By Mandakini Arora
Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin, trans. Jamie Chang, 2023
“I don’t know what I did to deserve this, I say. I don’t know where you started to go wrong ... I have earned the right to see the child, whom I went to such pains to raise, live an ordinary, decent life.” Concerning My Daughter, written and published in Korean in 2017 and translated into English in 2023, is narrated by a widowed woman in her early seventies. She worries about her daughter, a university lecturer in her mid-thirties, who is single and does not have a permanent job. Neither mother nor daughter is named.
Financially straitened, the daughter approaches the mother for a loan. The mother’s only asset is her house, part of which she rents out. As a solution, she proposes that the daughter live with her. The daughter moves into her mother’s house with Lane, her female lover. Despite the obvious, the mother initially tries to convince herself the couple are sisterly friends. “I can take this sight before me, crumple it up, squash it into a tiny thing, and toss it far away,” she thinks. She worries about the neighbors — “On holidays when their grown children come by with their spouses and kids, they’ll use my family’s gossip to reassure themselves of their own familial closeness.”
The mother works in a high-end care home, growing close to one patient, Jen. Single, Jen led a privileged, cosmopolitan life. Now alone, she is no longer in control of her mind or body. To the mother’s distress, the care home staff cut costs where possible, literally cutting adult diapers to stretch their use. Will her daughter end up like Jen, she wonders. Will that be her own fate too?
Her home starts to feel oppressive, as she cannot avoid Lane, blaming her for her daughter’s life choices. “The amount of space where I can rest easy is shrinking,” she thinks. “Like folding a piece of paper in half and then once more.”
The mother’s anxious internal dialogue, surprisingly, comes across as real rather than hateful, and not tedious, even when the worries are repetitive. Occasionally her anxiety erupts in harsh words — for instance, when the daughter is physically hurt in an anti-homophobic protest. “Making trouble everywhere you go ... Will you just look at how other people are living? No one lives like you do ... Find yourself someone decent and get married. Have kids.” A potential moment of compassion becomes a moment for the mother, in her obsessiveness, to shame her daughter.
The novel’s themes — parental expectation, adult children’s right to autonomous choices, societal pressure, the urge to keep up appearances, and hurtfulness in the name of love — are universally resonant. The story drew me in and gripped me throughout. Despite the narrative being solely from the mother’s perspective, I empathized with both the mother and the daughter.
A slim volume, Concerning My Daughter packs an emotional punch.
 | Mandakini co-chairs the AWA Writers’ Group, which meets on the second and fourth Thursday morning of every month. She is a historian who enjoys reading and writing stories and browsing in secondhand bookstores. Read her book reviews here and on Instagram: @travelling_bookmark. |
