CONCERNING MY DAUGHTER

A Korean elder-care worker navigates a troubled relationship with her gay daughter and the expectations of her workplace in this challenging novella.

“I was born and raised in this culture where the polite thing to do is to turn a blind eye and keep your mouth shut, and now I’ve grown old in it,” explains the unnamed protagonist of Kim’s English-language debut. A widow in her early 70s, the narrator earns a modest income by caring for a dementia patient named Jen, a journalist and activist who never married or had children and has no relatives to care for her in her old age. Despite the pressure from her boss to cut corners and the suspicion that her co-workers are able to successfully “leave all sentiment and anything like it at home,” she is deeply troubled by the societal belief that the elderly—especially those who are alone—are disposable. She is less successful at challenging the societal beliefs that affect her own child. Green, a college lecturer in her 30s, has become involved in a labor dispute at the local university and is struggling to pay her bills. When Green and her longtime girlfriend, Lane, accept the narrator’s invitation to come live with her for a while, the narrator is forced to confront her self-imposed ignorance about her daughter’s sexuality. 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.