KIM JIYOUNG, BORN 1982

By Cho Nam-Joo

I hated reading “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982,” the debut novel by Cho Nam-Joo, which is the opposite of saying that I hated the book itself. The story of a young stay-at-home mother driven to a psychotic break, it 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.

Upon its publication in South Korea in 2016, the book, which sold more than a million copies, had an “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” effect, propelling a feminist wave. It’s easy to see why.

The novel begins with Jiyoung having a dissociative episode. One day she wakes up not as herself but, to her husband’s horror and confusion, as her mother — speaking and acting just as her mother would. Another day she claims to be a schoolmate who died in childbirth the previous year. As her psychiatrist later puts it: “Jiyoung became different people from time to time. Some of them were living, others were dead, all of them women she knew. No matter how you looked at it, it wasn’t a joke or prank. Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.”

We eventually learn about the event that triggered Jiyoung’s descent into madness. On her last day as a woman in her right mind, she is sitting by herself on a park bench when a group of young office workers mock her for having the audacity to drink a cup of coffee in the middle of the day on her husband’s dime. They call her a “mum-roach” — a pejorative expression for an entitled woman of leisure.