In my search for literary texts that express in words this type of vacillating gaze, I came upon Jamie Chang’s translation of Concerning My Daughter, a 2017 novel by Korean writer Kim Hye-jin. The novel opens with the narrator—an unnamed Korean woman in her seventies—sitting across from her thirty-something daughter, Green, in an udon restaurant. As the narrator watches her daughter eat, we get a disparaging snapshot of the daughter’s appearance: “The heels of her sneakers are worn down at an angle. The bottoms of her pants are tattered and dirty.” The mother takes offense at her daughter’s refusal to follow the stringent standards of presentability that she has imposed on herself, and blames her own parenting, as she will throughout the book, for what she considers her daughter’s inability to live a “proud, normal life.” Meanwhile, we also see the mother through the imagined gaze of the daughter. We see their differences, the most obvious one being their ages. “Everywhere I go,” the narrator observes, “all I see is young people. My face full of wrinkles and age spots, thinning hair and slouched shoulders. I don’t belong here.” Like light bouncing off a mirror, the maternal gaze creates a self-image through that of its interlocutor.
The opposing portraits of mother and daughter are coproduced and inextricable from one another. However, the maternal and filial roles themselves are not fixed. During the day, the narrator plays a daughter-like role in her workplace as a caregiver in a nursing home, where she spends her days at the bedside of a former diplomat. In this role, the narrator observes what may well become her future self: alone, withering away in a facility that treats her as a financial burden. She worries especially about her dying years, and the prospect of both her and her daughter dying alone, because her daughter is a lesbian. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is unable even to hear or utter the word “lesbian,” so deep is her denial and her refusal to accept what has been her daughter’s seven-year relationship with a woman. Here, the maternal gaze is presented as unreliable, as it is able not only to scrutinize—zooming in on the daughter’s unkempt sneakers, for instance—but also conceal the most important facts from itself.
Green and her girlfriend Lane take the mother’s disapproval surprisingly well, although this is mostly out of necessity: Green, a university lecturer, has turned down a semester of teaching in order to spend her time protesting the sudden dismissal of other gay lecturers from her institution. Limited to Lane’s income, the couple have no choice but to rent a room in the dilapidated house owned by Green’s mother, who fears that the three of them will be seen together by the neighbors. The narration minimizes but cannot erase Lane’s gestures of deference and generosity toward her partner’s unforgiving mother during her stay in the house, and it is, oddly enough, the mother’s extreme reluctance to look at her daughter and Lane together that gives these two characters the impression of being rounded and distinct, of having lives to which neither the mother nor the reader will be given access.
At the same time, the dialogue in Kim’s novel, which lacks quotation marks, suggests a porousness in the boundaries between its characters’ voices and thoughts; it is often difficult to tell which of the characters is speaking. This stylistic choice also has the effect of couching the daughter’s words inside the mother’s locution. By narrating the book, the mother necessarily speaks on her daughter—and her daughter’s girlfriend’s—behalf, yet the younger women’s words have a way of subverting the mother’s monologue from within. For example, in a heated argument, Green points at a flyer from the protest and says, “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.” The narrator, who has thus far refrained from using any language that would identify her daughter as queer—who fears and denies the existence of such words—has them laid out before her in a way she “cannot ever forget.” For the most part, the reader is immersed in the mother’s monologue, where facts and feelings are supplanted by a self-preserving fantasy; here, though, the fantasy is ruptured, and the narrator, for a potent moment, loses control of her story.
According to a 2021 report by Human Rights Watch, the South Korean government has, despite facing decades of protest, been “slow” to enact legislation protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ people. That same year, although “81 percent of the public believed it was unfair to fire an employee because of their sexual orientation,” only “38 percent favored the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples.” In some cases, as is described in Kim’s novel, homophobia leads to extreme violence. Because of Green’s role in the university protests, the narrator is forced to reckon with the specter of violence and the politics thereof, something she would have tried to ignore otherwise. Here, the novel emphasizes the power of the maternal gaze and its priorities: when Green is released from the ICU following a violent attack at a demonstration during which another protester was beaten with a baseball bat and likely paralyzed, the narrator thinks, “The moment I see [Green] walking toward me, a heavy wall inside me topples and things that I would call light and air begin to flow through me again.” In that moment, the narrator would not hesitate to say that Green’s physical well-being matters more to her than anyone else’s, simply because Green is her daughter.
This kind of selective care—in a way, a kind of selfishness—presents itself as a double-edged sword. When Green asks, “Weren’t you the one who told me that there were all kinds of people in the world? Who live different lives? You said different wasn’t bad! You’re the one who taught me all that. How come these things never apply to me?” the narrator sharply retorts, “Because you’re my daughter! You are my child!” In this exchange, the narrator’s stance is rooted neither in politics nor in ethics but instead in a condensed and focused form of familial attentiveness, so she sees nothing wrong in the contradiction her daughter points out. Through such arguments, Kim’s novel fleshes out a complex side of love, one that verges on possessiveness, by considering the daughter an extension of the mother’s being.
Can the maternal-filial relationship stand on political or ethical grounds? If the heterosexual masculine gaze, theorized by Laura Mulvey in 1975 as a kind of “scopophilia”—sexual pleasure derived from looking—can be thought of as unethical insofar as it frames the feminine body as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, doesn’t the narrator’s heteronormative gaze on her daughter, with its requisite coercions and projections, also treat the daughter’s body as a means to an end (e.g., reproduction) rather than an end in itself (e.g., happiness)? One could argue that the mother’s desire for Green to bear children and live a “proud, normal life” stems not from an authoritarian impulse but from her worry that her daughter will die alone like the childless diplomat in the nursing home, and I believe Kim’s narrator genuinely attempts to put herself in her daughter’s shoes.
In the end, however, she has no choice but to acknowledge the limits of her understanding. She has trouble, for instance, imagining sexual attraction between two women, causing her to think, not with spite but with bemused acceptance, “That child who sprang from my own flesh and blood is perhaps the creature I’m most distant from. One I have never managed to make sense of.” Despite the material exchange between the mother’s and daughter’s bodies and the interlinked formations of self-image that occur when the daughter borrows her mother’s eyes and vice versa—and despite the daughter’s ability to interrupt and undermine the mother’s diegesis—they remain just as separate as any two people. A profound sense of loss accompanies this realization each time it occurs to the narrator in the book, and yet, Kim does not prompt the reader to feel anything as simplistic as sympathy for the mother. Instead, Kim weaves a story like an irregular tapestry, allowing the daughter—or, in this case, daughters—to shine through the gaps in the mother’s understanding, the way emotion can sometimes cut through the fog of politics—and vice versa.
