Book Review 55
December Double Feature
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 & If I Had Your Face Reviewed by Kristy Dolson
The first book is Kim Jiyeong, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo. Protagonist Kim Jiyoung is a stand-in for the thousands of Korean women who were the first daughters in their families to obtain post-secondary degrees, join the workforce, and then reluctantly drop out to maintain marriages and perform traditional childcare duties as mandated by an unchanging patriarchal work culture. This short novel explores how fierce competition and workplace pressures buffet the Seoul woman’s psyche.
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December 2020
Although Cho’s novel is a work of fiction, there are facts and figures pulled from real-world sources documenting
The second book, If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha, offers a depiction of these new attitudes and choices. The four women of this novel, Ara, Kyuri, Miho, and Wonna, all live in the same Seoul officetel. But they lead very different lives. Ara is a mute hairdresser, and she lives with her childhood best friend Sujin. Idolizing their beautiful neighbor Kyuri – a successful room salon girl – Sujin longs to become beautiful herself by undergoing plastic surgery. Sujin and Miho were raised in the same orphanage, although Miho was lucky to be born with natural beauty. Kyuri’s roommate, Miho, was granted a scholarship to study art in New York. While in America, she got swept into the world of rich young Koreans and started dating Hanbin, the son of a chaebol family whom she has no intention of marrying. Observing the younger women from a distance is Wonna, a woman in her
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After waiting years to read this book, I finished it in a mere two days. Surprisingly short for such an explosive and controversial work, the narrative is straightforward but challenges the reader to ask questions about cultural norms and long-held assumptions about gender roles. Personally, I found the novel very instructive of the current state of feminism in South Korea. I was very curious about how Korean women of my generation deal with traditional expectations in the post-Me Too era. I found that it is very much the same in other progressive countries where women born in the 1980s have been raised on pop culture “Girl Power” and Women’s Lib politics only to discover a work culture that begrudges their admission and expects them to continue playing by the old, male-dominated rules. It is no wonder that Kim Jiyoung suffers from a mental breakdown when the book opens.
Korea’s ongoing gender inequality. As a result, sometimes the book reads like a novel and sometimes it reads like a report, with most chapters containing endnotes listing the author’s research documents. Readers should know that the narrative is less of a story and more of a collection of vignettes of injustice that make up the shape of an individual woman. Recently translated into English by Jamie Chang, it is clear that this was translated for people who are already somewhat acquainted with South Korean language and culture. For outsiders with a basic understanding of South Korean culture, it is a good introduction to urban middle-class expectations, especially the gap in expectations between males and females. The ending is open to interpretation, perhaps as a nod to the next generations of women choosing selffulfillment over marriage, and careers over children.
CULTURE & ARTS
A
fter a roller-coaster 2020, I made the bittersweet decision to return to Canada early next year. And so, it is with a heavy heart that I announce this to be my final book review for the Gwangju News. It has been an honor to serve the community, and I wish to leave you with a special parting gift: a double feature review of two contemporary South Korean authors whose books disrobe Korean patriarchy and misogyny with blunt portrayals of female hardships.
11/24/2020 4:51:55 PM
