As she questions her daughter’s choice to protest the status quo, the mother also questions her own role as a bystander. How do you fight a society’s ills while keeping a low profile and not jeopardizing some elemental aspect of your well-being? The mother suffers extreme inner turmoil when she confronts her daughter’s life. Contingent labor is on the rise, the aged are stowed away and neglected at a profit, and there are no protections for the LGBTQ+ community.
It becomes all too clear that the mother’s journey is difficult, not just because she refuses or is conceptually unable to understand her daughter’s choices, but because the basic facets of Korean society have failed. She also struggles with a cultural value that encourages silence and conformity rather than active resistance or contradiction. The mother clings to a traditional and worn-out understanding of family and familial commitment: the one man–one woman paradigm. Over this short novel, the reader travels alongside the mother as she attempts to bridge the chasm separating her from her daughter, Green. Award-winning novelist Kim Hye-jin opens and closes her novel with a meal and a funeral to read as parallel experiences. It is just over 150 pages, in which no word, symbol, metaphor, or nuance is wasted.
The English translation is beautifully accomplished by Chang. Concerning My Daughter is a tightly structured, carefully crafted novel.
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