Concerning My Daughter

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The synopsis says: “Told in a brutally honest voice that at times simmers with impotent rage, Kim Hye-jin's novel taps into the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics, but also the systemic issues and obstacles that LGBTQ communities face in heteronormative societies. Kim Hye-jin lays bare our most universal fears on ageing, death, and isolation, to offer finally a paean to love in all its forms.” Concerning My Daughter provides desperate narratives of its female characters. It’s the story of a mother and a daughter, but it goes beyond the relationship and is also ahead of our time. By accompanying the women’s journey overcoming pain and suffering in their lives, we will see our stereotypes broken in the end. The great power smashing our fixed old ideas! This book is filled with such energy.” The narrative swings between the mother’s uneasy relationship with Green and her girlfriend, to her taxing workplace. There she witnesses how uncaring and downright neglectful the staff is towards one of her elderly dementia patients. The patient has no family to speak of and therefore no one but our narrator looks out for her. The mother fights against the idea that this patient should be treated this way because she did not conform to society (the patient was a diplomat of some renown who travelled the world). I found the parallelism between this patient and Green banal …

Concerning My Daughter: A Novel by Kim Hye-jin, Paperback Concerning My Daughter: A Novel by Kim Hye-jin, Paperback

Concerning My Daughter is a work that is unafraid of the human body in all its contradictions, at once philosophical and practical in its treatment of the aging body, the gendered body, the body’s capacity for acts of caretaking, protest, and love. Urgent, timely, tender.” The compisition of the story is simple, but stringent and effective, and while knowing a thing or two about Korean society will certainly help, it would probably be to easy to dismiss what is portrayed here as a Korean problem (this is one of the connections to Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982): The marginalization of LGBTQ+ people and the elderly is real in many societies all over the world. Concerning My Daughter is often didactic, privileging message over plot. Kim lets both Green and Lane deliver monologues about their right to acceptance; she also lets the narrator monologue, if only to the reader, about the precarity of her life. None of these passages are lectures, though: Kim gives them such emotional heft that they can only be pleas. Jamie Chang's translation, which is plain yet highly precise, amplifies this effect. She leaves no ambiguity in the text, which means the reader cannot hide from the intensity of the narrator's feelings. Ultimately, Concerning My Daughter turns into a confrontation — not just between Green and her mother, but also between Green's mother and the reader. Understanding, in this book, has to come from all sides. Hugs and Cuddles Labor without end. The thought that no one can save me from this exhausting work. Concern over what will happen when the moment comes when I cannot work anymore. In other words, what worries me isn’t death, but life. I must do whatever needs to be done to withstand this suffocating uncertainty that will be with me for as long as I am living. I learned this too late. Perhaps this is not about aging. Maybe it’s the malady of the times, as people say. Our times. This generation. Naturally, I am reminded of my daughter again. We have arrived at this point, her in her mid-thirties, me past seventy.

This little novel was hyper-realistic, the simple, matter-of-fact writing contributed in a way to that realism. Concerning My Daughter tells the story of a mother and widow, who begrudgingly allows her thirty-something daughter to move in with her. When her daughter arrives with her girlfriend, their relationship is one that her mother cannot accept. An admirably nuanced portrait of prejudice. . . . one that boldly takes on the daunting task of humanizing someone whose prejudice has made her cruel.”

Concerning My Daughter” by Kim Hye-jin “Concerning My Daughter” by Kim Hye-jin

But when Green turns up with her girlfriend Lane in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. And the world that she will reach, that I won’t be around for – what will it look like? Better than this? Or more relentless? Ya da belki. Korkağın tekiyim. Hiçbir şey duymak istemeyen, risk almaktan kaçan, başkasının meselesine burnunu sokmayan biriyim. Etliye sütlüye karışmayan, kıyafetleri kirlenmesin diye hep kenarda duran biriyim. Duyulmak istenenleri söyleyen, görülmek istenen ifadeyi takınan, çaktırmadan geri adım atan kişiyim. Yine de iyi biri olmak mı istiyorum? Peki ya konu kızım olduğunda?’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 an ageing mother allows her thirty-something daughter to move into her apartment, she wants for her what many mothers might say they want for their child: a steady income, and, even better, a good husband with a good job with whom to start a family. What an interesting sparse novel, told from an unlikely perspective about queer lives in Korea and investigativing other issues like ageism, elder care, and how the heteropatriarchay and capitalism fail to fulfill their promises, especially to women. I was fascinated to read that this author began this book with the idea of trying to see things from her mother's point of view. Diving into the perspective of an older generation steeped in deepseated homophobia and sexism is not for the faint of heart.

Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin Summary and reviews of Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin

But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. Having centred her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. Her daughter’s involvement in a case of unfair dismissal involving gay colleagues from the university where she works is similarly strange to her.

All I did was sit here in this spot where I could look up at the altar, run my hands over these words that I feared others might hear, and let the silence grow. Things I want to say, must say, cannot say, must not say – I have no confidence in any of these words. Whom could I possibly go to with these words? Who’s there to listen, anyway? And then, her only daughter, now in her thirties, has to move in with her, as she's broke and can't find a permanent job. She shares her room with her long-term partner, another woman. The mother’s fear and antipathy are exacerbated by the fact that she believes her daughter refuses to live a “normal life,” with a husband and children. The mother cannot accept that her daughter’s life partner is a woman. It is horrifying to her and we see her horror played out in her body. This comes from the mother’s ingrained inability to see Green’s relationship with her partner Lane as the foundation of her daughter’s family, and by extension, the mother’s own family—and, indeed her desired support in old age. The mother does not want anyone—her neighbors, coworkers, church group—to know about Green because she believes it is shameful and the shame will reflect on herself.