Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
A Novel
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Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
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Narrated by:
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Kathleen Choe
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Written by:
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Cho Nam-Joo
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Jamie Chang - translator
About this listen
Vulture Best Books of the Year (So Far)
A New York Times Editors Choice Selection
A fierce international best seller that launched Korea’s new feminist movement, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rigid misogyny.
Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.
In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A 30-something-year-old “millennial everywoman”, she has recently left her white-collar desk job - in order to care for her newborn daughter full-time - as so many Korean women are expected to do. But she quickly begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: Jiyoung impersonates the voices of other women - alive and even dead, both known and unknown to her. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her discomfited husband sends her to a male psychiatrist.
In a chilling, eerily truncated third-person voice, Jiyoung’s entire life is recounted to the psychiatrist - a narrative infused with disparate elements of frustration, perseverance, and submission. Born in 1982 and given the most common name for Korean baby girls, Jiyoung quickly becomes the unfavored sister to her princeling little brother. Always, her behavior is policed by the male figures around her - from the elementary school teachers who enforce strict uniforms for girls, to the coworkers who install a hidden camera in the women’s restroom and post their photos online. In her father’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s fault that men harass her late at night; in her husband’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s duty to forsake her career to take care of him and their child - to put them first.
Jiyoung’s painfully common life is juxtaposed against a backdrop of an advancing Korea, as it abandons “family planning” birth control policies and passes new legislation against gender discrimination. But can her doctor flawlessly, completely cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?
Rendered in minimalist yet lacerating prose, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 sits at the center of our global #MeToo movement and announces the arrival of writer of international significance.
©2016 Cho Nam-joo (P)2020 Audible, Inc.You may also enjoy...
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 5
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 3
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 3
Almost every afternoon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt sits on the same park bench, where she eats a cream bun while the local children make a game of trying to get her attention. Unbeknownst to her, she is being watched—by the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who is always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes, what she eats, whom she speaks to.
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What listeners say about Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Sudoba saifuddin
- 2022-11-09
Incredible
This book sheds a light on the patriarchy and it’s detrimental affect on Korean society.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Sarah
- 2022-04-03
Amazingly and frustratingly relatable.
I love the prose of this story. It's easy, to the point and says a lot without giving you a lot.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Me
- 2024-06-04
Highly Recommend!!
A serious look at the deep systematic misogyny in South Korea from the womans' perspective. I highly recommend this!
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Bernice Co
- 2020-10-08
Mundane but an important story
There was nothing extraordinary about this story, it’s something every woman specifically asian women deal with everyday. I know that the feminist revolution is still on the rise in Asia and this book did an amazing job to create a discourse about sexism in east Asia. I’m glad to have been able to relate to such a story that will create a positive impact in the Asian feminist movement!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Steffi Dias
- 2022-12-09
Poignant
Looks like an ordinary story but it’s the story of every Korean woman even in this day and age
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Fraser Simons
- 2021-06-01
Fantastic and different. Worth the read.
There are structural things about this work that are super interesting to me. It’s intersectional with auto fiction and nonfiction and literary fiction, for one, which creates a dissonance that makes a lot of sense when considering the ending of the story.
It made me think about how it’s a bit ingenious to make it intersectional like this in order to shift POV. Sometimes you’re Kim, sometimes you’re a disembodied watcher, and you don’t really know why for quite some time. Sometimes the disembodied narrator empathizes with Kim so much it slips into narration from her perspective, but then it slips out again into a distant analysis. With the last sentence of the work, I found that very clever.
It also effectively shifts the problems Kim faces from societal to the individual level. While it’s hardly the first to do this, I think it’s way more effective to demonstrate micro aggressions and misogyny from within a characters headspace because then male readers, such as myself, aren’t able to distance ourselves—which again, ties in nicely to the ending.
I totally understand why someone who was expecting literary fiction would feel let down. Expectations from that genre are so different from the goals of this book. It’s important to prepare the reader. I had already read reviews about this and knew it was different, so I had no problems on that front. It’s a challenging thing to classify, but I typically like these kinds of outliers.
Also, the narrator was great, imo!
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- S Harrison
- 2022-11-27
A Must Read!
Whoever and wherever you are, you need to read this book. It's written in such a style to make the reader feel as suffocated as the women themselves in this situation - and I think most women will relate heavily to this book. It describes the timeline and impact of sexism in a frank and illuminating way. If you're struggling to understand the insidious and sometimes small ways gender inequality saturates women's lives from the very beginning, this is a great start. I can't recommend it enough.
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