No, I haven’t forgotten about this series! I just got distracted by other things for a while, but now we’re back with a book I can’t recommend enough. Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is a devastatingly frank portrait of modern womanhood and a stirring reminder that the fight for gender equality is far from over.
The book follows on Kim Jiyoung, an average woman from an average family. We see her first as a young housewife who has recently left her job and is now struggling to adjust to motherhood, bearing the weight of social expectations and familial pressure. When she begins having “episodes” in which she blacks out and speaks in the voices of other women, expressing their anger and frustration, her concerned husband seeks psychiatric help for her. As the psychiatrist details her case, we learn of her early childhood and school days, as well as her brief career before marriage, and the many little traumas of living as a woman in a patriarchal society.
Cho deliberately situates Jiyoung as an “every woman” character, as a case study, using statistical data to form the backdrop of Jiyoung’s life – from the way she is pressured to leave her career after marriage to her very name, the most common one for baby girls in 1982. The result is simultatneously a specific account of the experience of South Korean women and a reflection of a global female experience. Details of life and tradition may vary from culture to culture, but the casual sexism, the intense pressure placed on little girls that their own brothers don’t receive, is hauntingly familiar and commonplace.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is not what I would call a hopeful story. Its matter-of-fact tone can even be brutal at times, both in the original Korean text and in Jamie Chang’s English translation. But Cho is not here to soften or comfort. She is writing to uncover the hypocrisies of “enlightened” society and make us acknowledge the unforgiving world in which women live. In which we, as a society, force them to live – by not protecting them, by not listening to their needs, by holding them back in favor of male relatives, coworkers, and classmates.
Does that sound depressing? The reality certainly is. Cho offers no solutions. Society does not magically change within the pages of her novel. Male characters do not suddenly understand the experience of women. Life simply… goes on. But outside of the story, we readers can take this as a both a sad reassurance that we are not alone and as a call to action: to support each other, as fellow-women and as allies, and to push for change so that future generations will enjoy more freedom and safety than those who came before them.
–b
Book It With Becca 