Kim Hye-jin’s Concerning My Daughter is set in a world of agency workers, where no-one has enough money, still less any job security; a world in which a university lecturer gets fired for being gay; a world in which a nursing home asks their staff to cut down on basic hygiene tasks and neglect their patients’ bedsores to save on the cost of diapers and disinfectant. It’s a world in which there are a lot of injustices: patients can get shunted from one care home to another if the spreadsheets demand it.
We feel for the hardworking nursing home carer who narrates this novel. She is badgered by her daughter to enter into debt so she can set up house, and then, when the only way that the mother can help is to let her daughter move in with her, her daughter lets slip that she comes as a package deal with her partner. The fact that her partner is a woman is of course an additional affront to the traditionally-minded mother.
As she berates her daughter for getting involved with causes, such as gay rights, that cannot advance her career prospects, she gradually becomes a campaigner herself for the rights of care home patients and forms a bond with one of her patients who has no family to support her.
The novel comes with an endorsement from Cho Nam-joo, author of the best-selling Kim Jiyoung Born 1982, prominently displayed on its cover, raising expectations that the reader will encounter a social justice manifesto in the same way that Kim Jiyoung campaigned for the cause of Korea’s oppressed women. The fact that both titles come from the same Korean publishing house – Minumsa – increases those expectations. However, Concerning My Daughter is more nuanced than that. It confronts the reader with some blunt realities about the world today, particularly relating to social and economic inequalities, which, as the cost of living continues to rise, are not going to go away any time soon. But while their contrasting attitudes to life mean that initially the mother-daughter relationship is strained, they eventually find some common ground in their caring for fellow humans. So although this novel is not, for the most part, an escapist or pleasurable read, it does offer some hope in a bleak world.
Kim Hye-jin: Concerning My Daughter
Translated by Jamie Chang, Picador, 2022, 162pp
Originally published as 딸에 대하여, Minumsa, 2017
