The Paradox of Feminist Writing
8 min read
Feminist fiction turns on an unresolvable tension: Writers must acknowledge patriarchy’s near-universal reach without paving over the acute specificity of women’s lives. What makes this difficult is that misogyny, though mean, is not clever; it deploys the same old tricks, over and over again. Yet not all women respond to sexism with identical emotional choreography. Even those who share the same culture will not always see one another’s experiences clearly; solidarity is not a given. This friction between collective struggle and individual personhood animates Miss Kim Knows, a new collection of eight stories from the South Korean author Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang.
Like her star-making novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which was published in 2016, translated into English in 2020, and subsequently longlisted for a National Book Award, Miss Kim Knows focuses on the quotidian lives of Korean women. Most of the collection’s primary characters are middle-class working adults, although a few are elderly or nearing retirement, and the youngest is a newly minted fifth grader. Across these varied seasons of life, Cho’s characters contend with—and repudiate—the insidious influence of male-dominated social structures on their relationships, both intimate and professional. Characters break up with their boyfriends, or reject traditional domestic roles. A widow changes her name from Mallyeo, or “last girl”—chosen by her parents to summon boy children—to Dongju, “bronze bead,” a nickname bestowed by her beloved elder sister. Another woman, unjustly fired, refuses to leave quietly and instead seeks revenge on her workplace.
Decidedly a companion to Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, Miss Kim Knows is Cho’s third book to be translated into English (in 2019 she published the novel Saha, which is set in a corporatized dystopia). Again, Cho invokes the name Kim, in this case to refer to a key character in the title story, as well as other characters throughout the collection, both principal and peripheral. Kim, one of the most common last names in Korea, connotes, in her fiction, an everywoman. At first glance, the repetition of such a name might register as homogenizing, a slapdash effort to unify Korean women in their shared plight. As Cho takes pains to convey, sexism saturates nearly every corner of South Korean society: in the blatant preference for male children common especially among elder generations; in the widespread tolerance of sexual and physical violence against women; in workplace gender discrimination. Yet the might of Cho’s storytelling resides in her tender precision; her style is distinguished by keen attention to each character’s particular foibles and agitations.
In Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, the titular character develops a bizarre postpartum psychosis, which seems at first like a direct response to the exhaustion of new motherhood. Yet, as Cho emphasizes, Jiyoung’s illness is not a stand-alone phenomenon; rather, it marks a breaking point, a powerful psychological crack under the punishing exertion required to navigate a society built for men. Jiyoung begins to impersonate other women’s voices, “some of them … living, others … dead, all of them women she knew … Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.” The metaphor performs a balancing act: Jiyoung is just one woman among millions, but sexism is so commonplace that she easily inhabits these other personas. This ethos of fellowship, without implying identical experience, underpins the Kim motif across the two works, and renders Cho’s fiction both sensitive and philosophically cogent.
When Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 was published in English, Cho described her motivations as explicitly political. As she explained in an interview with The New York Times, her goal was to make sexism in Korea “a public debate.” (She succeeded. A national conversation on gender blossomed after the novel’s publication; politicians and pop-culture figures alike championed it.) That righteous intent informs both narrative scope and tone: Kim Jiyoung is relentlessly diligent in its portrait of a woman undone by the ravages of her society. The reader takes leave of the novel bone-chilled, their stomach crackling with uneasy urgency, as if they held in their hands a feminist pamphlet, rather than a work of fiction.
Miss Kim Knows shares the political concerns of Cho’s first novel, but elaborates on them. This makes it a more emotionally refined work of literature, populated by more introspective characters. “I’m not doing anything productive, just taking step after step towards death each day. Does my life have meaning?” wonders the elderly narrator of “Under the Plum Tree,” the collection’s opening story, as she reflects on the quiet routineness of old age. This is a typical enough question to ask oneself, especially in the twilight of one’s life. But the anxiety in this case feels more specific: How does a woman abide, even enjoy, a life scaffolded by ideologies and traditions that diminish her?
Unlike Kim Jiyoung, the characters in Miss Kim Knows are, for the most part, not in crisis, at least not in the present. But neither are they satisfied, and Cho meticulously renders this discontent. When the narrator of “Dead Set” recalls her older brother’s domineering influence over their family affairs, it feels “like swallowing a very tiny, fragile fishbone every day.” Distressed by her only child’s pregnancy announcement, Hyogyeong, the narrator of “Night of Aurora” (the collection’s strongest, most full-bodied story) confesses that after years of grueling domestic ministry—maintained while also advancing a career outside the home—she’s looking forward to retirement. And yet she knows that, like many Korean grandmothers, she will be expected to devote herself to the care of another child, her own desires perpetually deferred.
The conflicts at the center of these stories reside in the characters’ inability, or outright refusal, to swallow their discomforts in the interest of preserving the peace. Across this collection, Cho’s characters search for agency and sometimes even find it. Still, these women understand their prescribed roles; they are sensitive to the expectations of the people who love them, or who depend on them. Many of their decisions—whether to leave a relationship, to deny a family member support, or to publish fiction based on experience as the victim of sibling abuse—emerge from painful processes of self-determination, and they arrive at them alone.
Meanwhile, the men who populate these stories have little sway over women’s choices. Some are rendered obsolete through death, others through distance. Many are troublesome—or worse—but the impediments they pose are not insuperable. “Dear Hyunnam Oppa,” a goodbye letter from an unnamed narrator to her ex-boyfriend, chronicles the latter’s manipulative, gaslighting abuse. But more important, it records the narrator’s assertions of hard-won truths: that her boyfriend corrupted her reality through derogation, lies, and systematic isolation; that she does not want to have children; that she prefers her meat grilled, rather than boiled.
“Dear Hyunnam Oppa” is the only story that foregrounds a breakup, but its cool appraisal of straight romantic partnerships—and its implication that women often gain little by them—abides throughout the collection. In Miss Kim Knows, heterosexual relationships are either actively dissolving or recalled with ambivalence. Though Cho avoids universal gestures, one thing her primary female characters have in common is that they are largely uninterested in finding romantic love. Instead, they cultivate other intimacies, which tend to flourish in the absence of men.
That tendency is evident in “Runaway,” which sees the narrator’s 72-year-old father abandon his family without warning. He leaves only a note to his wife with a firm directive: “Don’t come looking for me.” As it turns out, his departure yields few disadvantages: No longer mediated by the head of household’s stern, importunate presence, the narrator, her brothers, and their mother grow closer to one another. The narrator also breaks up with her long-term boyfriend, as if her father’s abrupt disappearance has undermined her attachment to conventional romantic arrangements. She begins a group text with her older brothers and renews the lease on her apartment, where she lives alone. She rejects the customary trajectory, in which a woman leaves home and forms a new allegiance to her husband, while also repairing ties in her family of origin. This fracture in the nuclear family ushers in a rush of oxygen.
The book withholds judgment of its characters’ actions. Instead, these stories are united by the implicit trust they place in their protagonists, as they suss out new frameworks for their relationships and, sometimes, their lives. In “Night of Aurora,” Hyogyeong is eager to fulfill her long-deferred dream of traveling to Canada to see the aurora borealis. But after her daughter, Jihye, has her baby, she makes clear that she expects her mother to prioritize caring for him.
Hyogyeong doesn’t want to look after her grandson. Moreover, she dismisses Jihye’s attempts to make her feel guilty. “You left me with Grandma and did whatever you wanted,” protests Jihye. “I’ve been hearing that all my life,” Hyogyeong replies. “The guilt trip doesn’t work on me anymore.”
Ultimately, Hyogyeong makes her Canadian pilgrimage, with nary a regret. Rewarded by the aurora’s splendor, she is overcome, and howls a tearful declaration to the polychromatic sky: “I don’t want to take care of [my grandson]! I really, really don’t want to! I won’t take him over the holidays. I won’t take him when he starts first grade.” It is not what another grandmother might choose, and it is not what her daughter wants. It is one woman’s desire, clarified and affirmed, in defiance of her only child.
Solidarity and self-determination can, at times, make for unwieldy bedfellows: When Hyogyeong honors her own desires, her daughter suffers the consequences. Yet the story’s denouement indicates that Hyogyeong and Jihye will mend their relationship; in fact, Hyogyeong’s epiphany begets Jihye’s own realization that she, too, does not wish to sacrifice her ambitions to domesticity. Her mother’s decision, like any progress, is painful in its demands. And though neither Jihye nor her mother realizes it at the time, Hyeogyeong’s act of self-interest is also an unintended gesture of encouragement toward her daughter, a signal that she, too, can make the choices that are right for herself alone.
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