Mar 4, 2024, 3:50:56 PM

Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-Jin, translated by Jamie Chang

52 - “If I keep pulling my daughter toward me, this taut, tenuous tie between us will snap. I will lose her.”

I adored this translated fiction. My five-star rating is purely driven by emotion because this one pulled and pulled at my heartstrings. The writing is simple and easy to read but did the job.

The narrator is an unnamed Korean mother whose adult 30-something daughter, Green, is moving back to live with her after hitting economic adversity. The problem is, she is moving in with her long-time girlfriend, Lane.

This is a story about motherhood and the fraught mother-daughter connection, and the struggle navigating a massive generational gap. As a mother who sacrificed her whole life to raise her only child, she doesn’t understand why she doesn’t deserve filial piety at the end of her life and why she can’t demand her child make more traditional life choices.

49 - “The way things are now, I don’t have the right to do that. There was a time when I held that right just by virtue of having brought her into the world. The conditions of qualification are continuously renewed, and I don’t have the ability or energy to keep up with it.”

But times are different now, and Green can only make moral decisions that make sense to her, even if it means parting ways with convention and defying her mother’s expectations.

(Continued in comments)

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