Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin is a much needed story of our time when people are still struggling for LGBTQ+ rights and freedom from family, society and state. Our understanding, acceptance, disregard, denial, disconcertion, disruption, emotions, resistance and all elements of our life concerning sexual orientation and personal freedom, like in everything else, are in a dynamic state – it is changing, evolving, and not so easily.
The novel centers on a caretaker mother who works in a nursing home for the elderly, and a lesbian daughter who has put up a fight/protest against a university for unfair treatment to homosexual professors. The daughter, who had left home to live on her own, have once again come back to live with her mother and this time with her partner. Mother, who doesn't want to accept, believe and welcome the sexuality of her daughter, has a world of her own in her thoughts – there is fear, hatred, sadness, love and desolation. Told from the perspective of the mother, this story takes a benefit of portraying universal mother-daughter relation, the trouble of living, aging and dying, sharp take on hard truths of our generation, an animation of thoughts, beliefs and difficulties. A daughter who cannot support herself a shelter, a mother who is finding hard to challenge her expectations, hopes and fear, an elderly woman at nursing home with dementia towards the edge of her life, and the unwavering commitment of the daughter's partner – these four women show us all colors of life.
In
moments like this, I’m brought face to face with the ruthlessness of life. One
hill after another after another. Climbing at first with hope and then
gradually in resignation. But life never goes easy. A foe without mercy or
magnanimity. A losing battle. A fight that ends only with defeat.
We find a mother
who is not contented how her daughter is getting by and has different
expectations from her. She cannot believe the private life and personal choices
of her daughter but fears losing her – her only family left. Finding herself at
the center of collapsing age, emotions and love, she is unsure how she should
act, feels a social shame and thinks that her daughter has derailed from the
regular course of life. Mother, who is also our narrator, is aware of her
vulnerability and crisis of being left alone, aging and unhappy. She is mostly
keeping to herself – her realizations, her hesitations, and her
dissatisfactions, but cannot stop herself bursting at times, when it becomes
unbearable – the burden of her inner thoughts. She is in a constant fear of
death, aging and loneliness – always reminding herself that her death is
imminent.
Why
do I need a husband and children to have family? Ma, Lane is my family. She’s
not a friend. We have been family to each other for the last seven years. What
is a family? Family is people who support you and are always there for you. Why
is that family and not this? That’s all those people asked. That’s all they
said in class. And the school showed them the door. They shooed them off like
flies without a word of explanation!
Ma,
look at this. Look. These words here – that’s me. Sexual minority. Homosexual.
Lesbian. This is what I am. That’s just how it is. That’s what people call me,
and stop me from having a family, career, everything. Is that my fault? Tell
me, is that my fault?
Caring Jen, the
elderly at the nursing home, her dwelling on death, its suddenness, sullenness,
sadness and horror surrounding it, have left her sensitive as if living in a
life of peril. The futility of what and how Jen lived for, living her alone in
the old age, the mother cannot stop seeing herself and her daughter turning
into someone with a fate like Jen. Therefore, her passionate care for Jen, is a
projection of her own hopes from her life and her daughter – someone to
remember, someone to love, and someone to get love from towards the twilight of
life. She feels guilty for her daughter's way of life and cannot express
herself enough. She tries to comfort herself, be protected from emotional pain afflicted
by her daughter but she cannot ignore her motherly love. We find ourselves in
the shoes of our narrator, and feel her discomfort, displeasure and
difficulties. At the heart, it is her love and fear for her life and her
daughter's but she tries to feign ignorance, as her inner world is unruly and
unsettled. She is lonely and desperate with a world of judgments and beliefs
and she cannot express it enough; she cannot escape it.
The daughter and
her partner living together in her mother's home, bring their world close to
her mother's isolated world. We immediately find the conflict brewing up, the
compromise of necessities and disjunction of private worlds. The mother cannot
accept their relation as it is, cannot believe they can be happy – she can't
believe families can be made in such ways; a happy life can be spent in such means.
She tries to interact as little as possible, ignore them, and at times ask them
to get out of her life, so that she can shield her feelings, aspirations and
expectations from her daughter. We see two different world seen from the eyes
of the mother and the daughter. The story reflects a stark picture of Korean
society – aging population and struggle for homosexual rights from the state
(there have been good progresses). As I was reading the novel, I couldn't help
myself from getting the updates on LGBTQ+ rights in my own country (Nepal) as
well, and was happy to know the recent Supreme Court's interim order to
recognize and register same sex marriage. The novel is at the same time
universal and contemporary, and can represent as a stand-alone novel in the
bibliography of LGBTQ+ study in literature.
Maybe
I am a frightened person. A person who doesn’t want to hear anything. Doesn’t
want to get involved. Doesn’t want to get entangled. Doesn’t want to get dirt
on my clothes and my body. I stand on the sideline. I say pleasant things, make
pleasant faces, and slowly back away when no one’s looking. Do I still want to
be a good person? But what can I do to be a good person to my daughter at this
point?
Told as if a
monologue with elements of stream of consciousness, this novel takes no
shortcuts, has no hidden messages, and doesn't indulge in the rituals of
sentimental treatment – it'll hit you with a bright light, and yet not dazzle
you but clear your thoughts. There is a meeting of two worlds, new and old; meeting
of two generations, two thoughts, two extremes of age, and the dilemma, drama, power
of will, reservations and conflict between two women keep the flame alive until
the end of the story. If I could suggest the author, perhaps little more
detailing of the physical world would have made the narrative more engaging,
and the Tipat's part of the story could have been presented in some other forms.
Obviously there are no misalignments, but only a need of a tickle.
Sitting across from me, the girls eat with their heads bowed. So close I could reach out and touch them. I didn’t know just how far away they were, how they were, or even where they stood with their feet planted in the ground. Everything is becoming clear now. They stand right in the middle of life. They are standing with their feet planted on firm ground, not in fantasies or daydreams. Like me. Like everyone else. They exist in the thick of life, terrifying, relentless. What they see from where they stand, what they are trying to see, what they will see, I cannot even imagine.
Coming towards the
end of the novel, we find that the mother's reservations, her conflicting thoughts
are showing some signs of rest. As she sees the life of her daughter from close
- trying to perfect it, solve it even before understanding it – she finds
herself challenged by the truth of her daughter's commitment, will and way of
life and happiness – a daughter who can go to all extremes to ask for rights,
to fight for it. This is a revelatory story of motherhood, mother-daughter
relation, aging, identity, fear of devoid of memory and love. The story doesn't
end in the novel, it again starts at the end and begins with you to understand
the world around you with patience, sympathy and love, and understand your own
complexity and question your beliefs, resistance and inheritance of thoughts.
Original Text: Korean
Translator: Jamie Chang
English Publisher: Restless Books https://restlessbooks.org/bookstore/concerning-my-daughter
Korean Publisher: Minumsa Publishing Group http://minumsa.minumsa.com/book/11755/
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