Book Review: Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin translated by Jamie Chang

 

Concerning my Daughter by Kim Hye-jin, translated by Jamie Chang who also translated Born 1982, is the social report of a slightly confused single mother of an academic lesbian daughter in her 30s. Green has to move back home to her mother after being dismissed from university, mostly because of her queer choice of curricula. Soon, she her girlfriend of seven years joins her, forcing her mother to acknowledge the reality of her daughter choice of relationship.

The mother´s confusion is amplified as she notices with fear the other changes taking place in the world she lives. In a society where respect towards elders is highly revered there are old people getting old and dying alone. People with a high education and status - ´the professor´s wife´ - do end up tragically, in a nursing home, the place where the mother is currently working.

The society shifts and the tremendous pressure to comply to the rules - ´why are you wasting your precious time?´ is the mother asking Green, requesting her to start looking for a man and to make children - remain only for the parents. Parents like Green´s mother do not understand the new world - she is asking how her daughter may enjoy her sexual life with Lane, among others - the freedom of being relived from the society pressures, although still depending on their parents - like Green returning to her mother´s house, although at an age when she is supposed to have her own. 

At a great extent, the mother is relatable. I can imagine a woman, in her 50s, unable to grasp the life of her estranged academic daughter, although she has all the love in the world to start understanding and maybe, one day, accepting her. She projects her fears on her daughter, because her prescience of an eventual tragical outcome is all she can hang on to. If this is not going to turn out badly, then it means that her own view of life may be obsolete in the end, isn´t it?

The story builds up in mirror, with either the daughter or her mother accounting about the same events they experienced or, in the case of the mother, her additional experience at the nursing home, which relates to her fears. Those are the only glimpses we are offered into the life and personalities of the characters, which although it is far from being complete, it leaves us enough place to imagine and project our own expectations and, why not, fears.

I had access to the book in the British-accented reading of Minhee Yeo. 

Rating: 4 stars