more than his village could offer. Though he agreed to the marriage arranged for him, he often wandered. Yet somehow, he always came back home. "When the unfamiliar things away from home became commonplace, the things your wife grew and raised hovered before your eyes. Puppies, chickens, potatoes that kept coming out when they were dug up ... and your children."
The fourth voice belongs to Mom, Mom, who has gone missing, who doesn't answer as her husband stumbles through their empty house, calling out "I'm home. Are you here? I'm home!" Mom: a woman with her own story, her own desires and even a few secrets.
This past weekend, I visited my daughter in New York City. I chatted with a cab driver from Nepal on my way into Manhattan. The Nepalese population in New York is not large, though it has grown considerably since this man arrived 16 years ago.
He told me he supported his aging mother back in Nepal. He worried about her, but things were much better nowadays — he could buy a card and chat with her for 55 minutes every Sunday. Knowing she was safe and healthy was a great relief to him.
Angling for a tip? No doubt. And he got it. I imagined him returning to Nepal, bursting through the door where his mother lived: "I'm home. Are you here? I'm home."
Photo by Luke Hoagland (Creative Commons)
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