What do you want from us? The dumb girls are too dumb, the smart girls are too smart, and the average girls are too unexceptional?
This review may contain spoilers.
In my quest to explore more female authors, I happened to find Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. My list of favorite asians novels was mostly men, and I knew there had to be more women out there who were/are killing it.
I just finished Kim Jiyoung, born 1982 and I’m feeling a weird mixture of anger and resignation. In the novel, the author Cho Nam-Joo chronicles the life of an ordinary woman in South Korea in a strange combination of facts and fiction, including actual data on women in the workplace, the hoju system, and abortion.
In its short read the novel presents the various stages of Jiyoungs' life, from her childhood, schooling, career, marriage, and motherhood.
On the book:
The novel starts with a short overview of Jiyoung life/status at the moment of the events (autumn 2015), with the husband observing his wife exhibiting a very abnormal behavior. She is impersonating the voices of different women as if she became them. And as the story progresses we get to know the chain of events lead to Jiyoung’s behavior.
After we got our introduction in 2015, we go back in time and follow Jiyoung through the different stages of her life story and a few glimpses of her mothers' struggles as well. We see a girl who:
- Is born in a family where in-laws wanted a boy, and one of her siblings (a girl) was aborted.
- Experienced gender roles and inequal treatement both at school and home.
- Faced predatory boys and handsy teachers, and sexual harassment just to be blamed for it.
- Pressisted through challenges and rejections to become a working woman.
- Faced sexism in the workplace.
- Is supposed to leave everything she worked hard to achieve and start a family.
Cho Nam-Joo skillfully showcases the minimisation of Jiyoung’s feelings, the doubt of her choices, and the continuous burden of societal expectations. These seemingly subtleties of Jiyoung’s experience paints a vivid picture of the collective weight that women bear in Korean society and the world as a whole.
The book questions patriarchy, gender bias that still persists in society while highlighting how women’s identities are more often than not reduced to their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers.
My thoughts:
This book highlights so many different aspects of women’s everyday life. The beginning wasn’t much of a shock to me having grown up in a patriarchal country myself, it just served as affirmation to my own experience.
However, I really felt saddened when I got to the marriage part, i genuinely thought if I get a good partner I would at least not have to face sexism in my own house.
And I was quite mad at the husband in the part where he casually suggests having a child after getting back from a family visit, specially when his wife explains her concerns and hesitation on the subject, he says and i quote "Still, think about what you’ll be gaining, not just what you’ll be
giving up. Think how meaningful and moving it is to be a parent."
While Jiyoungs' concerns are about her health, job, colleagues, career and future, she asks him, "what will you lose by gaining a child?" And his list of potential losses included not seeing his friends often, how tough it would be to help with house chores, and being the sole financial support of the house. His concerns in Nam-Joo’s words are trifling compared to Jiyoungs’.
I almost cried reading from then onwards, watching Jiyoung’s self of identity slowly being chipped away. It mirrored a fear so deep in me that I had to put the book down for a few days.
At the end it was revealed that the book was narrated from Jiyoung’s psychiatrist perspective who in turn seems to be struggling with understanding his wife and too wrapped in his own misogyny to understand Jiyoung’s condition.
The world had changed a great deal, but the little rules, contracts, and customs had not, which meant the world hadn’t actually changed at all.
The problems in Jiyoung’s life are ongoing for many women around the world, thus the book has no real end. It’s really bleak that some of us may be like her, maybe not exactly the same condition but rather in how we will always be giving up something of ourselves in order to fulfill some women responsabilites and Societal expectations.
In conclusion, I wish women would get to overcome these stifling gender roles someday and live their life outside of them but I know that’s almost impossible to overcome easily. But I have hope for small
victories.
This book is such a beautiful and highly recommended read.
