Kim Ji-young, born in 1982

"I hope that 10 years from now, we can stop letting Kim Ji-young, who was born in 1992, fall into despair."


Kim Ji-young was born on April 1, 1982 in Seoul.

She had a vegetable market nickname common among girls of that generation. She grew up in an ordinary civil servant family. She studied humanities in college and finally found a relatively stable job after graduation. At the age of 31, she married her college senior, and they had a daughter three years after their marriage. Then, under everyone's "natural" expectations, she quit her job and became an ordinary housewife...

One day, Kim Ji-young's speech and actions became abnormal. When talking to her husband, she used the tone of her own mother, or transformed herself into a deceased senior schoolmate and blurted out shocking words. When she went to her husband's house in Busan to celebrate the holidays, she acted as her own mother and expressed her inner dissatisfaction to her mother-in-law as the "mother-in-law". Finally, her husband decided to take her to receive psychological counseling. During the conversation with the doctor, she slowly revealed her life story...

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My name is Jin Zhiying, I was born in 1982.
This is my story, and maybe your real life too...

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This book is like a live broadcast of life, telling the series of fear, exhaustion, shock, fright, confusion and frustration that women feel in society. Through the life of the heroine Kim Ji-young, the film specifically explores where society's injustice and prejudice against women manifest themselves. How does this invisible gender discrimination restrict and suppress women’s lives? What exactly have women sacrificed in their families, workplaces, and marriages?

The entire text is based on Kim Ji-young's memories, occasionally citing statistics and literature reports to support those memories, with the intention of portraying her life in a more realistic and universal way. It is in such an ordinary documentary-like life that there lies a shocking criticism of reality. From the name of the protagonist of the novel to the life story she has experienced, it seems that everyone can see their own shadow in her, which makes people feel empathy and heartbroken when reading it.


Award-winning record

★ The best book of the year in the category of literary fiction selected by Korean bookstores in 2017
★ Top 1 in the best-selling new books list, Top 1 in the novel category in physical and online bookstores
★ The best-selling novel in Korea in the first half of 2017, with cumulative sales exceeding 600,000 copies since its release
★ Aladdin Bookstore bestseller, ranked in the top ten for 23 consecutive weeks
★ Ranked second on the overall list of Yes24, the largest online bookstore in Korea, and won the Writer of the Year Award

Celebrity recommendation <br data-mce-fragment="1">　　　<br data-mce-fragment="1">Wang Chunzi (illustrator)
Wu Ruoquan (writer/radio host/business consultant)
Li Haozhong (chief editor/writer of Shangbao)
Lin Jingru (lawyer’s wife)
Yujie Ai (author) unanimously recommended

Readers' response to Korean online bookstores

If there are still people who haven't read this book, I would strongly recommend that they should read it. This is a book that completely enlightened me. The things that I took for granted in the past turned out not to be reasonable at all. 김상희

Watching Kim Ji-young's life story, it was as if I saw my own future. I knew that I would not be able to escape such a fate, so I silently shed tears of unwillingness as I read on. The world has been constantly changing, but until the world where I, as a woman, can stand firmly on my own feet, I am afraid there is still some way to go. 2

It took me less than a day to finish reading her life story because it was a very familiar story, almost exactly the same as my own. Those depressions and worries that I didn’t know about before marriage, never thought about before having children, and the imaginable future, this is not a novel at all, but my life report. 2

Cho Nam-joo
Born in Seoul in 1978, graduated from the Department of Sociology at Ewha Womans University. He has been a screenwriter for current affairs education programs such as "PD Handbook", "Dissatisfaction ZERO", and "Live This Morning" for more than ten years. He has a keen sense of social phenomena and problems, and has a thorough understanding. He is good at using realistic and resonant storytelling techniques to present the real tragedies in ordinary people's daily lives.

In 2011, he won the "Literary Village Novel Award" for his novel "Listening"; in 2016, he won the "Huangshanfa Youth Literature Award" for his novel "For Komanaji"; in 2017, he won the "Today's Writer Award" for "Kim Ji-young, Born 1982".

This book was written after the author witnessed the "Mom Bug" incident in late 2014. She felt the society's violent gaze towards women, especially women with children, and was shocked to write this novel. Machong is a newly coined Korean word that combines the English words "mom" and "chong". It is used to belittle young mothers who are unable to discipline their children who make loud noises in public. Although this new term is used to refer to some mothers who have poor parenting skills, it is indiscriminately applied to most mothers, causing widespread fear and pain.

The author was a housewife when she wrote the article and her daughter was in kindergarten. She was concerned about the attitudes online that disparaged mothers based on one-sided accounts, so she began to explore the lives of modern Korean women.