Category: Books

Unpopular Opinion: “Kim Jiyoung: Born 1982” Didn’t Hit Hard Enough

Kim Jiyoung: Born 1982 scores points for its raising of numerous feminist issues, but its treatment of them is frequently quite superficial. Here’s how one scene should have been handled differently, shattering stereotypes and suggesting solutions in the process.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes. Photo by Gabe Pierce on Unsplash.

I didn’t like the novel Kim Jiyoung: Born 1982 much at all. There, I said it.

It’s basically a Korean Feminism 101 compendium, which means it didn’t really teach me anything new. Its constant shoehorning of facts and statistics into the narrative ruined it as a work of fiction too. But the biggest flaw was Jiyoung’s constant, infuriating lack of agency, with its flipside that author Cho Nam-joo didn’t really offer any solutions to the numerous hardships she faces either.

That doesn’t mean those hardships aren’t well-described. Like I said in my earlier review, I don’t think it’s a bad book at all. If you personally learned a great deal from it, and/or laughed, cried, and seethed in anger alongside Jiyoung, then I’m hardly going to claim that my own disappointment and frustration mean I’m somehow a much better, more knowledgeable feminist than you.

But Jiyoung’s lack of agency, and Cho’s lack of solutions, are absolutely a hill I’m prepared to die on. One scene in the film set in a subway toilet, albeit not mentioned in the book, illustrates both very well.

In it (55-56:00), Jiyoung (played by Jung Yu-mi) has to get off the subway to change her bawling infant daughter. Once that’s done, she realizes she needs to pee herself, but struggles in the narrow cubicle to hang up her heavy bag with her daughter strapped to her chest. Then, before she attempts again, she eyes the walls and lock nervously, remembering a recent molka (spycam) incident at the place she used to work. The scene then shifts to her home, implying she gave up and went there instead.

At first viewing, it’s difficult to find any fault here at all. Given that the burden of childcare falls overwhelmingly on women, then more men—or, indeed, more unsympathetic childless women—sometimes really do need to be literally shown just how much effort that actually involves. So too, do more men need to realize how stressful it is having to worry about being secretly filmed literally every single time you used any toilets outside of your home, as well as the potential health consequences if you understandably chose to avoid them.

Admittedly, that may seem like a lot to ask of a one-minute scene. Yet with just a little tweaking, it could have achieved those aims very effectively and forcefully. Instead, it largely fails, for three reasons.

The first is because, ironically, guys can relate to the practical difficulties. The indignity of using a cubicle while wearing a suit and carrying a backpack, desperately trying to prevent either from touching all the urine and smokers’ spittle on the floor, is absolutely no joke. As for childcare specifically, my ex-wife would naturally take our daughters with her to the female toilets when they were young, but it’s not like I wasn’t often in just as awkward and uncomfortable situations with them in other cramped locations.

Devoid of any wider context then, which I’ll provide myself in a moment, men’s own issues with using cubicles can mean women’s complaints fall on deaf ears, let alone calls to make women’s toilets bigger than men’s. (In fact, some men even consider the proposal to be reverse-sexism.) This lack of sympathy is misguided, of course, but I can understand it—unless men are flat out told or shown why not, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that more cubicles in place of urinals suffice for women’s need to sit down. That women somehow still have to queue nonetheless, delaying everyone? Pop culture reveals that’s just their own fault, thanks to all the primping, preening, and gossiping that really goes on in there.

Next, the scene doesn’t do enough to convey the visceral fear of spy cameras. This is indeed much harder for men to relate to, because they never have to think about them when using public toilets. So, something much more forceful than Jiyoung’s brief nervous glances was required.

Best would have been a tweak to an earlier scene, which I’ll outline in a moment. But as an emphasis in this one, a more realistic cubicle should have been shown, with every nook, cranny, screw, bolt, and indent jammed with toilet paper and gum. Rather than the toilet the scene was actually shot in, which, complete with a rare heater, was easily the most pristine in Korea, seeing what it’s actually like in women’s toilets would surely have rammed home just how big of a problem spycams are in Korea—in a way that abstract news reports never could.

Image source: The Fact.

That earlier scene (44:30-47:30) is where Jiyoung’s former coworkers discover a spycam had been set up in one of the female toilets, and that their male coworkers had been sharing the videos, followed by meeting Jiyoung in a coffee shop to let her know. In hindsight, it’s all over surprisingly quickly. Whereas in the book, the incident is dealt with over three pages, and among the many grave consequences the coworkers reveal in those is that one victim overdosed on meds—possibly intentionally. This is omitted entirely in the film, but fits with the film’s much more kid-gloves, family-friendly tone overall (In particular, Jiyoung’s husband, played by Gong Yoo, is a vastly more sympathetic and likeable character than in the book. Perhaps a truer portrayal was rejected as harmful to his image?). In its place, the coworkers are not so much in tears as almost laugh off the affair, one joking about borrowing Jiyoung’s daughter’s diapers from now on.

Not only would I have absolutely kept that line about the coworker’s potential suicide instead, I would have devoted a minute to visiting her in hospital too. Was that not worth it to show that spycams have very real, devastating effects on people’s lives?

But if I only had an extra minute’s grace, I would use it to shift Jiyoung’s toilet scene to a few years earlier in her life, before she stopped working to have her daughter. She would be in her smart workclothes and high heels at a hweshik, an (effectively mandatory) after-work dinner with her boss and coworkers, and have to go to the toilet as everyone was preparing to leave to go to a second round at a bar. She would take longer than many of the men would like, because—and herein lies that context, as explained by Sora Chemaly in Time. Because, yes, it really does need explaining, as it’s not at all just about sitting vs. standing:

Women need to use bathrooms more often and for longer periods of time because: we sit to urinate (urinals effectively double the space in men’s rooms) [note also, “Women empty their bladders more frequently than men and take longer – an average start-to-finish time of 60 seconds for men, but 90 for women”—James], we menstruate, we are responsible for reproducing the species (which makes us pee more), we continue to have greater responsibility for children (who have to use bathrooms with us), and we breastfeed (frequently in grotty bathroom stalls). Additionally, women tend to wear more binding and cumbersome clothes, whereas men’s clothing provides significantly speedier access. But in a classic example of the difference between surface “equality” and genuine equity, many public restrooms continue to be facilities that are equal in physical space, while favoring men’s bodies, experiences, and needs.

So when Jiyoung did rejoin the group, one of those impatient men could have made an all too common complaint or joke about holding everyone up for the sake of putting on her lipstick. To which she could have angrily pointed out it wasn’t her fault, for any number of the above reasons she could have chosen to highlight (and/or by having to spend time ramming toilet paper into all those potential camera holes, would have killed two birds with one stone). She could have followed that the obvious solution of “potty parity”—mandating 2:1 or 3:1 female to male toilet size ratios in all new building plans, and/or building more shared toilets—wasn’t at all reverse-sexism, but would benefit both women and the men who had to wait for them.

Indeed, this scene would not be unlike the—MILD SPOILER—final scene in the film, in which Jiyoung actually does confront a guy who accuses her of being a “mom roach,” living the high life gossiping in coffee shops, a parasite on her rich husband and the hard workers who pay the taxes for her holiday of maternity leave. Which is a rare credit to the film, and certainly a better alternative to her just slinking away in shame like in the book, then getting gaslighted by her husband when she complains about it. However, as it’s the conclusion to what’s actually an extremely saccharine-feeling film overall as discussed, it’s somewhat underwhelming as a climax—SPOILER ENDS.

With an extra minute still, I would also add a scene of her as a teenager, suffering from bladder and dehydration problems that her much fawned-over brother avoided, because he could obviously better endure Korean schools’ notoriously dirty and outdated toilets. But I digress. The point is, Jiyoung in the subway toilet with her daughter is just one scene of many that could have been dramatically improved. I curse having read the book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World by Leslie Kern (2020) in particular, which means I can just no longer unsee the flaws in the scenes in either the book or film. Although, given the former’s popularity, now I do appreciate the value of seeing one’s own lived experiences represented in print, even if Cho neither presents Jiyoung as a role model nor offers any potential solutions to what she faces.

Those responsible for the film however, could have and should have responded to the backlash by taking up that mantle, exploiting the potential of the new visual medium to shock and shame. Instead, they wasted the opportunity by making it as saccharine as possible, all for the sake of people who had probably never actually read the book and were even less likely to watch the film.

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

“Hashtag activism found in translation: Unpacking the reformulation of #MeToo in Japan”—Zoom Presentation by Ms. Saki Mizoroki, Friday April 28, 5:30-7pm JST

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.

Do any of you reading this in Korea volunteer for a local feminist organization?

As a Western male feminist, or feminist ally if that’s your jam, frankly I’ve never seriously considered it. I’ve always just assumed my presence would be more awkward and complicated than helpful, and probably quite rightly so. There’s visa restrictions against non-Koreans participating in “political” activity too, even for permanent residents.

But are my assumptions correct? Or are they really just excuses?

Because I’ve recently become more interested in contemporary Korean feminist activism than ever. Perhaps, the day I get off my armchair and test those assumptions will come sooner than I think.

If you do ever see my bald head pop up on mutual Instas we follow then, blame Ito Shiori’s Black Box: The Memoir That Sparked Japan’s #MeToo Movement. Not just because because it well deserves its seminal title, but because I was shocked to learn just a few weeks later of the relative failure of that movement compared to South Korea’s. Why? What are the similarities and differences between #미투 and #KuToo? What mutual lessons do they offer for each other? I have to know.

Naturally then, I’ll be all over next Friday’s presentation below (note the open access accompanying article). I’ll also soon be cracking open my copy of Flowers of Fire by Hawon Jung (of course), but first will have to try the more specialized but older (2014) Practicing Feminism in South Korea: The women’s movement against sexual violence by Kyungja Jung while it’s hopefully still relevant.

If you have any other recommendations, please let me know. And I hope to hear your thoughts about next Friday’s presentation too! :)

Join Zoom Meeting https://sophia-ac-jp.zoom.us/j/99468537215 Meeting ID: 994 6853 7215 Passcode: 982771

In 2017, the MeToo hashtag spread across the globe. However, it showed limited success in the Japanese Twittersphere and instead inspired local initiatives such as #WeToo and #Furawādemo (“flower demo”). To understand this reformulation, we analyzed 15 interviews with Japanese social media users and 119 Japanese newspaper articles. The results corroborate the framework we label VTM (values, topics, media), suggesting that an intersection between perceived Japanese values, the topic’s gendered and sexual nature, and media affordances explain the movement’s local development. While perceived Japanese values clash against those associated with #MeToo, new formulations “soften” the protest by blending in values such as reserve and harmony. Overall, we show how perceptions of popular values rather than values as essential orientations shape activism. Finally, we discuss the study’s implications for understanding cultural variance in cyberactivism, highlighting how divergent notions of “safe space” shape such movements.

Saki Mizoroki is a doctoral student at the University of Tokyo and a visiting research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her research focuses on feminist media studies, drawing on her extensive experience as a journalist. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Sophia University and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked as a journalist for a top-national Japanese newspaper, The Asahi, as well as internet media, BuzzFeed Japan.

This talk is organized by David H. Slater (Professor of Anthropology, FLA).

*Mizoroki, S., Shifman, L., & Hayashi, K. (2023). Hashtag activism found in translation: Unpacking the reformulation of #MeToo in Japan. New Media & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231153571

Flyer (PDF): Download from here

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

April Book Club Meeting: “Phoenix Extravagant” by Yoon Ha Lee, Wednesday 26 April, 8:15pm KST

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes.

A medley of steampunk, fantasy, and magic realism? And featuring multiple animal characters? Frankly, none of those I like at all, let alone when all put together. But, expanding my literary horizons was of the main reasons I started this book club, as was supporting more LGBTQ representation in Korean and Korean-American fiction. So I was already well sold on Phoenix Extravagant (2021) by American writer Yoon Ha Lee (Wikipedia; interview) for this month’s book choice, only then to be even further persuaded by the following excellent, quick review by a fellow club member (posted with permission):

The genre is new to me, a giant leap really. Lots of norm transgressions, in the best possible way. Is it Steampunk, SciFi- Fantasy, Alternative History, Parody…??? Or none/ all?

American-Korean author Lee is not just transgressive in genre blending, but in the themes and characters of his story here. Lee himself identifies an a trans man/ queer (choosing “him/ he”) and his protagonist here is a gender neutral “them/they”. This was less confusing than the anti-woke mob might presume when reading. Non traditional nuclear/ heteronormative families, relationships and people populate this story with disarming naturalness. The whole book eschews complicated narrative and linguistic features, offering an ostensibly straightforward plot and “young adult” level vocabulary (albeit with some rather clever invented vernacular for the world described).

But the themes and historical parallels it clearly (maybe too obviously for a Korean audience) makes to Korea’s colonial experience are also subtly transgressive. It questions the ideas of nationalism and independence (for whom), as well as whether a foreign tyranny is worse than an indigenous one. In historical parallelism, it also questions who or what a loyal citizen/ collaborator is, in the face of daily needs to survive. The role of art also arises, and whether the effects of art can be attributed/ blamed on the artist?

There’s escapism and juvenile fantasy too – if you chose to read it that way. Worth a read!

Please see LibraryThing, The StoryGraph, and/or GoodReads for further reviews, and then, if Phoenix Extravagant still appeals, I’d like to invite you to our meeting on Wednesday 26 April, at 8:15pm Korean time. Just a small, informal event, with a limit of 12 participants to help ensure that they remain as safe a space as possible, please contact me via email or leave a comment below (only I will be able to see your email address) if you are interested in attending. I will contact you to confirm, and will include you in the club reminder email with the Zoom link a few days before the event.

See you on Zoom!

If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

BUY THIS BOOK—”Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China’s Global Rise” by Monica Liu (2022)

Don’t let my glorious laser tits deter you from an eye-opening interview, and a must-read!

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes.

First, a quick update to explain my absence this past month,

Basically, I’ve finally gotten my shit together.

I could count the ways. Instead, suffice to say I’m so enthused and energized that I’ve even started paying attention to my laser tits again.

You read that right. (You’ll thank me for passing on this “꿀팁” later.) Ten random notifications from a reminder app a day, I advise, is the sweet spot for perking you up before starting to get annoying:

Naturally then, life chose to reward my newfound drive by bookending those past four weeks with two debilitating colds. Repetitive strain injury has flared up in my right arm too,* leaving me in agony every time I want to do anything even remotely fun or pleasurable with my hand. Like, say, eating or sleeping (what did you think I meant?), let alone banging away at a keyboard.

With my resolve being so sorely tested, literally, my response is to push even harder through my huge backlog of writing, as well as my new plans to completely overhaul this blog and my social media use. What those plans actually are, I’m going to tend towards doing before explaining. But one I already announced back in October—more geeking out over things that bring me joy, no matter how obscure or academic. The difference now being, I realize life is just too short to worry about losing followers who don’t share my obscure passions, or curious, ribald sense of humor.

On that note, the New Book Network’s (NBN) recent podcast interview of Monica Liu, about her new book Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China’s Global Rise (2022), is conspicuously bereft of laser tits, but is no less jaw-dropping for all that. Primarily, for Liu’s emphasis on the women’s perspectives and their sense of agency, which in hindsight I’ve much neglected in my own coverage of migrant brides to Korea over the years (understandably, given how so many are exploited and abused, but a neglect nonetheless). Moreover, despite the title of the book, and NBN’s synopsis below, it quickly becomes clear while listening to the interview that Chinese seekers of marriage with Western men share many of the same issues and goals with those Chinese, Central Asian, Russian, and Southeast Asian women seeking Korean men.

Her study of China’s email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese women who are primarily middle-aged, divorced, and proactively seeking spouses to fulfill their material and sexual needs. What they seek in their Western partners is tied to what they believe they’ve lost in the shifting global economy around them. Ranging from multimillionaire entrepreneurs or ex-wives and mistresses of wealthy Chinese businessmen, to contingent sector workers and struggling single mothers, these women, along with their translators and potential husbands from the US, Canada, and Australia, make up the actors in this multifaceted story. Set against the backdrop of China’s global economic ascendance and a relative decline of the West, this book asks: How does this reshape Chinese women’s perception of Western masculinity? Through the unique window of global internet dating, this book reveals the shifting relationships of race, class, gender, sex, and intimacy across borders.

I strongly recommend listening to the interview yourself; at 39 minutes long, it doesn’t at all drag on like, frankly, most other NBN interviews do. To encourage you to do so, here are several eye-opening excerpts, all lovingly, painstakingly transcribed by myself (my apologies for any minor errors).

(Too young, and too well-off?) Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash.

First, from 7:30-8:45, an important difference between Chinese women seeking Western men to migrant brides in Korea: the former tend to be much older and financially well-off. As we’ll see soon, this has big implications for the power dynamics between prospective partners:

Q) Why really did the Chinese women seek Western men?

A) For a couple of different reasons. Across the board, one main reason I saw was that the women felt aged out of their local dating market, because men of similar age and economic standing tended to prefer much younger, never-married women without children, and so women believed Western men were more open to dating women their age. And there’s also some differences based on the women’s socioeconomic class. A lot of women who are financially well-off have previously been married to very wealthy Chinese men that cheated on them and left them for younger women, and so think that Western men are going to be more loyal and more family-orientated—that being the primary reason. While women who struggled financially, have often divorced Chinese ex-husbands that lost their jobs and couldn’t support their families, and so these women are also seeking financial stability in their new marriages. Finally, there’s also a group of women who wish to send their kids to college in the US, to escape the very, very brutal college entrance exam in China, but they couldn’t do that as single moms that were financially struggling.

Next, from 10:20-11:20, on how Chinese dating marriage agencies both respond to and perpetuate Occidental stereotypes:

Q) Tell us about global financial crisis of 2008 when the men lost their jobs. Did this impact the dating scene?

A) Yes, this certainly impacted the dating scene. At the dating agencies, before the crisis there would be this idea that many of the men would possibly be financially well-off, but actually after the crisis a lot of women were actually discovering off-site that those men that they thought were financially well-off were not in that position, and as a result one of the tactics that the agencies used to promote these men to the women was that these men were loyal, devoted, and family-oriented, and thereby worth of marriage, even if they’re not particularly financially well-off.

Photo by Marcelo Matarazzo on Unsplash.

Then from 13:28-15:11, on the racial hierarchies contained within those Occidental stereotypes. But already, Chinese women’s agency is evident in their readiness to reject or subvert these:

Q) You talked about the discrimination against Black men with the Chinese women, but not other racial groups. Tell us more.

A) When I stepped into the dating agency, I found that Chinese women were very reluctant to date Black men. And for that reason, the agencies actually had a policy to not entertain emails from Black men unless given special permission from the women, in order not to “offend” the women. I’m not exactly sure what their personal reasons were…but I do know China has a long-standing history of anti-Black prejudice where Blacks are stereotyped as savage, hypersexual, and violent.

However, the women didn’t seem to discriminate against other racial groups, and to them, interestingly, the term “Westerner” included not only Caucasians but also Latinos and Native Americans. And occasionally some women would actually refer to Western men of Northern- or Central-European ancestry as “pure white,” and Latin-American men, or men of South-European ancestry, for example Italian men, or Native American men, as “non-pure white.” However, being pure white didn’t seem to actually boost the men’s desirability in the women’s eyes, and in fact I saw that some women in fact preferred the non-pure white look and they found the darker hair and eye color to be more Asian-looking, and more familiar and more pleasing to their eye than someone who is, say, blond-haired and blue-eyed.

Photo by Roselyn Tirado on Unsplash.

From 18:24-19:52, on the traditional, patriarchal values the Western men using international dating agencies often bring to their anticipated relationships with Chinese women. Obviously, by no means all (or even a majority) do. But just as obviously, it’s surely no coincidence that many Korean men do the same:

Q) Now give us the profile of the Western male seeking a Chinese woman.

A) The majority of the men enrolled tended to be older, divorced, and tend to come from lower-middle class or working class backgrounds, although some were middle class. I’ve seen a lot of truck drivers, lots of small business owners, and these men tend to feel left behind by globalization as agriculture, manufacturing, and small businesses started declining. So these men actually viewed this changing economic landscape as a threat to their masculinity.

Now a lot of sociologists’ studies show that marriage rates have declined among working class men, and poor men, because women within their own class find them to be too poor to be marriage worthy. So for these men, having slipped down the socioeconomic ladder, they really struggle to hold on to what privilege they have left by pursuing so-called “traditional” marriages, possibly with foreign brides, because they think this will allow them to exert some kind of dominance and control at home. And there’s also some middle class men who, despite being financially stable, they still feel left out of place within the new gender norms that have emerged in Western societies, [supposedly] dominated by feminists who they see as destroying the family and nation through their spoiled behavior and materialism.

Photo by Conikal on Unsplash.

And, reluctantly, a final excerpt from 23:21-25:10 (there were so many I wanted to highlight!), on the upending of global masculinity and racial ideals when women are empowered to reject those marriages:

Q) Let’s look now at some of the theories about Western masculinity. What did you find concerning race, class, gender, globalization, and migration?

A) First, I challenge readers to rethink the relationship between race and class…the question I ask is, does Western masculinity still command some degree of hegemonic power in China, despite China’s global rise—and I confirm that it does, by showing how Chinese dating agencies market their Western male clients as morally superior to Chinese men despite their lack or wealth. So the fact is that this portrayal still sells in China, and this reflects this continued superiority of Western culture within the Chinese women’s imagination.

However, in this book I also show a lot of moments when Western masculinity is starting to lose its hegemonic power, and this typically happens in the latter stages of the courtship process, when couples go offline and start meeting face-to-face. And in this book, I show how some of these women quickly rejected their working class, Western suitors, once they realized these men didn’t embody the type of elite masculinity that they were seeking in a partner, and instead these women would choose to continue having affairs with their local Chinese lovers, even if those men were married and not willing to leave their wives. And this is because [they] had these refined tastes, lifestyles, and sexual know-hows that a lot of their foreign suitors lacked.

Two final points of interest to round off. First, by coincidence, shortly after listening to this interview I got an alert that Kelsey the Korean was busy dismantling Western masculinity’s hegemonic power in Korea too:

Next, another well-timed coincidence: the latest issue of the Korean Anthropology Review just dropped, with an article by Han Seung-mi—”Critique of Korean Multiculturalism as Viewed through Gendered Transnational Migration in Asia: The Case of Vietnamese Returnee Marriage Migrants“—that sounds perfectly placed to challenge my own image of migrant brides in Korea as passive victims (my emphasis):

This article analyzes “returnees from marriage migration” by focusing on Vietnamese women from Cần Thơ and Hai Phong who have been to South Korea for marriage migration. In contrast to prevalent concerns in South Korea about the possibility of “child abduction” by Vietnamese mothers/divorcees, the author found many “deserted” Korean Vietnamese children and their mothers in Vietnam through this research. There is also a growing number of Vietnamese “return marriage migrants,” women who came back to South Korea after their first divorce and return to Vietnam. The article emphasizes the complexities and multidirectional trajectories of marriage migration and highlights the agency of female migrants, whose contribution to family welfare and to “development” is often overshadowed by their status within the family.

Does it really matter that, technically, my copy of the book hasn’t actually arrived yet? If you’ve read this far, I hope you too will indulge yourself (38,170 won on Aladin!), and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

*I first had repetitive strain injury about 10 years ago, consequence of having my keyboard too close to me, forcing me to bend my arms to type; fortunately, it resolved itself in a few weeks once I moved my computer just shy of arm’s length. This time round, it’s undoubtedly due to spending hours in bed on my phone, again bending my arms to use it; now that I’ve stopped, hopefully again the pain will go away just as quickly.

In the meantime, I can’t stress enough how much my arm can hurt at the moment, nor how debilitating it is to be literally too scared to use your right hand as a result. So, if you reading this, please do take a moment to consider how you physically use your devices, and for how long!

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

March Book Club Meeting: “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982” by Cho Nam-joo, Wednesday 15 March, 8:15pm KST

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Knowing a thing or two about Korean feminism, I avoided reading the most popular Korean feminist novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, for the longest time. Ironic, I know, but I just felt it wouldn’t really teach me anything new.

I wasn’t being arrogant. I’m still no ‘expert’ on Korean feminism, and I’m never going to claim to be one. But expert or not, if you’ve spent nearly two decades immersed in a subject, there’s only so much you’re going to gain from a book aimed at a general audience.

Then March’s book club meeting was coming up, originally planned for International Women’s Day on the 8th (postponed because I was sick). It felt time.

So now, having read it…I actually liked it, and would recommend it. But yeah—it really didn’t teach me anything new.

What it does do, and very well, is open a window onto the lived experiences of Korean girls and women. While much of what gets revealed by that may well not be news to anyone who’s shared, witnessed, listened to, read about, and/or studied those experiences, the way Cho Nam-joo summarizes and puts them all together into a succinct, very readable story is still very skillful, and essential for spreading knowledge of them to a wider audience.

Take the following two pages on many Korean schools’ blatantly unfair, sexualizing, and body-shaming dress codes for schoolgirls for instance. Just these few paragraphs alone are far more evocative of what it’s really like for girls than any of the news reports I’ve translated, and much more likely to spur people to action:

It’s also true that while I can’t really think of anything earth-shatteringly new I learned from it, it covers so many aspects of Korean girls’ and women’s lives that it reminded me of many things I’d almost completely forgotten, and got me interested all over again. To give another for instance, a topic I covered here recently was a ruling against a (usually) rarely-enforced law requiring study-rooms to be sex-segregated; providing some context to that, I explained that in many respects Korea is a surprisingly homosocial society, starting with most Korean schools being single sex. Thanks to that same chapter above, “Adolescence, 1995-2000,” I was reminded that even in ostensibly coeducational schools too, the classes themselves are still often single-sex. And that’s just one important fact about Korean school life, packed in among so many others in the chapter on that subject. Likewise, there’s many more jumping out at you in the sections on university, dating, work, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood, and so on.

Yet I only gave it a 3 out of 5, for three reasons.

First, because of frequent, long seques into discussions of background statistics and trends. (I’d previously encountered them in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, finding them very shoehorned in; hearing that they were in Kim Jiyoung too was another big reason why I put off reading it for such a long time.) Sure enough, while there were a lot fewer than I’d expected, they were definitely jarring, completely ruining the immersion in the story. Say, when listening to Jiyoung’s fuming about being discriminated against at job interviews in the mid-2000s, to suddenly being given figures on the numbers of female managers in the mid-2010s, then right back to going back to her fuming ten years earlier. Those stats, to the extent something from ten years in a character’s future even needed including at all, could surely have been brought in much more seamlessly.

Next, for its brevity. For sure, being only 163 pages long will likely have positively contributed to sales. But for what I personally wanted from the book, it felt at least 163 too short.

Specifically, I was approaching it having just read last month’s selection Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, a collection of light horror-themed, often graphic, sometimes disgusting short stories (in the first, a woman’s doppelganger slowly grows out of her feces in her toilet, and begins talking to her). Struggling to understand these earthy, brutally corporeal choices of subjects, and trying to find a common theme to the stories, I gained a sense of women’s much more visceral relationship with their bodies and awareness of their cycles and rhythms, based on their physical difference with men’s.

Which I realize may sound crude and simplistic, and open to multiple (mis)interpretations. So, to be clear, I’m absolutely not saying that women are any less rational than men, that men can’t be emotional or don’t ever have mood swings, that men shouldn’t also be much more aware of their bodies, or that the similarities between men and women aren’t much stronger than the differences. I also completely understand every women’s outrage at ever being dismissed by men for being “hormonal.”

I still raise that sense though, because I also brought to Kim Jiyoung my own lived experience, discussions with women, and those nearly two decades of immersing myself in various feminist materials and forums, all of which tell me that, yes, speaking very, very generally, (cishet) women do talk about their bodies much more than (cishet) men, talk about men and sex very differently, talk to women very differently than to men (as indeed men do to women), and that the female gaze, libido, and arousal are not at all like cishet men imagine them to be, and so on.

(Update: Having just seen the film, I realize I was so fixated on sex this issue that I neglected several, much more important flaws of the book. So, I cover them in a longer second review here.)

Put that considerable baggage of mine all together, and I was just expecting something much deeper—and less sanitized—from Korea’s most popular and famous feminist novel. Insights into what it’s really like being a woman that I didn’t already know. The numerous things that all women take for granted and so generally don’t discuss, least of all with men, which is why I’m still only learning about them at the tender age of 47.

Indeed, many of them from the first novel I’m (painfully slowly) reading in Korean: Bodies and Women ‘몸과 여자들’ by Lee Seo-su, which I’d easily recommend from anyone wanting an upgrade from Kim Jiyoung. And, given that Bodies and Women is also relatively short, tells me that even in a longer book Cho probably wouldn’t have provided what I was looking for anyway.

Image sources: Aladin, NamuWiki.

The third and final reason though, I couldn’t put my finger on, but somehow felt familiar. Then, as I actually clicked on those 3 stars at The StoryGraph, I was informed that my connection there, Mel of Equal Opportunity Reader, had also given it 3 stars (great minds think alike!), and written a review which hit the nail right on the head. Taken here from the longer one on her blog:

…despite the familiarity of her experiences, Jiyoung herself is nearly impossible for me to relate to. She has an infuriating lack of agency and inner thought–she’s a perfect victim and it’s only her privilege as a member of a stable family who support her financially that keeps her life from being far, far, worse. I found myself frustrated by how safe and protected she actually was and how little she did with that foundation. She’s a flabby marshmallow of a woman who goes along with everything that happens to her and comes out far better than a lot of women do despite that. This is only highlighted by the fact that most of the other women in the story–her mother, her sister, her first boss–all have much more developed, layered personalities, in my opinion.

As she goes on to explain, the book doesn’t really offer any solutions or ways forward, whereas “there [definitely] are in fact ways to claim agency and equity as a woman in the world.” I also suddenly realized the familiarity: all the K-dramas I was exposed to in the early-2000s, in which the hapless long suffering daughters-in-law and/or lowly company employees would just sit there and take abuse all day long, complaining and crying but never actually doing anything about it. Constantly shouting at the screen, just wanting to get up and shake them out of their resignation and passivity, it ruined K-dramas for me for life.

Unlike books ;)

And on that note, if you’re interested in attending the book club meeting—a very safe space, with a maximum of 12 members, but frankly usually more like 4 or 5—then please send me an email, and I’ll pass on the Zoom link before Wednesday. Also, my apologies for the very short notice, but you’re more than welcome to join if you’re just interested in Korean feminism in general, regardless of if you’ve actually read the book. Even most of the reading group questions below, helpfully provided at the end of the edition I bought, don’t at all require it. So please do get in touch!

Update: I forgot to mention there’s still time to cheat by watching check out the movie on Netflix too!

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)

In Just Two Minutes, My Eyes Were Opened to Why Resolving the Comfort Women Issue is so Necessary for Japan’s #MeToo

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Image by Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

For sixteen years, I’ve maintained a strict policy of never covering anything related to the “comfort women” issue. I already have my fair share of trolls, thank you very much, so don’t need to add Japanese and Korean ultra-nationalists to the mix.

With this convenient out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude though, I recently realized I’ve been missing a crucial connection to present discourses about sexual violence today, especially in Japan.

It just took two minutes, taken from the New Book Network’s podcast interview of Robert O’Mochain and Yuki Ueno about their book Sexual Abuse and Education in Japan: In the (Inter)National Shadows (Routledge, 2022):

“The fixation with depicting comfort women as fake victims has repercussions for survivors of sexual assault today. Even if victims of abuse are not aware of comfort women issues, they are aware of the danger of being labeled a higaisha-buru (“fake victim”), and in the book we show how the association of ideas between ex-comfort women, and fake victims, and contemporary women who report sexual assault, is still a factor in the silencing of women, who have a right to report sexual assault, but…they remain in the shadows.

And, I think a good illustration of how this is relevant still today, is something that happened in 2020. There were prominent members of the main political party, the LDP, and there was an event there on a program that was looking at (unintelligible Japanese term?) through comfort women issues, and when the issue was under discussion a member of the House of Representatives, Sugita Mio, she made the comment “Women can lie as much they want.” Now she did issue an apology later for saying [that], but she wasn’t censured by her party for the comment. They actually refused to receive a petition against her then, when it came to the LDP headquarters…she is still around—she continues to exert influence as a lawmaker in the Diet. And the comment [about the refusal?] was “Why do you report it?”, so it’s part of public discourse. So I think it indicated there’s a determination there amongst ultra-conservative groups to depict ex-comfort women as fake victims, to cast doubt on their oral evidence, and that will affect all sexual assault survivors. I think that’s an important question that we’re exploring in the book.”

(Robert O’Mochain speaking,16:24-18:33)

Unfortunately for those of you who likewise now want to get their hands on said book, I think I speak for most of us when I say US$160–$204 is slightly out of our price range ㅠㅠ. So too, even US$44–$50 for a copy of Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement edited by Emma Dalton and Caroline Norma (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) that I’ve long had my eye on, when you realize it’s only 141 pages long!

I therefore recommend the podcast interview again then, for more on links to the relative failure of Japan’s #MeToo movement (also Lile Otaki Donohue’s article in Trinity Women & Gender Minorities Review for an excellent 8-page summary and comparison with other countries), and the Daiwa Foundation’s video below for short interviews of the contributors to Voices:

Finally, it’s my birthday next week on—yes, really—International Women’s Day(!), so I think one source on Japan’s #MeToo movement even I can indulge myself on is the self-explanatory Black Box: The Memoir That Sparked Japan’s #MeToo Movement by Ito Shiori :)

Has anyone read any of those books? Or have any other recommendations? Can any Japanese speakers please help with the term I couldn’t make out in the podcast at 17:25? Thanks!

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If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)