Diagnosis: Murder
(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through NetGalley. Trigger warning for misogyny and violence against women, including sexual assault.)
The girls stowed away repulsive, frightening experiences with males deep in their hearts without even realising it themselves.
Jiyoung was standing in the middle of a labyrinth. Conscientiously and calmly, she was searching for a way out that didn’t exist to begin with.
Jiyoung did not feel good as she checked ‘NO’ with her own hand. The world had changed a great deal, but the little rules, contracts and customs had not, which meant the world hadn’t actually changed at all.
Kim Jiyoung lives in a small apartment on the outskirts of Seoul with her husband, Jung Daehyun, and her baby daughter Jung Jiwon. A middle child who grew up in a working class family, Jiyoung attended university and landed a job at a small marketing agency after graduation. One of just a handful of women, she enjoyed her work well enough but quit after just a few years to have and raise Jiwon.
About a year after Jiwon’s birth, Jiyoung started exhibiting strange symptoms: she would “become” other people. Always women, always known to her, both living and dead: for example, her own mother, Oh Misook, or Cha Seungyeon, a mutual college friend of both Jiyoung and Daehyun who died in childbirth. Alarmed, Daehyun sought the help of a psychiatrist; Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is presented as the doctor’s case study of Jiyoung.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is basically a laundry list of the misogynist slights that Korean women – and especially Korean mothers – are subjected to, both historically and in contemporary society. (Ditto: women who dare to live and breathe and exist in any patriarchal society. As someone born and raised in the United States, I found roughly 97.8% of Jiyoung’s experiences easily translatable across cultures.) Even as I explain the plot this way, it seems like Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 should make for a fairly tedious read; and yet, it’s anything but.
As Jiyoung’s psychiatrist traces a path through her early childhood, high school and university years, marriage, and motherhood, we’re forced to bear witness as a young girl’s spirit is beaten down, degraded, and eroded – just like her mother’s and grandmother’s before her – while, as outsiders looking in, we are powerless to stop it. We are watching a murder: psychological, emotional, psychic, spiritual. A death by a million cuts: some tiny, others not so much. Intergenerational trauma galore.
There are the “smaller” microaggressions, such as how the boys are always allowed to go first: served the first (and best) portions of food at home, or permitted to do their presentations first at school. Then there’s the bigger stuff: gender discrimination in hiring and pay; limited career opportunities and pink collar jobs; sex-selective abortion; the indoctrination into rape culture, starting in elementary school; sexual harassment and assault; the pressure to have children; and the simultaneous idolization and vilification of stay-at-home moms.
When Jiyoung finally “snaps,” you’ll wonder why it took so long. Her adoption of other personas isn’t the disease, but rather a symptom: of a society that dismisses, denigrates, devalues, and outright hates women. Only by becoming other women can she challenge the status quo. They function as Jiyoung’s protectors, when Jiyoung is barred from protecting herself. (Sometimes.)
I hate to quote Alyssa’s father, because he is 110% one of the pricks this story is about, but when the gif fits…
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The coup de grace is the psychiatrist’s personal notes at the end, wherein he recounts his own wife’s struggles, thus positioning himself as the rare male beast, better suited to understanding Jiyoung’s predicament than most. Mansplaining meets “not all men,” while completely and utterly failing to help either beleaguered woman. It’s enough to make you wonder why Jiyoung didn’t opt for a female psychiatrist … but only if you missed the entire point of the book.
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