Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 : A review

Somewhere in the world, a girl is born. I would tell you her story but perhaps you already know how it goes. It’s Kim Jiyoung’s story. It’s every woman’s story.

As one flips through the pages of “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982” it becomes increasingly evident that it is one of the best executions of the advice given by E.B. White, “Don’t write about Man; write about a man.” Kim Jiyoung might be a 33-year-old woman in Korea but it is impossible to put all the people around the globe who can relate to her under one demographic. Occasions of misogyny like sex-selective abortion, preferential treatment of the male sibling, uniform policing of female students, and leaving one’s job to raise children, resonate beyond the novel’s uniquely Korean context.

Kim Jiyoung is the second of three children, two girls and one boy. Coming into existence because her family wanted a boy sets the tone for the misogyny-filled world she’s about to arrive into and depicts how it begins even before one is born. In fact, one of the unique things about this book is the intergenerational trauma - the things Jiyoung’s mother went through, how she navigates the world and how that affects Jiyoung’s life. When Jiyoung finds out about her mother’s long-abandoned dream of being a teacher she can’t help but feel like the reason was her. And so when she considers having a child, she feels guilty for trying to figure out a way to make it work while keeping her job.

Jiyoung is very observant and registers all the things around her that are normal but should not be. As a child, she hears how girls are much more dependable and mature, yet, all the power would be given to the boys as they would be made class monitors. Her grandmother would give the better portion of everything to her brother. Her mother would never receive credit for looking after her grandmother for over 17 years. Men would be eased into the workload so that they last longer at their jobs whereas women would be burdened from the very beginning since they would eventually leave anyway. On the unpaid domestic labor that women have to do, she remarks, “Some demeaned…,while others glorified…, but none tried to calculate its monetary value. Probably because the moment you put a price on something, someone has to pay.”

She is also painfully aware of the false myth of female exception - the belief that though women around her fail to succeed at their careers and their conjugal lives simultaneously, with the right amount of hard work and perseverance, she will rise to be the perfect woman in a man’s world. Her arriving to this conclusion is supplemented by the experiences of the women around her. Kim Eunyoung, her sister, ended up giving up her dream of becoming a television producer. Kim Eunsil, her supervisor, struggles to retain her female employees despite her best efforts. Pregnant Jiyoung adamantly refuses to avail the provisions for her because male colleagues call her lucky for being able to come to work late. She 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.

When she is passed over for an internship for a less deserving male classmate and she questions it, the reply she gets is, “Companies find smart women taxing. Like now – you’re being very taxing, you know?”

So, she learns to be silent and passive to such an extent that all we know about her life has been mediated so far by her male psychiatrist. This objective limited point of view makes for a very interesting choice of narration because we are reduced to mere spectators of the events. It’s an efficient method of “show not tell.” But that also means that the readers might have a hard time connecting with the characters. Of course, that is not the case in this book as it was the spark that set off the #metoo movement in South Korea. What is the reason that we connect so well to a character that we’ve only seen a detached glimpse of?

It’s a fairly simple method but extremely hard to pull off - “Trust your Audience.” The writing style allows readers to form their own opinions and trusts them to be able to understand the pain. And they can understand it because they’ve gone through the same things. They know why it’s unfair. Cho Nam Joo cleverly writes around the issue instead of wasting time by describing why all of it is so unfair. She is not overly ambitious about the big issue. She picks the smallest manageable part of the big issue and works off the resonance.

Resonance is the phenomenon where an external stimulus forces another system around it to vibrate with more frequency. Kim Jiyoung is a woman who is deeply troubled by her struggles which is amplified by the struggles of the women around her. She develops a dissociative order where she “becomes other women.” The first time this happens is when she overhears some men calling her a “Mom-roach” as she is drinking coffee at the park with her daughter in the stroller. She realizes that there truly is no escape. Society registers women like her as vermin despite the fact that she has given up her job, her life, and her dreams, to reproduce it.

In turn, the readers are resonating with her struggles as well, eliciting a peculiarly emotional reaction despite its narrative style. Speaking of the psychiatrist himself, he is representative of a lot of men who call themselves “progressive” but do nothing that indicates so. The story closes with a chapter in first person from his point of view. While the chapter begins on a positive note where he talks about empathizing with Jiyoung and we see a glimmer of hope, we begin to question it when he describes encounters with his wife. This hope is completely shattered at the end of the chapter when he decides to make sIure that his next secretary is not married. People often talk about memorable opening lines but I think this book has one of the most impactful closing lines. The line, “Even the best female employees can cause many problems if they don’t have the childcare issue taken care of. I’ll have to make sure her replacement is unmarried.” is like a bucket of ice, dousing us with the cold reality, and really manages to drive the point home.

Despite the fact that we’ve spent so far talking about how good this book is, it has its fair share of drawbacks of course. The most prominent one is the limitation of the narrative style. Since it's written as a psychiatric case study, we never really get an opportunity to know the other characters. In particular, I was really interested in knowing more about Kim Eunyoung. Was she happy with her life? Did she regret giving up her dream? Another interesting character was Kim Eunsil, Jiyoung’s supervisor, who was single handedly trying to retain the female employees of the company. Was her mission successful?

Another drawback is that while the book has laid out the endemic problems of society, even going as far as backing it up with statistics, a solution is never really presented. How is one even supposed to come up with an end all solution to such a vast problem though? So, it didn't really hamper the reading experience but did leave me wanting more.

Consequently, as one flips the last page, one is left with a realization of the universality of the women’s experience, lots of thoughts, lots of unanswered questions, and a desire to find their solutions.