Concerning My Daughter
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-Jin’s debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, and generational schism through the incendiary gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her daughter’s queer relationship.
When a widowed, aging mother allows Green, her thirty-something daughter, to move into her apartment, all she wants for her is a stable and quiet existence like her own. Ideally, a steady income and, most importantly, a good husband with whom to start a family.
But when Green turns up with her long-term girlfriend in tow, her mother is enraged and unwilling to welcome their relationship into her home. Having centered her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. Green’s involvement in a campus protest against unfair dismissals of gay colleagues throws her into deeper shambles.
Meanwhile, the nursing home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for Jen, an elderly dementia patient who traveled the world as a successful diplomat, chose not to have children, and has no family. Outraged, Green’s mother begins to reconsider the unfair consequences of choosing one’s own path.
With bracing honesty, Kim Hye-jin taps into the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics while unearthing the mechanisms of violence that target LGBTQ communities in traditional societies. Elegantly translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, Concerning My Daughter shines a light on all facets of familial love and conflict.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kim excavates the complexities of a mother and daughter's relationship in her excellent debut. The unnamed narrator, a widow who works at a nursing home in South Korea, expresses a strong affinity for an elderly dementia patient named Jen. In contrast, the narrator feels only anger and resentment toward her own daughter, Green, who has recently moved back in with her, along with Green's apparent lover, Lane, despite never asking permission to bring him along. Underlying the narrator's anxiety is a sense of invisibility or smallness, which comes through in her stream-of-consciousness inner monologue as she deals with the pain caused by missteps and miscommunications between her and Green, who rejects her hope for her to have a husband and children. "Ma, Lane is my family," Green says. Later, while working with Jen, her mother thinks, "What's the use of family? We all end up the same way." Kim skillfully depicts the vulnerability and fear underlying her protagonist's anxiety and anger, laying bare the ways in which family dynamics are fluid and full of paradoxes. As the narrator reflects, "The child who sprang from my own flesh and blood is perhaps the creature I'm most distant from." Kim's compassionate portrayal of the narrator's contradictions and ever-changing feelings makes her project captivating and moving. Readers will be grateful to discover this new author.
