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.

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.”

Surprised to suddenly see the image from my 2010 post “Sex and the Red-Blooded Woman” again. Turns out, “Hormonal: The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones” by @haselton,has just been translated into Korean. So naturally, I just ordered it for my birthday! 🤓 https://t.co/wg7fm9ymFY pic.twitter.com/DWtVZ7LTDM

— The Grand Narrative (@JamesTurnbull) February 21, 2022

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!

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

Tag: Cho Nam-Joo