Kim jiyoung, born 1982
SynopsisPlot
Kim Jiyoung is an “ordinary” Korean woman in her early thirties, married with a daughter. Suddenly she begins exhibiting unsettling behavior — talking as if she were other women, including her mother or grandmother. Concerned, her husband urges her to see a psychiatrist. The narrative then takes us backward through her life — childhood, school, work, marriage — revealing how everyday discrimination, gender expectations, social pressures and internalized misogyny have shaped her experience. As her identity blurs in the present, the story asks: what toll does this “ordinary” life take on a woman when she’s constantly asked to conform, to sacrifice, to stay invisible?
Story
About this book
Kim Jiyoung lives in a small, neat flat on the outer edges of Seoul with her husband and their baby daughter. She has stepped away from a white-collar desk job to raise the child at home, a step many Korean women are expected to take. Then she starts speaking in the voices of other women, some familiar and some strangers, and her worried husband books a psychiatrist.
The novel moves backward through her earlier years in a clipped third-person account. Born in 1982, she was given the name most often chosen for Korean girls of that year, and she grew up ranked below a younger brother. Male authority shapes her at every stage, from teachers policing girls' uniforms to coworkers who hide a camera in the women's restroom. Her father treats late-night harassment as her own fault.
Her ordinary difficulties sit against South Korea's rapid change, including the end of state family planning campaigns and new laws against gender discrimination. Cho Nam-Joo keeps the psychiatric setting in view, so the question of who gets to interpret a woman's distress stays open alongside the plain record of her daily life.
