Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo
A review of Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Ji-young, Born 1982
Cover of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982.
Written by Cho Nam-joo.
I’ve had this book for over a year, but I finally got the chance to sit down and finally read it. I’d heard a lot about it, because there was a movie starring the ever-so-famous Gong Yoo, and because it stirred an entire feminist debate in the country, one that exposed the misogyny rooted in Korean history.
As I read it, I had many different thoughts about what was going on, and I was honestly kind of conflicted about the hype around this book. I see why it’s an important novel in the grand scheme of things, but I also wanted more from it.
Purchase a copy of the book here.
Let’s break this down by category.
Book Blurb
In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A thirtysomething-year-old “millennial everywoman,” she has recently left her white-collar desk job—in order to care for her newborn daughter full-time—as so many Korean women are expected to do. But she quickly begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: Jiyoung impersonates the voices of other women—alive and even dead, both known and unknown to her. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her discomfited husband sends her to a male psychiatrist.
In a chilling, eerily truncated third-person voice, Jiyoung’s entire life is recounted to the psychiatrist—a narrative infused with disparate elements of frustration, perseverance, and submission. Born in 1982 and given the most common name for Korean baby girls, Jiyoung quickly becomes the unfavored sister to her princeling little brother. Always, her behavior is policed by the male figures around her—from the elementary school teachers who enforce strict uniforms for girls, to the coworkers who install a hidden camera in the women’s restroom and post their photos online. In her father’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s fault that men harass her late at night; in her husband’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s duty to forsake her career to take care of him and their child—to put them first.
Jiyoung’s painfully common life is juxtaposed against a backdrop of an advancing Korea, as it abandons “family planning” birth control policies and passes new legislation against gender discrimination. But can her doctor flawlessly, completely cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?
Content/Plot
Kim Ji-young is the main character of this novel, and we follow her throughout how she got to be the way she is in the modern era. She was born in an uneventful household, but there was blatant favoritism in the house towards the youngest son. We follow Ji-young from the eras of her life, from childhood, her being bullied in middle school, to college, then to her job at a small marketing firm, then her married life where she quits her job to be a stay-at-home mom.
We’re clearly meant to sympathize with Ji-young, because we start out with her being a depressed mother who is embodying the spirits of the women in her past. She is sassing her in-laws in Busan, but she is also has just given up towards her situation. It’s really sad, and if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. This is the situation of women not only in Korea, but throughout the world.
We follow her throughout her life. That’s basically the novel. She is a kid bullied by the boy who likes her, she goes to college to study marketing, struggles to break into the workforce because of her gender. We have a bunch of statistics and studies cited in classic Chicago style at the bottom of the pages, giving us as readers a glimpse into the reality of the situation. This isn’t just fiction. This is the story of many women throughout Korea.
Characters
Kim Ji-young, in my opinion, is quite a universal character, despite the novel’s Korean context. She is a depressed mother who has quit her job in order to care for her newborn daughter, and, suddenly, she finds that her life lacks a purpose upon quitting her job.
We get such a hyper focus on Ji-young, one that made me a bit sad and frustrated at times. I was really interested in her sister because she gave up on her dreams of broadcast journalism in order to become a teacher, which is what her mother had pushed her towards.
Ji-young and her mother, in the novel, claim that this is because this is truly what her sister wanted. But is it really? We don’t hear much of her siblings outside of the childhood arc, and I wanted to know more about them.
I also wished we saw more of Jung Dae-hyun, Ji-young’s husband. Story-wise, we jump from her dating several different men, then we randomly are placed into a scenario where she is engaged to Dae-hyun. Dae-hyun, too, is clearly an important part of her life, but we don’t get to see their meeting, and he obviously cares somewhat, as he took her to a psychiatrist.
Writing Style
As for overall structure, this is set up in the basic three-arc structure, and it is previous obvious from the way the novel itself is formatted. We start the beginning of the novel from the current era, as Ji-young seems to embody the women from her past and lash out against the patriarchal figures in her life.
This is in third-person omniscient narrator, which is why we get such a focus on Ji-young as a character. We are tracking her throughout her life, and we get a small glimpse into her head, but, as a character, we only really get to see her fleshed out as an individual.
That really got to me, because while I do love how we get a little bit about the female office manager or the friend she had in college, I wanted it to go deeper. We get one woman’s life, but there are so many other stories she herself is shielded from. Like what if Ji-young had more meaningful dialogue about all of this?
Speaking of dialogue, there was very little of it throughout the novel. I found that super interesting as a writer, because often we are told that dialogue is a necessity to continue.
Something I also found really interesting was the incorporation of actual statistics and studies from academic studies about the status of women in Korea. As a researcher myself, I appreciate it, but if I were a casual reader, I’m not too sure if that would’ve made sense in the placement of the novel. It’s something we’re not used to as readers, I feel like.
I also was confused at the ending—we switch to the psychiatrist’s POV in first person. That really confused the heck out of me, and it was a struggle to get through it, because, for the first time, we get a man’s thoughts.
Overall Thoughts
This was a pretty short read. I’m a fast reader, so by sitting down and actually focusing on it, I managed to finish the entire book by the end of a single night. It’s a good, and very important story to tell, but I wanted so much more from the novel, just like I said before. It’s a bit short for a novel, and I don’t know how exactly I feel about that.
I totally get that this is supposed to be representative of so many women’s experiences, but Ji-young just kinda comes across as a bit naive. And, perhaps, that’s the irony in all of this, that she noticed and saw that so many women weren’t getting to live the lives they truly deserved, but also continued to go down this path of a society built for men.
It’s super depressing, just like life, to see her fall to the system at the end of the day without a fight. She does say she fought her husband against this, but I honestly would’ve preferred to see her keep fighting until the end.
It’s an interesting and decent read, but I wouldn’t classify it as a really good one. It will, however, be a good case study novel for gender studies and history students. As a casual reader, I wouldn’t be like “hell yeah” to this novel, but instead I found the academic part of me more interested in the novel as a case study.
Rating: 3.5/5
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