#concerning my daughter

[queerliblib]

Did y’all know we also have queer books in translation ?! Check out the curated lists in the Libby app

[samireads]

Some more Korean reads 🇰🇷📚

난 요즘 많이 좋아 😌

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Concerning My Daughter: A Novel

By Kim Hye-jin.

[hiddenbookcasepodcast]

Happy Caturday! 🐾 Hope this weekend finds you curled up cosy with a book, just like Chai!

[warningsine]

The best-selling Korean writer Kim Hye-jin’s first novel to be translated into English, “Concerning My Daughter,” begins with an awkward question. Eating udon noodles with her mother, a 30-year-old daughter asks if she and her girlfriend, Lane, can move into the mother’s house. The daughter (who is only ever referred to by Lane’s nickname for her, “Green”) can’t afford a flat of her own because of her unpredictable work as an “itinerant” university lecturer. The mother — our narrator, also unnamed — agrees reluctantly, needing extra income to supplement what she earns caring for dementia patients. She also recognizes that her only daughter needs help, even if that means helping Lane too, whom the mother despises on principle because she is not a man. The mother wrestles with her disapproval of her daughter’s life choices both in private and with her patient Jen, a successful and well-traveled woman who never had children, and now has no family to care for her.

A middle-aged woman with an unglamorous job, the narrator is both scrutinizing (of her daughter) and scrutinized by a society that has not fulfilled its duty to support her. Kim plays close attention to the precariousness — bodily, financial, social — of not only the mother, but also her daughter and Jen. The lesbian daughter has been born into a generation with few job prospects; and Jen’s mind and body have deteriorated too much for her to take care of herself.

This is an admirably nuanced portrait of prejudice. The mother’s greatest anxiety is how other people will perceive her daughter, not only because she is socially conservative, but also because she fears her daughter will not have children, and will end up in old age in the same situation as Jen, with no one to visit or tend to her. Jamie Chang’s precise, pared-back translation conveys the mother’s internal struggle between her biases and her love for her daughter in a careful, balanced way, so that the reader is able to understand her position without being asked to endorse it. The mother understands that her outbursts are unacceptable (“How can you do this unless you’re out to make me suffer,” she asks her daughter, “you don’t care even the tiniest bit what your old mother thinks, now, do you?”), but she cannot prevent them. “My emotions carry me away to a place of no return,” she thinks. Wisely, Kim chooses to report rather than directly quote the mother’s worst homophobic tirade, against Lane. We learn only that the mother “let the words burn in the flames of disgust, resentment and hate.”

As the novel goes on, the daughter is badly injured at a protest against the firing of her university colleagues for their sexuality; and budget constraints at the nursing home lead the mother to bring Jen into her own home to see out the end of her life. The daughter’s vulnerability, combined with Lane’s tender care and the proximity of death, helps the mother start to see the errors in her thinking; but no promises are made. This is not a redemption story, nor does it aspire to be. The mother wants to be able to tell her daughter that she doesn’t care whether she likes men or women, that she believes her daughter and Lane should be treated with equal respect by society — but she doesn’t tell her these things. “Will the time come when I will be able to say these things out loud?” she wonders.

There is the occasional tendency to lay on too thickly the resonances between the mother’s relationships with Jen and with her daughter. “Am I seeing myself in her because I’ve given up hope of depending on my daughter in old age?” she asks herself about Jen. But it’s generally a tightly conceived and executed work, and one that boldly takes on the daunting task of humanizing someone whose prejudice has made her cruel.

[commajade]

I'm also korean (hi) and ended up enjoying concerning my daughter. At first I was sceptical and thought it would just use the mother as a vehicle to entice the straight reader into the story, and to some extent thats true, but I think it really cleverly addresses three huge problems in korea: queer rights, women's rights, ageism. The mother at first can't comprehend her daughter, but instead of being that oh its because she's old trope, it becomes about the fact that the mother made a lot of heteronormative and culturally enforced choices and still ended up with nothing so shes filled with fear for her daughter financially. And then the mother is a caretaker for another woman who made non normative choices and lead a more successful life, but has still been thrown to the side in old age. Eventually the three characters help each other realize that korean society rn places heavy burdens on women, is highly homophobic, and enforces normative choices that end up burdening women disproportionately and promising nothing. It was well done I thought, for what it was.

hi!!! i'm glad u liked it!! yeah ppl rly like it for those reasons i'm just not interested in reading that kind of story atm. intergenerational stories about queerness and navigating that reality within a family structure r important esp since in korea there's so much more emphasis on the importance of family ties and connections than in hyper individualist western societies and that further alienates lgbt ppl in specific ways.

[kindledspiritsbooks]

My Month in Books: August and September 2022

My Month in Books: August and September 2022

Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin If there’s one author I feel like I’m trapped in an abusive relationship with, it is George R. R. Martin. Yes he treats his female characters like garbage, kills off every character I love in increasingly brutal ways and has kept me waiting for over a decade for him to just finish The Winds of Winter already but goddammit when things are good, things are…

[elletudie]

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

demanding a series in the same vein (heh, vein) as Dexter/Hannibal wherein a prolific serial killer plays cat & mouse with the police--except the serial killer in question is a preteen schoolgirl. this would make for compelling television due to the fact that middle school frequently causes girls to become deranged, and more media should reflect this

[wildwildme]

First book of 2023. Concerning my daughter by Kim Hye Jin

I give it 3 and a half stars. I wanted to like it more.

The topics that were discussed shed light on how elderly can think of certain topics like death and lgbtq. Definitely a must read for everyone.

[meatexe]

itty bitty purse dog vibes 🎀

[novaneondream]

Girl dad things

[samireads]

What a year 2023 was! Here are my favourite reads 📚💕

[thesmokinpossum]

If My Body Could Speak, Blythe Baird | The Godfather, Mario Puzo | My Father's House, Sylvia Fraser | To The Daughter Who Secretly Longs For Her Mother’s Affection, Lynne Shako | Storms from Jupiter, Wanda Deglane | DO NOT REPLY, @filmnoirsbian

[twelvemartha]

Oh god, they'll never know. I... I'll just have disappeared. And they'll always be waiting. Call them.

[starsailores]

tboy jak truthers rise up