Concerning My Daughter

$17.00

By Kim Hye-jin

Translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang

Prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin’s debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, and generational schism through the incendiary gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her daughter’s queer relationship.

When a widowed, aging mother allows Green, her thirty-something daughter, to move into her apartment, all she wants for her is a stable and quiet existence like her own. Ideally, a steady income and, most importantly, a good husband with whom to start a family.

But when Green turns up with her long-term girlfriend in tow, her mother is enraged and unwilling to welcome their relationship into her home. Having centered her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. Green’s involvement in a campus protest against unfair dismissals of gay colleagues throws her into deeper shambles.

Meanwhile, the nursing home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for Jen, an elderly dementia patient who traveled the world as a successful diplomat, chose not to have children, and has no family. Outraged, Green’s mother begins to reconsider the unfair consequences of choosing one’s own path.

With bracing honesty, Kim Hye-jin taps into the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics while unearthing the mechanisms of violence that target LGBTQ communities in traditional societies. Elegantly translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, Concerning My Daughter shines a light on all facets of familial love and conflict.

By Kim Hye-jin

Translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang

Prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin’s debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, and generational schism through the incendiary gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her daughter’s queer relationship.

When a widowed, aging mother allows Green, her thirty-something daughter, to move into her apartment, all she wants for her is a stable and quiet existence like her own. Ideally, a steady income and, most importantly, a good husband with whom to start a family.

But when Green turns up with her long-term girlfriend in tow, her mother is enraged and unwilling to welcome their relationship into her home. Having centered her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. Green’s involvement in a campus protest against unfair dismissals of gay colleagues throws her into deeper shambles.

Meanwhile, the nursing home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for Jen, an elderly dementia patient who traveled the world as a successful diplomat, chose not to have children, and has no family. Outraged, Green’s mother begins to reconsider the unfair consequences of choosing one’s own path.

With bracing honesty, Kim Hye-jin taps into the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics while unearthing the mechanisms of violence that target LGBTQ communities in traditional societies. Elegantly translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, Concerning My Daughter shines a light on all facets of familial love and conflict.

About the author

Kim Hye-jin is an award-winning author from Daegu, South Korea. She won the 2023 Kim Yujeong Literary Award, the JoongAng Literature Award in 2013 for Central Station, the Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature in 2018 for Concerning My Daughter, and the Daesan Literary Award in 2020 for The Work of No. 9. She was also the Special Award Laureate of the 4th Lee Hochul Literary Prize for Peace in 2020.

About the translator

Jamie Chang is a literary translator. Her translation of Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature. She is the recipient of the Daesan Foundation Translation Grant and a three-time recipient of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea Grant.

Book Details

Paperback ISBN: 9781632063496 • $18.00
eBook ISBN: 9781632063168
Publication date: Sep 27, 2022
5" x 7.125" • 176 pages

Other buying options

Ebook | Indie Bound | Bookshop

Also available as an audiobook on your platform of choice.

Praise

“An admirably nuanced portrait of prejudice. . . .  one that boldly takes on the daunting task of humanizing someone whose prejudice has made her cruel.”

—Imogen West Knights, The New York Times

“The novel raises questions about autonomy, justice and freedom—and the duty we owe to our loved ones.”

—The New York Times

“Kim skillfully depicts the vulnerability and fear underlying her protagonist’s anxiety and anger, laying bare the ways in which family dynamics are fluid and full of paradoxes …. Kim’s compassionate portrayal of the narrator’s contradictions and ever-changing feelings makes her project captivating and moving. Readers will be grateful to discover this new author.”

—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Kim is unsparing in her depictions of the indignities of old age, the corrosiveness of homophobia, and the piercing loneliness that comes from living in a culture of silence. A heavy but tentatively hopeful look at the struggle for intergenerational understanding through one mother’s eyes.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Already a prestigious best-seller in Korea, Kim’s impassioned novel about the meaning of family—by blood, by choice—marks her English-language debut, seamlessly translated by National Book Award longlister Chang…. Kim’s confessional first-person narration expresses the sense of urgency to unburden one’s most vulnerable thoughts and longings and readers willing to become intimate witnesses will be rewarded with a resonating and empathic tale.”

— Terry Hong, Booklist, Starred Review

“Award-winning Korean novelist Kim Hye-jin’s Concerning My Daughter is a clear-eyed character study of the fraught relations among biological and found families alike…. Kim’s keen attention to character reveals the nuance of her narrator’s pragmatic brand of empathy…. Concerning My Daughter manages to capture a societal need for both accepting collective complicity and practicing enduring empathy.”

—Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness

“Concerning My Daughter is a work that is unafraid of the human body in all its contradictions, at once philosophical and practical in its treatment of the aging body, the gendered body, the body’s capacity for acts of caretaking, protest, and love. Urgent, timely, tender.”

—Yoon Choi, author of Skinship

“I can't help but be moved by a story about women meeting, fighting, helping each other, looking after one another, and raising their voices against the prejudice and criticism they are subject to.”

—Cho Nam-joo, author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

“Concerning My Daughter provides desperate narratives of its female characters. It’s the story of a mother and a daughter, but it goes beyond the relationship and is also ahead of our time. By accompanying the women’s journey overcoming pain and suffering in their lives, we will see our stereotypes broken in the end. The great power smashing our fixed old ideas! This book is filled with such energy.”

—Kyung-sook Shin, author of Please Look After Mom and Violets

“Concerning My Daughter is one of the best character studies I've read in years—thoughtful, complicated and surprisingly kind, it raises important questions about aging, family, and both the cost and the value of change.”

—Jessie Greengrass, author of An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk and Sight

“Pitch-perfect short novel about what it means to have a 'good life,’ as well as about devoted smothering parenting and generational divide. Kim Hye-jin packs a lot of emotion and meaning into this slim novel, showing not only personal transformation, but also how societal traditions and conventions can harm and hinder.”

—Anton Bogomazov, Politics and Prose (Washington, DC)

Books by Kim Hye-jin

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Employee No. 9
Employee No. 9
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By Kim Hye-jin

Translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang

Winner of the 2020 Daesan Literary Award


With shades of Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice and Choi Jin-young’s Hunger, Employee No. 9 runs a psychological gauntlet of money, power, personal responsibility, and the daily struggle for survival.

No. 9 is in trouble. His son’s college tuition is coming due, his wife needs surgery after taking double shifts at a grocery store, the apartment building they bought as a nest egg is falling apart, and the company he helped build is trying to force him into early retirement. When he refuses, the mid-level IT man is demoted to sales and given increasingly impossible tasks. As his salary dwindles and the humiliations mount, No. 9 must decide where his loyalties lie. If he fights back, how far will the company go to stop him?

With her urgent and timely novel, award-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin questions how long we can endure a broken system. In a rigged game, is there an alternative to playing out your hand?

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Counsel Culture
Counsel Culture
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From prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin comes the contemplative, superbly-crafted story of a woman scapegoated by sudden tragedy, and the unexpected paths she must wander in search of redemption.

Haesoo is a successful therapist and regular guest on a popular TV program. But when she makes a scripted negative comment about a public figure who later commits suicide, she finds herself ostracized by friends, fired from her job, and her marriage begins to unravel. These details come to the reader gradually, in meditative prose, through bits and pieces of letters that Haesoo writes and finally abandons as she walks alone through her city.

One day she has an unexpected encounter with Sei, a 10-year-old girl attempting to feed an orange cat. Stray cats seem to be everywhere; they have the concern of one other neighborhood woman and the ire of everyone else. Like Haesoo and Sei, the cats endure various insults and recover slowly. Haesoo, who would not otherwise care about animals or form relationships with children, now finds herself pulled back by degrees into the larger world.

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Concerning My Daughter
Concerning My Daughter
$17.00

By Kim Hye-jin

Translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang

Prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin’s debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, and generational schism through the incendiary gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her daughter’s queer relationship.

When a widowed, aging mother allows Green, her thirty-something daughter, to move into her apartment, all she wants for her is a stable and quiet existence like her own. Ideally, a steady income and, most importantly, a good husband with whom to start a family.

But when Green turns up with her long-term girlfriend in tow, her mother is enraged and unwilling to welcome their relationship into her home. Having centered her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. Green’s involvement in a campus protest against unfair dismissals of gay colleagues throws her into deeper shambles.

Meanwhile, the nursing home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for Jen, an elderly dementia patient who traveled the world as a successful diplomat, chose not to have children, and has no family. Outraged, Green’s mother begins to reconsider the unfair consequences of choosing one’s own path.

With bracing honesty, Kim Hye-jin taps into the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics while unearthing the mechanisms of violence that target LGBTQ communities in traditional societies. Elegantly translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, Concerning My Daughter shines a light on all facets of familial love and conflict.

Read more →