In Concerning My Daughter, translated from Korean by Jamie Chang, 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. Why should not having chosen a traditional life mean that your life is worth nothing at all? Her daughter’s involvement in a case of unfair dismissal involving gay colleagues from the university where she works is similarly strange to her.Īnd yet when the care home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for an elderly dementia patient who has no family, who travelled the world as a successful diplomat, who chose not to have children, Green’s mother cannot accept it. Prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-Jins debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, and generational schism through the incendiary gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her. Having centred her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. When a 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.īut when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. 'I can't help but be moved by a story about women meeting, fighting, helping each other, looking after one another, and raising their voices against the prejudice and criticism they are subject to.'Ĭho Nam-joo, author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 On the other hand, she also desperately craves others’ acceptance, so as not to be perceived as an outlier in society. The Prize-Winning International Bestseller Concerning My Daughter is a fascinating look at the double-edged nature of acceptance: on the one hand, the mother struggles to accept her daughter’s sexuality and life choices.

Concerning my daughter by kim hye jin