12/15/2023 0 Comments Romantic moods woman sleepwear![]() ![]() Just like the main character, Kim, Heo's mother delayed college because her brother - the male in the family - took first priority. ![]() "It made me think a lot about my mother," Heo says. Then I realized maybe that isn't the way things should be. "If we women all go through these experiences, then they should be discussed together, in a public way," Cho says. Cho Nam-Joo says she wanted to make personal experiences public. And harsh stigmas exist around menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth. Despite being highly educated, about half its working-age women stay home, something the US hasn't seen since the early 1980s. South Korea's gender wage gap is the widest in the developed world, by a long shot women make 63 cents to a man's dollar. The book may be fiction, but she fills it with real-life examples and data about the state of gender equality in her country. "I just wanted this book to be in the bookshelves, in bookstores and the library as evidence of how women in this era, the 2010s, lived, thought and made efforts," Cho says through an interpreter. She says she never expected it to take off - and she didn't even know if she could get a book deal. I thought of Kim Jiyoung's character as a vessel that contains experiences and emotions that are common to every Korean woman.Īuthor Cho Nam-Joo wrote the book inside of three months. "So in that way it doesn't just represent one person's experience, but everybody's experience." "For Korean women, this is the first novel that offered a full, panoramic, cradle to present-day view of all of their collective plight," says Jamie Chang, who translated the work into English. But the book is full of demoralizing daggers flung at Kim, an everywoman in Korea's punishingly patriarchal society. No love affairs, no crime, no wild plot twists. ![]() She starts by sharing her memories of childhood, then her school years, college, getting married, getting a white collar job and becoming a mom. In it, protagonist Kim Jiyoung, an ordinary woman in her mid-30s, recounts the beats of her life. The story itself doesn't sound like it would be the stuff of a meteoric bestseller. Nearly four years after debuting in its native country - and months after the film adaptation hit theaters, the book is now available in English. How?Īcross South Korea, a slim novel called Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, by Cho Nam-Joo, became a cultural sensation when it came out, selling more than a million copies. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 Author Cho Nam-Joo ![]()
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