This week I read Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by South Korean screen-writer and author, Cho Nam-Joo. South Korea is located in Asia and borders North Korea. Nam-Joo published the book in 2016 during the rise of the #MeToo movement. Her story touches on all of the forms of gender discrimination and violence that women face in South Korea. She blends personal narrative through the main character, Kim Jiyoung, with many references to real gender statistics in the country.
The short novel is divided into six sections beginning in Autumn 2015. Jiyoung is 34 years old, married, and had a daughter a year ago. She is exhibiting strange behavior noticed by her husband. Amidst her last year of postpartum depression, Jiyoung has begun to take on the personalities of other women in their lives, almost as if possessed. She falls asleep sucking her thumb like their child and scolds her husband, Daehyun, exactly like her mother did. Daehyun is concerned and books Jiyoung a session with a psychiatrist.
After this short introduction we are immersed in a retelling of Jiyoung’s life, starting with her childhood from 1982-1994. Nam-Joo sets the groundwork for her discussion of life as a woman in South Korea from Jiyoung’s first memory. Jiyoung is the middle child, with one older sister, Eunyoung, and a little brother.
Despite the fact that her brother was the youngest he was always treated the best and with the most respect, especially by their Father’s mother, who also lived with the family.
In their life, “it was a given that fresh rice hot out of the cooker was served in the order of father, brother, and grandmother, and that perfect pieces of tofu, dumplings, and patties were the brother’s while the girls ate the ones that fell apart. The brother had chopsticks, socks, long underwear, and school and lunch bags that matched, while the girls made do with whatever was available”. To Jiyoung this did not seem abnormal and as a child she never felt any jealousy over her brother because that’s how it had always been.
Before Jiyoung’s brother was born, her mother had been pregnant with a girl. She engaged in the common medical practice of abortion and aborted Jiyoung’s younger sister. In South Korea, abortion due to medical problems was legal in the 1980s and 1990s and checking to see if the fetus was a female, and aborting if it was, fell under this category, “as if ‘daughter’ was a medical problem”. This practice led to a large imbalance of the male-female ratio in the country.
In her late childhood and adolescence (1995-2000) Jiyoung attended a co-ed elementary and middle school. Her first obstacle was coexisting with her male classmates. Her teachers reinforced gender roles, with strict dress codes for girls and lax ones for boys, as well as brushing off any bullying or teasing done to the girl students by the boys. The phrase of “boys will be boys” is enforced in full, with Jiyoung’s teacher going so far as to say that the male classmate who had been harassing her is doing it because of a crush, that his feelings for her manifested in teasing and pushing.
Her early adulthood (2001-2011) begins with the start of her college experience. With the financial crisis underway in South Korea, Jiyoung was determined to excel in college and earn scholarships. College is more difficult than Jiyoung expected, though she is awarded a sense of freedom and discovers she is not as reserved and introverted as her younger school years led her to believe.
From this point on Nam-Joo begins her portrait of what it is like to be a working woman in South Korea. The female students recall a past student, one with the highest GPA, who was not recommended to a company by her advisor and that four male candidates had been recommended instead. She filed a complaint that traveled all that way to the college’s director. His response, “Companies find smart women taxing. Like now–you’re being very taxing”.
This outlook is widespread among businesses and companies. They don’t offer higher up positions for women because of the possibility of maternity leave and the fact that women are seen as unreliable workers due to other life priorities. When Jiyoung is overlooked to join a planning team at work it was due to the managers perception of what women workers were like, simply for being a woman she was never even considered.
“The head of the company knew that the nature and intensity of the marketing agency job made it difficult to maintain a decent work–life balance, especially if childcare came into play, and therefore he did not think of female employees as prospective long-term colleagues. He had no intention of giving employees better hours and benefits, either. He found it more cost-efficient to invest in employees who would last in this work environment than to make the environment more accommodating”. Jiyoung explains her feelings and her attempts to plan her career and rise-up like being stuck in a labyrinth with no exit.
In the second to last section, marriage (2012-2015), Jiyoung begins the struggle to balance her work, her marriage, and her pregnancy. As a pregnant woman at her company she is allowed to come in a half-hour later to avoid the traffic rush, though still working the same amount of hours as everyone else.
Despite this, there is the assumption by her male colleagues that she will work less, to combat that Jiyoung announces that she will not be coming in late (and in fact comes in an hour early to beat the rush) to compensate for the idea that she will be slacking off.
She regrets this and feels that she is setting “a bad precedent for the younger women in the office”.
Jiyoung “couldn’t win: exercising all the rights and utilizing the benefits made her a freeloader, and fighting tooth and nail to avoid the accusation made things harder for colleagues in a similar situation”.
Eventually Jiyoung leaves work to raise their child, giving up her “routine, career, and dreams”. Being a “stay-at-home” mom is a hypocritical and controversial state of being. Online in South Korea, women who stay at home to raise the kids and don’t work are criticized relentlessly and called “mom-roaches”. They are seen as not participating in society and as stealing their husbands money to live frivolously. Jiyoung is called a “mom–roach” in person when she is at a park with her daughter, drinking coffee. A group of male office workers on break are drinking the coffee as well and whisper how they wish they could “bum around and get coffee” and live off someone else's money. The coffee they are all drinking costs 1500 won, equivalent to $1.05.
The last section is 2016. It is the narration of Jiyoung’s therapist, concluding all of the details of her life that he has gathered from her and her husband’s sessions. He has diagnosed her with dissociative disorder and postpartum depression that progressed to childcare depression. I found the last paragraph of this novel to be the most haunting part of the book. What this doctor says encompases and reiterates the points that Nam-Joo has explained in so many different ways using Jiyoung.
I thought this was a brilliant book that shed a lot of light on the complications of being a woman in South Korea and the management of child-care, career, and family expectations. Nam-Joo also included lots of statistics and references to articles, which is an expansive resource for information on women in the workforce and gender statistics. The way she blends the big picture facts with the small, intimate details of Jiyoung’s life creates a realistic and moving portrait.
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