Concerning My Daughter

Winner of the 2018 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature

Korean author Kim Hye-jin’s debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, & generational schism through the incendiary gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her daughter’s queer relationship.

When a widowed, aging 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. 

But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared & unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. Having centred her life on her husband & 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. 

And yet when the care home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for Jen, 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. Why should not having chosen a traditional life mean that your life is worth nothing at all? 

With bracing honesty, Kim Hye-jin taps into the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics while unearthing the mechanisms of violence that target LGBTQ communities in traditional societies. She lays bare our most universal fears on ageing, death, & isolation, to offer finally a paean to love in all its forms. Elegantly translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, Concerning My Daughter shines a light on all facets of familial love & conflict.

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Kim Hye-jin won the JoongAng Literature Award in 2013 for Central Station & the Daesan Literary Award in 2020 for The Work of No. 9.