However, the siblings had yet to realize that their brother was given special treatment. Only when Misook gave birth to Jiyoung’s younger brother was she considered a successful wife in the eyes of her mother-in-law, reflecting the general attitude at the time that viewed women as son-producing factories.Īs little girls, Jiyoung and her sister must share everything and do household chores, while their younger brother enjoyed his childhood without being burdened by anything. When she was pregnant again soon after the birth of Jiyoung, Misook decided to abort the fetus after knowing that it was a girl. It was told that when Jiyoung and her sister were born, Misook cried and apologized to her mother in law for failing to give birth to a son. She has an elder sister, Kim Eunyoung, and a younger brother. Kim Jiyoung is the second child in a family of five, born to mother Oh Misook and an unnamed father. The chapter on childhood reveals a great deal about the traditional view regarding gender in South Korea, starting from the blatant unequal treatment toward sons and daughters, to how girls learn to internalize these misogynistic behavior and even rationalize them. Through these stories, the readers witness how Kim Jiyoung learned her place in society as a woman, before she could even question and challenge the status quo. The book is divided into several chapters based on Kim Jiyoung’s phases of life: childhood, adolescence, early adulthood and marriage. During these episodes, Kim Jiyoung would criticize her family and her husband, pointing out their lack of sensitivity and unfair treatment toward her as a woman. Kim Jiyoung, a wife and a mother to one daughter, is experiencing dissociative episodes in which she turns to other people - from her mother to her late friend. In less than 200 pages, told in the style of clinical notes made by a psychologist, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 tells the life story of Kim Jiyoung from her birth to her current predicament. However, Kim Jiyoung and her life story unravels the lives of girls and women in a patriarchal society, the internalized misogyny that has taken root in the women themselves, and how gender inequality is so detrimental that not only does it rob opportunities from women, it erases their existences as individuals. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, on the surface, is only a story about a woman and her psychological problem. My routine, my career, my dreams, my entire life, my self-I gave it all up to raise our child. Am I stealing from you? I suffered deathly pain having our child. “It’s nobody’s business what I do with the money my husband made.

Book born 1982