Book Review: ‘Concerning My Daughter,’ by Kim Hye-jin
CONCERNING MY DAUGHTER, by Kim Hye-jin, translated by Jamie Chang
The best-selling Korean writer Kim Hye-jin’s first novel to be translated into English, “Concerning My Daughter,” begins with an awkward question. Eating udon noodles with her mother, a 30-year-old daughter asks if she and her girlfriend, Lane, can move into the mother’s house. The daughter (who is only ever referred to by Lane’s nickname for her, “Green”) can’t afford a flat of her own because of her unpredictable work as an “itinerant” university lecturer. The mother — our narrator, also unnamed — agrees reluctantly, needing extra income to supplement what she earns caring for dementia patients. She also recognizes that her only daughter needs help, even if that means helping Lane too, whom the mother despises on principle because she is not a man. The mother wrestles with her disapproval of her daughter’s life choices both in private and with her patient Jen, a successful and well-traveled woman who never had children, and now has no family to care for her.
A middle-aged woman with an unglamorous job, the narrator is both scrutinizing (of her daughter) and scrutinized by a society that has not fulfilled its duty to support her. Kim plays close attention to the precariousness — bodily, financial, social — of not only the mother, but also her daughter and Jen. The lesbian daughter has been born into a generation with few job prospects; and Jen’s mind and body have deteriorated too much for her to take care of herself.
This is an admirably nuanced portrait of prejudice. The mother’s greatest anxiety is how other people will perceive her daughter, not only because she is socially conservative, but also because she fears her daughter will not have children, and will end up in old age in the same situation as Jen, with no one to visit or tend to her. Jamie Chang’s precise, pared-back translation conveys the mother’s internal struggle between her biases and her love for her daughter in a careful, balanced way, so that the reader is able to understand her position without being asked to endorse it. The mother understands that her outbursts are unacceptable (“How can you do this unless you’re out to make me suffer,” she asks her daughter, “you don’t care even the tiniest bit what your old mother thinks, now, do you?”), but she cannot prevent them. “My emotions carry me away to a place of no return,” she thinks. Wisely, Kim chooses to report rather than directly quote the mother’s worst homophobic tirade, against Lane. We learn only that the mother “let the words burn in the flames of disgust, resentment and hate.”
As the novel goes on, the daughter is badly injured at a protest against the firing of her university colleagues for their sexuality; and budget constraints at the nursing home lead the mother to bring Jen into her own home to see out the end of her life. The daughter’s vulnerability, combined with Lane’s tender care and the proximity of death, helps the mother start to see the errors in her thinking; but no promises are made. This is not a redemption story, nor does it aspire to be. The mother wants to be able to tell her daughter that she doesn’t care whether she likes men or women, that she believes her daughter and Lane should be treated with equal respect by society — but she doesn’t tell her these things. “Will the time come when I will be able to say these things out loud?” she wonders.
