Then, perhaps trying to be polite, she adds: I mean, maybe you should go outside now and then? Lots of festivals and things going on. She looks as if she’s about to ask another question but only says, Oh.

I make up some nonexistent lunch with a person she might remember me mentioning before. But here I am, sitting with my daughter, with nothing to show for it, not a single plan or solution. I had thought about her so hard all weekend that I’m exhausted. I kept telling myself I should call you but then I forgot.

My daughter’s face seems a little tired, a little gaunt, and a little aged as she rummages through the utensils box for spoons and chopsticks.ĭidn’t you get my text message, Mom? she asks me.

Why should not having chosen a traditional life mean that your life is worth nothing at all? In Concerning My Daughter, translated from Korean by Jamie Chang, Kim Hye-jin lays bare our most universal fears on ageing, death, and isolation, to offer finally a paean to love in all its forms.The waitress brings out two steaming bowls of udon noodles. And yet when the care home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for an elderly dementia patient who has no family, who travelled the world as a successful diplomat, who chose not to have children, Green's mother cannot accept it. Her daughter's involvement in a case of unfair dismissal involving gay colleagues from the university where she works is similarly strange to her. Having centred her life on her husband and child, her daughter's definition of family is not one she can accept. In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. The Prize-Winning International Bestseller '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 When a mother allows her thirty-something daughter to move into her apartment, she wants for her what many mothers might say they want for their child: a steady income, and, even better, a good husband with a good job with whom to start a family.

Kim hye jin about my daughter