Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982: A Novel

"The offspring of Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 imagines the modern day Korean woman as a “mom roach” – a creature gradually stripped of all human agency, metaphorically turned into vermin by the patriarchy’s crushing prerogatives. Endowed with a generic Korean female name, Jiyoung is an educated, 33-year-old woman who gives up her job at a marketing firm to care for her infant daughter. Soon she begins to experience psychotic episodes where she channels the voices of other women – both living and dead – to assert herself in public situations. In her dis/integration, Jiyoung represents the collective fate of all modern Korean women whose inexorable oppression – perpetuated by seemingly supportive fathers and husbands – becomes doubly devastating. The novel also asks a salient question: “Do laws and institutions change values, or do values drive laws and institutions?”"