The Diminishment of Women Theme Analysis

Then came the Chuseok harvest holidays. They were visiting Daehyun’s parents down in Busan. […] They had lunch with Daehyun’s parents immediately after they arrived, and Daehyun, tired from the long drive, took a nap. Daehyun and Jiyoung used to take turns at the wheel on long drives, but ever since their daughter was born, Daehyun did all the driving. The baby fussed, whined, and cried every time they put her in the car seat, and Jiyoung was better at keeping her occupied and happy by playing with her and giving her snacks.

Jiyoung did the dishes after lunch, took a coffee break and went to the market with her mother-in-law to shop for Chuseok food. They spent the afternoon boiling the ox bone, marinating ribs, prepping and blanching the vegetables to season some and freeze the rest for later, washing and preparing seafood for the next day’s pancakes and fritters, making, eating, and clearing dinner.

Disappointment flashed across the mother’s face. “It isn’t work when you’re feeding your own family. The point of the holidays is to get together, make and eat food together.”

“Still, I get to eat warm food my son made for me, and sleep under warm covers my son arranged for me because I had four sons. You have to have at least four sons.”

Oh Misook, her son’s wife, was the one who cooked the warm food and laid out the warm covers for her, not her son, but Koh Boonsoon had a habit of saying so anyway. Easy-going considering the life she’d had, and relatively caring toward her daughter-in-law compared to other mothers-in-law of her generation, she would say from the bottom of her heart, for her daughter-in-law’s sake, “You should have a son. You must have a son. You must have at least two sons…”

When Kim Jiyoung was in elementary school, her mother was reading a one-line comment her homeroom teacher had made on her journal assignment and said, “I wanted to be a teacher, too.”

Jiyoung burst into laughter. She found the idea outrageous because she’d thought until then that mothers could only be mothers.

He likes me? He picks on me because he likes me? Jiyoung was confused. She went over the series of incidents that she had suffered because of him, and still couldn’t make sense of what the teacher was saying. If you like someone, you’re friendlier and nicer to them. To friends, to family, to your pet dogs and cats. Even at the age of eight, this was common sense to Jiyoung. The desk-mate’s pranks made school life so difficult for her. What he’d put her through was awful enough, and now the teacher was making her out to be a bad child who misunderstood her friend.

One of her friends got a bouquet of flowers from her father when she started her periods, another had a family party complete with cake. But to most girls it was a secret shared only among mothers and daughters. An irritating, painful, somehow shameful secret. It was no different in Jiyoung’s family. The mother avoided referring to it directly, as if something that should not be said out loud had happened, as she offered her ramen soup.

But that night, Jiyoung got an earful from her father. “Why is your cram school so far away? Why do you talk to strangers? Why is your skirt so short?” Jiyoung grew up being told to be cautious, to dress conservatively, to be “ladylike.” That it’s your job to avoid dangerous places, times of day and people. It’s your fault for not noticing and not avoiding.

She couldn’t picture herself at the company ten years down the road and resigned after some thought. Her boss grumbled, “This is why we don’t hire women.” She replied, “Women don’t stay because you make it impossible for us to stay.”

The first thing she did when she became management was get rid of unnecessary company dinners, retreats, and workshops. She guaranteed maternity and paternity leave. She said she’d never forget how proud she felt when she presented a bouquet of flowers as a welcome-back present to one of her team members, who returned from a year-long maternity leave for the first time in the company’s history.

“Who is she?” Jiyoung asked.

“She left a few months after that.”

The team member couldn’t help out with the frequent late nights and weekends as well. Most of her paycheck went to the babysitter, and even then she was always frantically looking for someone to watch her child at short notice, and fighting with her husband over the phone every day. She came into work with her baby one weekend and ended up throwing in the towel. When the subordinate apologized for quitting on her, Kim Eunsil didn’t know what to say.

“My daughter attends the university right here. She was studying late at the library and wants me to come and pick her up because she’s scared to go home by herself. Apologies all round, but I have to go. Miss Kim Jiyoung, finish that beer!”

At that, a frail bit of hope inside Jiyoung crumpled. In a few years, that precious daughter of yours will find herself exactly where I am now. Unless people like you stop treating me this way.

“Everyone fumbles in the beginning. You get better with practice. Jiyoung will handle it well,” Daehyun’s mother concluded.

No, I don’t think I’ll handle it well, Jiyoung thought to herself. Oppa knows more about housework from living by himself for years, and he said he’d take care of everything when we get married. But both Jiyoung and Daehyun only smiled.

As hard as she tried not to, she couldn’t help feeling she was bargaining something away.

Since she became a full-time housewife, she often noticed that there was a polarized attitude regarding domestic labor. Some demeaned it as “bumming around at home,” while others glorified it as “work that sustains life,” but none tried to calculate its monetary value. Probably because the moment you put a price on something, someone has to pay.

“The fact that they have families and parents,” Eunsil retorted, “is why they shouldn’t do these things, not why we should forgive them.”

In fact, Eunsil was scared and exhausted herself. All of them—the team leader Eunsil, Kang Hyesu and the victims standing with them—wanted this case to be resolved soon so that they could go back to their lives. While offenders were in fear of losing a small part of their privilege, the victims were running the risk of losing everything.

Looking at the moments and scenes in Kim Jiyoung’s life that she chose to share in our sessions, I realize that I may have diagnosed her hastily. I’m not saying I was wrong, only that I’ve come to realize there is a world that I wasn’t aware of.

Even the best female employees can cause many problems if they don’t have the childcare issue taken care of. I’ll have to make sure her replacement is unmarried.