Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982: A Novel

by Cho Nam-Joo, Kathleen Choe (Read by), Jamie Chang (Translator)

Overview

Vulture Best Books of the Year (So Far)

A New York Times Editors Choice Selection

A fierce international best seller that launched Korea's new feminist movement, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman's psychic deterioration in the face of rigid misogyny.

Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.

In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A 30-something-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?

Rendered in minimalist yet lacerating prose, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 sits at the center of our global #MeToo movement and announces the arrival of writer of international significance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781713584674
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 6.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Cho Nam-joo was a television scriptwriter for nine years. She is the author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, longlisted for the National Book Award for Translation, and most recently, Saha.

Jamie Chang is an award-winning translator who teaches at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

Editorial Reviews

01/06/2020

Cho’s spirited debut offers a picture of rampant sexism in contemporary South Korea through the experience of a frustrated, subjugated, 33-year-old housewife. At a gathering with her husband Jung Daehyun’s family, Kim Jiyoung suddenly speaks up to her father in law, questioning the cultural expectation that she bend over backward to serve them. A distressed, apologetic Daehyun insists to his parents that “she’s not well,” and coaxes Jiyoung to see a psychiatrist whose report on Jiyoung forms the novel, offering insight on the challenges she’s faced. Jiyoung grew up in Seoul as a middle child with an older sister and younger brother, and learned from her grandmother to accept that boys receive special treatment. At her school, she is punished for eating lunch too slowly despite being given much less time than the boys. While the psychiatrist recognizes how sexism has shaped Jiyoung and reflects on his privilege as a man, he concludes his report without resolving to offer support and validation. While Cho’s message-driven narrative will leave readers wishing for more complexity, the brutal, bleak conclusion demonstrates Cho’s mastery of irony. This will stir readers to consider the myriad factors that diminish women’s rights throughout the world. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Already an international best-seller, television scriptwriter Cho’s debut novel has been credited with helping to ‘launch Korea’s new feminist movement.’ The fact that gender inequity is insidiously pervasive throughout the world will guarantee that this tale has immediate resonance, and its smoothly accessible, albeit British English vernacular–inclined, translation by award-winning translator Chang will ensure appreciative Anglophone audiences. Cho’s narrative is part bildungsroman and part Wikipedia entry (complete with statistics-heavy footnotes).... Cho’s matter-of-fact delivery underscores the pervasive gender imbalance, while just containing the empathic rage. Her final chapter, “2016,” written as Jiyoung’s therapist’s report—his claims of being “aware” and “enlightened” only damning him further as an entitled troll—proves to be narrative genius."

Terry Hong

"Cho’s clinical prose is bolstered with figures and footnotes to illustrate how ordinary Jiyoung’s experience is.... When Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, was published in Korea in 2016, it was received as a cultural call to arms.... Like Bong Joon Ho’s Academy Award-winning film Parasite, which unleashed a debate about class disparities in South Korea, Cho’s novel was treated as a social treatise as much as a work of art.... The new, often subversive novels by Korean women, which have intersected with the rise of the #MeToo movement, are driving discussions beyond the literary world."

New York Times - Alexandra Alter

"Cho Nam-joo’s third novel has been hailed as giving voice to the unheard everywoman. . . . [Kim Jiyoung] has become both a touchstone for a conversation around feminism and gender and a lightning rod for anti-feminists who view the book as inciting misandry . . . [The book] has touched a nerve globally . . . The character of Kim Jiyoung can be seen as a sort of sacrifice: a protagonist who is broken in order to open up a channel for collective rage. Along with other socially critical narratives to come out of Korea, such as Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning film Parasite, her story could change the bigger one."

Sarah Shin

"Cho deploys a formal, almost clinical prose style that subtly but effectively reinforces the challenges Korean women like Jiyoung endure throughout their lives in multiple contexts—familial, educational, and work-related. . . . Kim Jiyoung effectively communicates the realities Korean women face, especially discrimination in the workplace, rampant sexual harassment, and the nearly impossible challenge of balancing motherhood with career aspirations."

Faye Chadwell

"Following the life of the titular character from her mother’s generation through her own childhood, young adulthood, career, marriage and eventual 'breakdown,' the book moves around in time to subtly uncover how patriarchy eats away at the psyches and bodies of women, starting before they’re even born."

Sarah Neilson

"This is a book about the life of a woman living in Korea; the despair of an ordinary woman, which she takes for granted. The fact that it’s not about ‘someone special’ is extremely shocking, while also being incredibly relatable."

Sayaka Murata

"In this fine—and beautifully translated—biography of a fictional Korean woman we encounter the real experiences of many women around the world."

Claire Kohda Hazelton

"Chilling."

Domino - Rebecca Deczynski

"Cho Nam-Joo points to a universal dialogue around discrimination, hopelessness, and fear."

Annabel Gutterman

"Written with unbearably clear-sighted perspective, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 possesses the urgency and immediacy of the scariest horror thriller—except that this is not technically horror, but something closer to reportage. I broke out in a sweat reading this book."

Ling Ma

"I loved this novel. Kim Jiyoung’s life is made to seem at once totally commonplace and nightmarishly over-the-top. As you read, you constantly feel that revolutionary, electric shift between commonplace and nightmarish. This kind of imaginative work is so important and so powerful."

Elif Batuman

"[Kim Jiyoung] laid bare my own Korean childhood — and, let’s face it, my Western adulthood too — forcing me to confront traumatic experiences that I’d tried to chalk up as nothing out of the ordinary. But then, my experiences are ordinary, as ordinary as the everyday horrors suffered by the book’s protagonist, Jiyoung. This novel is about the banality of the evil that is systemic misogyny. . . . Jiyoung, like Gregor Samsa, feels so overwhelmed by social expectations that there is no room for her in her own body; her only option is to become something — or someone — else."

Euny Hong

02/01/2020

Korean author Cho's semiautobiographical portrayal of life in contemporary Korea opens with Kim Jiyoung's husband, Daehyun, suspecting that she has had a psychotic break. Jiyoung had begun to show signs that other people, including her mother and a dead friend, have possessed her mind and spirit. To relay Jiyoung's story, Cho deploys a formal, almost clinical prose style that subtly but effectively reinforces the challenges Korean women like Jiyoung endure throughout their lives in multiple contexts—familial, educational, and work-related. Clever footnotes embedded in the text provide economic and social statistics to confirm the almost rampant misogyny. Less effective is the introduction of a framing narrative by a male psychiatrist toward the story's end. Though the doctor seems compassionate, even trying momentarily to draw parallels between Jiyoung's troubles and those of other women he knows, this new narrative voice seems abrupt. VERDICT A relatively quick read at under 200 pages, the novel was originally published in 2016 and is credited with launching Korea's own #MeToo moment. It effectively communicates the realities Korean women face, especially discrimination in the workplace, rampant sexual harassment, and the nearly impossible challenge of balancing motherhood with career aspirations. [See Prepub Alert, 10/7/19.]—Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

Library Journal

2020-01-13
A 33-year-old woman in Seoul slowly breaks under the burden of misogyny she's been facing all her life.

Kim Jiyoung's life is typical of a woman in South Korea. Born the second of three siblings, with an older sister and younger brother, her experiences with patriarchy begin early. At home, her brother gets preferential treatment and less responsibility. At school, she's told that boys who bully her just like her. Though her mother encourages and supports her in myriad ways, including making sure she goes to university and follows her heart, Jiyoung grows to realize that in every aspect of life and work, women are dehumanized, devalued, and objectified. The book's strength lies in how succinctly Cho captures the relentless buildup of sexism and gender discrimination over the course of one woman's life. With clinical detachment, the book covers Jiyoung's childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, first job, and, finally, marriage and motherhood. The pressure of the patriarchy is so incessant that she starts to dissociate, transforming into other women she's known, like her mother and her college friend. The central critique of patriarchy is clearly—and necessarily—tied in to that of capitalism. Jiyoung wonders, as she catalogs the ways in which the world is built to accommodate "maximum output with minimum input...who'll be the last one standing in a world with these priorities, and will they be happy?" To be clear, there's nothing revolutionary here—it's basically feminism 101 but in novel form, complete with occasional footnotes. There is not a single move to recognize anything outside of a binary gender. But the story perfectly captures misogynies large and small that will be recognizable to many.

A compelling story about a woman in a deeply patriarchal society.

Kirkus Reviews