This novel, first published in South Korea in 2016, led to a minor upheaval there. While feminists lauded it for bringing to light the lifelong discriminations faced by South Korean women in a largely patriarchal society, detractors alleged that it made sexist generalisations against men and distorted reality. One can imagine a similar book stoking similar reactions in India: happy societies are all alike, aren’t they?
Little rules
Middle-class, 30-something Kim Jiyoung, whose mind starts unravelling suddenly, is an everywoman. When she is born, her paternal grandmother is disappointed because she had hoped for a boy; growing up, she and her elder sister share a room while their brother gets one of his own; when she is stalked, her father blames her; although she works hard, she never gets a promotion while undeserving male employees go places; her looks are commented upon by random men she meets at work; once she becomes a mother, she has to give up her career and independence to look after the child — if none of this sounds startling to us, it is because most women in Asia are in the same situation. Not surprisingly, the novel became a bestseller in Japan, China and Taiwan. And why just Asia. As the Metoo revelations proved, even in seemingly privileged nations, the ‘second sex’ remains under-privileged oftener than not.
Kim’s story is told in a flat monotone, indicative of the banality of the endemic evil of gender discrimination. Cho Nam-Joo can hardly be accused of bending reality to suit her narrative — she backs up her presentation of the hurdles women are confronted with at every stage of their lives with hard data, which are cited in the footnotes. So, abortion of female foetuses, daughters
supporting male siblings’ career to their own detriment, the glass ceiling in workplaces, women earning less than men in the same position — all this is supported by statistics and reports, lest they be mistaken as fiction. And Cho Nam-Joo doesn’t spare women either — many of them, even presumably enlightened ones like Kim’s teachers, are shown as having internalised patriarchal diktats and weaponising them against their own sex.
When the crisis comes — Kim starts speaking in the voices of other women, like that other much-abused woman, Grace, does under hypnosis in Atwood’s Alias Grace — you see it almost as an inevitability, the figurative made literal. Kim is one in the long line of women whose life is predetermined before her birth and whose minor resistances can create no ripple. “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.” Denied her own voice, the voices of other women in her unconscious come to the surface, scaring everybody around her.
Last seen, she is recovering with the help of therapy and medicines. But when the doctor treating her says, “while her symptoms have decreased in frequency, they have yet to disappear,” you fear what Kim will turn into once her symptoms do disappear under the male psychiatrist’s ministrations. A model ‘normal’ citizen, like her mother, mother-in-law, her sister-in law, grandmother, who are deemed normal only because they have successfully taught themselves not to rock the boat?
Here, a spoiler alert is in order: Kim’s story is narrated by the psychiatrist based on her and her husband’s account of her life. He appears to be a woke man who has been made aware of a reality other than that of the average Korean male’s by following his wife’s career trajectory — a promising medical student, she ends up as a stay-at-home mommy.
Forever passive
He is sympathetic, of course, but so is Kim’s husband. Yet neither of them actively helps their respective wives to choose differently. And the final remark the doctor makes about his female colleague who is quitting because of her pregnancy — “Even the best female employees can cause many problems if they don’t have the childcare issue taken care of. I’ll have to make sure her replacement is unmarried” — makes him, at one fell stroke, one of ‘them’, the Korean males and institutionalised females in positions of power who must screen a female applicant’s personal life before considering her for the job. Given this, how reliable a narrator has he been all through?
Considering Kim Jiyoung as a work of literature rather than a social document, I wish this aspect of the narrative was explored further. Kim is forever passive — whenever something goes wrong, she is shown crying, rushing out, outraged, mortified — and that’s that. Didn’t she hit back, ever? She could have chosen not to become a mother — facts show that South Korea’s fertility rate has been decreasing down the years — why did she do what her husband wanted of her despite knowing that motherhood might mean the end of her career? Is the novel the doctor’s subjective interpretation of her story or is it Kim herself who is doggedly naïve throughout? Reading Kim Jiyoung it seems women are fated to be victims. Surely that’s not true?
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982; Cho Nam-Joo, trs Jamie Chang, Simon & Schuster India, ₹450
anusua.m@thehindu.co.in
Published - April 11, 2020 04:00 pm IST
