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A Trans-East Asian Study on the Logic of Sacrifice under Compressed Modernity: Focusing on Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom

  • Journal of Chinese Language and Literature
  • 2025, (100), pp.241~259
  • DOI : 10.15792/clsyn..100.202512.241
  • Publisher : Chinese Literary Society Of Yeong Nam
  • Research Area : Humanities > Chinese Language and Literature
  • Received : November 20, 2025
  • Accepted : December 13, 2025
  • Published : December 30, 2025

Liu, Yaxiang 1

1고려대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper, from a Trans-East Asian perspective, explores the logic of sacrifice under “compressed modernity” as depicted in Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look After Mom. The study finds that although the two works are set in distinct urban spaces—Shanghai and Seoul—they both reveal the spiritual uprooting and disintegration of familial structures brought about by rapid modernization. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow reflects the loss of urban identity and individual belonging through the decay of civic culture and Wang Qiyao’s death, while Please Look After Mom uses the mother’s disappearance to symbolize the rupture of family ethics. Both narratives articulate a modernization process achieved at the expense of emotion and memory, thereby exposing the paradox of “development through sacrifice” that characterizes East Asian modernity.

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