The Unbending Leg – Kobo eBook

A son’s remembrance of the mother who held a family together through twentieth-century Korea.

“Whenever I think of Mother, the first thing that comes to mind is a river.”

Born in 1926, Lee Mun-ho was a gifted young athlete whose life changed after a skating accident left one leg unable to bend. Sent to a mountain temple in despair, she found a path back to life. The young Buddhist monk she met there would become her husband, and together they would have seven children.

In The Unbending Leg, Hanuleye follows his mother’s life through Japanese colonial rule, the Korean War, poverty, and the ceaseless work of keeping a family alive. Temple courtyards, village markets, fields, classrooms, and crowded rooms become the settings for a story in which national history is felt in the most intimate ways.

These thirty-five recollections are tender, candid, and sometimes deeply painful. They remember not an untroubled ideal of motherhood, but a particular woman: resourceful, outspoken, wounded, and fiercely determined. They also trace a son’s growing understanding of the burdens his parents carried, and of the love he was slow to recognize.

Translated from the Korean memoir Eomeoni-ui Gang, this English edition includes 75 photographs and documents from the original volume, among them a 1945 portrait of the author’s mother, his parents at Huibangsa temple, and a family portrait of the household she held together. It is a family remembrance, a portrait of rural Korean life, and a tribute to a mother whose resolve outlasted the hardships before her.