Kim Jiyoung, Born

1982: A Novel
Approaching a book like Kim
Jiyoun 1982 is an enormous
undertaking; something that
should be done with real
consideration. The novel has sold
over a million copies in its native
South Korea, has been adapted
into a successful Korean film, and
has been a huge spark for the fires
of the #metoo movement in South
Korea.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is a

novel that has achieved so much,
done so much good, and is now finally available to
English-speaking readers. Even knowing where to begin
with reviewing it is a trial. This book is important. It
really matters.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 can be seen as the novelisation

of the lived experiences of every ordinary Korean
woman for the past forty years. It traces the life of a
single woman from early childhood to marriage
and motherhood.
The book begins with her being given an appointment
with a psychiatrist in 2016 after she has developed a
disturbing condition wherein she impersonates the
voices of, and embodies the personalities of, the women
in her life both alive and dead.
This condition is what initially introduces us to her
character, and it is a very clear statement to the reader
that Kim Jiyoung speaks for every ordinary woman of
20th and 21st Century South Korea.
Everything you may have heard about Kim Jiyoung,
Born 1982 being an impactful and important piece of
feminist fiction is true.

It is a book that brings to light the everyday misogyny,

sexism, ignorance, aggression, bias, and abuse (both
active and passive) that women in South Korea (and, of
course, the world over) suffer and do their best to
survive in this modern world. To really get the most out
of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, one of the most powerful
Korean novels, it’s important to first understand the
novel’s purpose. It is not a story with a view to
entertaining us. It is a book that enlightens, and
encourages anger in, its readers. Kim Jiyoung is not an
individual.
She is not a character to form a bond with. She is every
abuse victim. She is every woman who has encountered
sexism at home, at school, in the workplace, and on the
street, and who perhaps never even realised it.
Speculative fiction

Where Evolution Meets Creation: the Uncommonly

Speculative Fiction of Kim Bo Young’s On the Origin
of Species
 THE KOREA BLOG

By Colin Marshall06/20/2021

This is the second of a two-part series on the work of Kim Bo-young. The
first, on her collection I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories, is here.
 

“Speculative fiction” is in some quarters used as little more than a

euphemistic label for science fiction, by readers hoping to preempt
association with a stigmatized genre. But interpreted literally, the term
covers a vast imaginative field encompassing horror stories, fantasy
sagas, alternate history, and much else besides. Many writers specialize
in one or two such subcategories of speculative fiction; few if any could
be said to write speculative fiction itself, with the width of narrative
and intellectual range that would demand. But if any current writer of
my acquaintance does approach that ideal, it’s Kim Bo-young, whose
collection I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories I covered last time here
on the Korea Blog. That book, published in April by HarperVoyager,
was her very first in English translation. And just last month Los
Angeles’ Kaya Press put out another, On the Origin of Species and Other
Stories.

“If we see a person in the distance and they seem to have breasts, we
hastily assume that they must be a woman,” writes Kim in her
introduction to the new collection. “Science seems to occupy a similar
position in SF.” Though breasts may not in themselves make someone a
woman, Kim — a woman — notes that her own body “came equipped
with a set. I didn’t, for example, decide one day to install a pair myself.
Similarly, many of the stories I’ve written came into being without me
consciously trying to turn them into SF.” Still, they’ve been received
and even acclaimed as such, though some of them include nothing that
the casual reader of the genre would call science — or in any case, not
the kind of science that manifests in pieces of advanced future
technology like the spaceships flown in I’m Waiting for You.

The variety of science most consistently underlying On the Origin of

Species is, unsurprisingly, biology, and evolutionary biology in particular.
Several of its stories feature a humankind evolved, devolved, or
obliterated only to evolve all over again. In “An Evolution Myth,” a
fifteenth-century Korean crown prince undergoes a dramatic biological
transformation by himself: as he flees the kingdom when a hostile
cousin ascends to the throne, a process kicks in that aids his survival in
isolated exile by granting him various animalistic features. Eventually
the prince becomes a kind of all-powerful dragon, a type of creature
that dominates the devastated future Seoul of the following tale, “Last
of the Wolves.” Human beings still exist there, though they’ve taken on
lupine characteristics and mostly been domesticated by dragon
masters; the few who remain untamed squat in the “ancestral ruins” of
Dongdaemun Station and forage for soybeans in the overgrown
Gwanghwamun Square.

If you know Seoul as it is today, you know those are two well-trafficked
places in the city, and if you don’t, the story’s footnotes do their bit to
fill you in. Gwanghwamun Square, as one of them explains (at least to
readers who missed my piece on The Square at the National Museum of
Modern and Contemporary Art), is “one of Seoul’s most famous public
spaces and the site of a surviving gate to Gyeongbokgung, the main
royal palace of the Joseon Dynasty.” The footnotes don’t offer the
information that the period of the Joseon Dynasty lasted nearly five
centuries, from 1392 until 1897 — containing the life of that long-
suffering prince-turned-dragon —  and nor should they, since it would
violate the text’s respectful assumption of a certain amount of
familiarity on the reader’s part with Korea, if not with every detail of
Korea’s history and mythology.

Still, those who live here will find it at least a little funny to see
something as common as ddeokppokki spelled out. “Spicy rice cakes sold
by street vendors or at cheap restaurants,” says the footnote. “A
popular snack among school-age Koreans.” That definition comes
embedded in “Between Zero and One,” which has nothing to do with
biology but much to do time travel, a more conventional sci-fi subject
and one not often satisfyingly handled. But as in the title story of I’m
Waiting for You, Kim refrains from getting as fantastical with it as so
many writers fatally have, and again she anchors the concept in
everyday, even mundane Korean reality. The setting is populated by
nagging, academics-obsessed, socially competitive moms and their
exhausted, cramming-addled children, some of whom protest against
“College Entrance Exam-Centered Education” — in extreme cases, by
taking their own lives.

In discussing I’m Waiting for You, I mentioned that modern South

Koreans have experienced a kind of time travel, so rapidly and
dramatically has their homeland changed compared to other developed
countries over the past half-century. Here Kim offers another
explanation for the consequent generation gaps. “I don’t want to go to
school,” complains the story’s central teenager Soo-ae. “The teachers
are like people from another time.” But she means it literally: “Some
took refuge here during the Korean War. They still despise communism
and North Korea, even though we reunified ages ago. Some teachers
even came from the colonial era or from the Joseon era.” Soo-ae’s
mother pushes her to study English even though “computerized
translation today covers one hundred and sixty languages in real time,”
and what’s more, “it’s already been a long time since the decline of the
United States and the importance of its language.”

Clearly the US, whose bankruptcy and dissolution is similarly

referenced as a historical detail in “I’m Waiting for You,” doesn’t have a
place in Kim’s futures. But then, in the title story of On the Origin of
Species, the longest and most ambitious in the book, human civilization
itself has long since collapsed. The cause seems to have been a change
in the climate: as manmade factories “pumped out more and more
carbon dioxide, the earth’s temperature began to rise, resulting in an
extreme greenhouse effect. At some point, this process must have
crossed a certain threshold beyond which nothing could be done to
reverse the trend.” After the extinction of nearly all living things, this
still-thickening industrial cloud “blocked the sunlight and lowered the
earth’s temperature back down to its current state. Any organisms that
had survived to that point perished in this latest temperature
fluctuation.”

In this frozen desert of a world, only robots have survived. In fact

they’ve thrived, having not just taken over the factories but established
cities, universities, and even their own versions of history, philosophy,
and religion. It is within this self-sustaining mechanical-and-digital
society that one robot, an undergraduate student, posits a theory of
organic life. Though dismissed at the time as a crackpot notion, the
possibility of entities that can grow and decompose as if by themselves
— without the aid of a factory, somehow — gradually finds its adherents
among robotkind. Over the subsequent decades, or perhaps centuries
or millennia, their clandestine research and experimentation makes its
complicated and dangerous way to reproducing organic life, first simply
and then in the diversity of forms in which we know it today. For
robots, who have existential reason to fear even drops of water, this is
an alarming prospect indeed.

For those robots who pursue the development of so-called “organic

biology” all the way, however, the result is quasi-religious ecstasy. That
their newly evolved Homo sapiens inspires them to blind devotion, even
worship, stands to a kind of reason: what have they done if not re-
created their creator in their own image, having been created in that
image themselves in the first place? Kim’s descriptions of these robots’
components and means of interaction with their environment had me
envisioning Johnny 5 from the Short Circuit movies, but in the end it
came clear that they were meant to be close to humanoid. The
protagonist is of a model series with a deluxe face covered by a soft
skin-like material, “but that softness came with a price: the skin on
Kay’s face, like that of all 1029s, was so fragile that it cracked upon
exposure to the outside air.”

And so, “needless to say, cosmetic surgery was a booming industry

among the 1029s, who had taken to covering their faces with gold
plating that resembled that of the 700s.” Kim takes all the opportunities
presented by this robot society and the various different models that
constitute it to satirize aspects of human society, especially as
instantiated in 21st-century South Korea. “Despite the claim of having
abolished modelism, there was a limit to how quickly society could
change,” she writes, “so it was exceedingly rare for 2000s to receive a
higher education.” While most models communicate only through
speech, their faces presumably remaining as static as a Sticky
Monster‘s, the 2000s were designed to use facial expressions as well,
and the resulting obviousness of their feelings puts them at a serious
disadvantage in their personal and professional dealings.

This condition of inborn separation from the mainstream takes a variety

of forms throughout On the Origin of Species. “Perhaps foremost among
Kim’s thematic concerns,” as USC associate professor of Korean Studies
and Gender Studies Sunyoung Park puts it in an afterword, “is the
consideration of marginality, alterity, and radical difference.” That may
sound stiltedly academic, but Kim executes these considerations with a
playfulness as well as a comic instinct for reversal and
recontextualization. “I have no desire to start treatment,” a woman
writes to her brother in “Stars Shine in the Earth’s Sky.” “What chance
of cure it promises is of no consequence to me.” In due time Kim
reveals that this character suffers not from a terminal illness, but from
her society’s inability to accept her daily need to “plummet into a state
of total oblivion for a minimum of five to six hours.”

She has to sleep, in other words, but in her world most don’t. The
majority insist that the minority “beat” their unorthodox habit, but
“from where I stand, ‘beating’ what we have looks a lot like turning
ourselves into someone we’re not.” Remaining conscious at all times
“would mean abandoning myself. Throwing away every thing that is
truly me.” Kim at first seems to be constructing an uncharacteristically
blunt allegory for the angered incomprehension with which certain
people or ways of life meet in reality. But then the real speculation
begins: maybe on the distant planet of Earth, the narrator imagines, the
sky isn’t always bright. If Earth moves like she thinks it does, “the light
shining down on the planet would change with each hour.” Just imagine
— “a world that alternates regularly between light and dark. A world
where warmth and cold, activity and rest, change places every day.”

The fruit of labor by three different translation teams, mainly Joungmin

Lee Comfort and Sora Kim-Russell but also Eunhae Jo and Melissa Mei-
Lin Chan (“Between Zero and One”) and Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar
(“An Evolutionary Myth”), The Origin of Species provides what Park
describes as a representative selection of Kim’s earliest and most
successful work published in Korea. To the uninitiated reader, the
jarringly breast-themed disclaimer at the beginning also gives a sense of
Kim’s attitude: her attitude as a writer and thinker, yes, but also toward
the genre in which she has made her name, to an extent inadvertently
or even reluctantly. Yet in English or Korean, most of the stories
collected here do, neatly and at once, fulfill both of the broad goals of
science fiction: the inferior, making us reconsider the nature of our
society; and the superior, making us reconsider the nature of our
reality.