Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, and the Voices She Had to Borrow

The holiday is nearly over. Since the day before, Kim Ji-young has been on her feet in her husband’s parents’ house in Busan: cooking for a crowd, clearing up after the ancestral rites, washing up, scrambling out of bed in the morning because she could hear her mother-in-law already moving about the kitchen. There has been a present, too, handed over as if it were something precious: an apron, a free one from a bank, which her mother-in-law says she queued a long time to get for her.

The bags are packed. Ji-young is minutes from leaving for her own parents’ house when her mother-in-law’s daughter arrives with her family, home for the holiday. The daughter is told to sit down and rest. Ji-young is told to warm the pancakes again and bring out some fruit, and then, with a wide smile, that if she is tired she should go and lie down.

She takes off the apron and turns to the room, and the voice that comes out of her is not her own. It is her mother’s: the manner, the cadence, the courtesy of one mother addressing another. She tells her mother-in-law that she too would like to see her daughter, and that she cannot see her unless her daughter is sent home.

The room goes still. Her husband takes her out to the car. Afterwards she remembers none of it.

This is the scene most people carry away from Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, Kim Do-young’s 2019 film of Cho Nam-joo’s novel, and it is usually described as the moment a quiet woman cracks. Look at it again. Nothing in that kitchen cracks. The sentence is the most lucid thing anyone says in the film: courteous, accurate and impossible to answer. The only trouble is who says it. From a daughter-in-law it would be ingratitude. From Ji-young’s own mother, speaking to the woman whose son her daughter married, it is one mother asking another for what any mother would ask. Korean has a respectful form of address that the two mothers of a married couple use for each other, sabuin, and the sentence opens with it.

That is what this essay is about. Ji-young is not a woman who has lost her words. Her words are intact, and when they come out they are sharper than anyone else’s. What she lacks is standing: a place from which the true sentence can be said in the first person without being heard as complaint, or ingratitude, or selfishness. So the sentences come out in the voices of women who have that standing. The film, in its gentler way, is about how she comes to have a little of her own.

This essay discusses the whole film, including its ending, and sets that ending beside the very different one in the novel. If you would rather meet the film first, this will keep.

The outline can be short, because the film’s events are small on purpose. Ji-young is in her thirties, married to Jung Dae-hyun, an office worker, and at home with their small daughter. To have the baby she gave up a job she loved at a marketing firm, where she admired her team leader, Kim Eun-sil, the only woman in charge. Now her days are laundry, meals and the playground, and to anyone who asks, her husband included, she says she is fine.

At moments of strain she begins to speak as other women, most strikingly her own mother and her late grandmother, and afterwards remembers nothing. Dae-hyun, frightened, films the episodes in secret and goes to a psychiatrist on his own. Rather than tell his wife what he has seen, he gives her the doctor’s card. She takes it and does not go, because the sessions cost too much.

She wants to work again. Kim Eun-sil, who has left to start her own firm, offers her a way back, and Dae-hyun offers to take a year’s parental leave, knowing it may cost him promotion. His mother hears of it and rings Ji-young in a fury about her son’s career. No sitter can be found. Ji-young’s own mother, Mi-sook, who gave up her schooling so that her brothers could study, sees one of the episodes for herself and weeps. Ji-young lets the job go.

At last she asks Dae-hyun why he keeps pushing her towards a doctor, and he shows her the videos. Shaken, she asks what she should do first, and begins treatment. She talks about what has worn her down, at home and at work, and the episodes ease. When strangers sneer at her again, she answers back. Her younger brother gives her a fountain pen engraved with her name. She starts to write, her pieces appear in magazines, and the film ends with her at a desk, beginning a book of her own.

That is nearly everything that happens. The weight of the film is not in its events. It is in who may say what, to whom, and in whose voice.

Take the episodes together and a pattern shows. Each borrowed voice belongs to a woman who has the standing to say the particular sentence that Ji-young cannot.

To her mother-in-law, at the holiday table, she speaks as her own mother: one parent to another. Once, to her husband, she speaks as a friend from their university days who has since died, and tells him how his wife is really doing and what she would like to hear from him. A friend may say that; a wife who asked for it herself would be heard as asking for praise. And to her mother, Mi-sook, she speaks as Mi-sook’s own late mother, and says the thing that only the person who did the wrong can say. We will come to that scene. It is the one audiences wept at.

Korean critics noticed the same composure. Writing for the Korean Film Archive’s database, the critic Cho Hye-young observed that in these episodes Ji-young sets out her views with complete reason and coherence. The borrowed voice is not disordered. It is organised. The novel’s English translator, Jamie Chang, told the BBC that while she worked she kept asking Kim Ji-young why she didn’t speak up, why she didn’t say something. The film’s answer is that she does. She says exactly the right thing to exactly the right person. She simply cannot do it as herself.

Kim Do-young has described her film as the story of a woman who has lost her words and goes looking for them. The episodes suggest a slightly different sentence. The words were never lost. They were there all along, arranged and ready. What she lacked was a mouth she was allowed to use.

A word about what this essay will not do. The film sends Ji-young to a psychiatrist and lets us sit in on some of her sessions; it does not ask its audience to settle on a name for what is happening to her, and this essay will not offer one. The episodes are the film’s device, and a device can be read without being diagnosed. What the film shows is enough: a woman under strain who speaks in other women’s voices, remembers nothing afterwards and, once she knows, asks for help.

The word Ji-young uses in place of all this is “fine”. She says it to her husband and to anyone who asks. The film’s Korean publicity built its synopsis around it: whatever happens, she just smiles at her husband and says she is fine. When the film opened in Japan in October 2020, the distributor’s summary had her telling her husband, and herself, that she is only tired, that she is fine. An earlier essay in this Library, “The Woman Who Holds Everything Is Not Fine. She Is Skilled.”, called competence the most convincing disguise exhaustion has ever worn. Fine is that disguise in its plainest form.

Fine is not a lie. It is a policy, and a reasonable one. It is what a woman says when every true sentence within reach has a price on it. “I miss my work” sounds like a complaint about her child. “I am exhausted” sounds like an accusation against a husband who is also tired. “I would like to go home now” sounds like contempt for the family in whose kitchen she is standing. Fine costs nothing today. It is paid for later, and by her.

The film is precise about what the policy holds in place. The job she gave up was one she was good at, under a team leader she hoped to become, and when a way back opens it brings the arithmetic that anyone who has tried will recognise, arriving from every side at once. Nobody in that arithmetic is a villain. The sitter who cannot be found, the husband whose offer of leave is sincere and will cost him, the mother-in-law on the phone about her son’s prospects: each is being reasonable, and together they make a wall.

The film opens on her from behind, standing on the balcony at sunset, the hour at which, she says, her heart sometimes drops. It is a small line and a telling one. The unhappiness has been filed under the time of day, as if it were weather.

This is the first self the film asks her to outgrow, and it is worth being careful about which self it is. It is not the mother. The film never suggests that loving her daughter was the mistake. It is the woman who says fine: the policy, not the person. A policy can be retired. The difficulty is that this one has been doing real work, keeping the peace in three households at once, and nobody retires a thing that works until it stops working.

Jung Dae-hyun is the film’s great gift to its audience and, as we will see, its most argued-over change. He loves his wife. He sees before she does that something is wrong. He is frightened, and he does what a frightened, conscientious man might do: he films the episodes in secret, goes to a psychiatrist on his own to ask what to do, and, instead of telling Ji-young what he has seen, gives her the doctor’s card.

His reasons deserve to be heard first, because they are good ones. The film’s own publicity puts it simply: he cannot bring himself to tell her, because he is afraid she will be hurt. He hopes she will get help without having to hear that she needs it. And yet there is something else in the arrangement, which the film lets us see without underlining it. For most of the story, the record of what is happening to Ji-young belongs to somebody else. It is on his phone. She is the one person in the film who cannot see it.

When she finally asks why he keeps pushing her towards a doctor, he shows her the videos. She is shaken, and the first thing she says, once she can speak, is a practical question: what should she do first? It is the hinge of the whole film, and it turns on something very simple. A woman handed the facts of her own life acts on them. Dae-hyun breaks down and says he feels he has driven her to this, and she begins treatment.

The other men around her are drawn with the same care. Her father once brought a fountain pen home from a business trip for his son alone; years later that son, spoiled all through his childhood, turns up with a fountain pen for his sister, her name engraved on it. Dae-hyun offers a year of leave he knows he may pay for. None of these men is cast as the enemy, and the refusal is deliberate. When the film opened, the Korean critic Heo Nam-woong said so plainly: it does not paint men as villains, and its argument is for women and men living shoulder to shoulder.

Whether that generosity is honest or merely kind is a real question, and the case against the film takes it up below. For now, notice what the film does with the husband’s love. It is sincere, and for most of the story it is also a way of keeping hold of the facts. Noticing is where care begins. Telling her what you noticed is where it becomes something she can use.

Ji-young’s mother, Mi-sook, runs a small restaurant and has spent her life being the sensible one. As a girl she gave up school, and her hope of becoming a teacher, so that her brothers could study, and she went to work in the garment workshops along the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul to help pay for it. The novel tells her sacrifice without naming the place. The film names it. Koreans above a certain age, writes Ito Junko, a Japanese writer who has lived in Korea and written about it for decades, know exactly what that name means: low-ceilinged workrooms where girls not long out of school sat at sewing machines through long shifts.

When Mi-sook finally sees one of the episodes for herself, the voice coming out of her daughter is her own mother’s. Ji-young calls her by her given name, the way a mother would, speaks of the years at the machines, and says what nobody said at the time: that it broke her heart to watch, and that she is sorry. Mi-sook takes her daughter in her arms and weeps.

The critic Kim Sun-ah, also writing for the Korean Film Archive, recalled colleagues warning her that there would be exactly one scene at which everyone cried, and that this was it. Ito Junko, who wrote the commentary for the Japanese edition of the novel, notes that the scene is the film’s own addition. It is the purest case of the pattern. The only person who can apologise for a wrong is the one who did it, and she is dead. So the apology travels down the generations and arrives through the only mouth left that can carry it.

There is one more detail, and if this essay could keep only one, it would keep this. In one of the film’s scenes from the past, when Ji-young’s father tells a daughter about to finish her studies that she should simply get married, Mi-sook slams down her spoon and orders her daughters to put themselves forward, using, and turning inside out, the very word a Korean family uses to tell a girl to stop showing off. So when Ji-young at last speaks up at her in-laws’ table, the voice she borrows belongs to the woman who once ordered her to. The permission had been given years before. It simply could not be used in the first person.

To see what the film has chosen to do, it helps to know what the novel does. Cho Nam-joo’s book, published in Korea in October 2016, is written as a case history: Ji-young’s life set down in a flat, careful third person by the psychiatrist she is seeing, with footnotes to government statistics and news reports. Cho, a television current-affairs writer who had left her work to raise a child, has said she wanted the book on the shelves as evidence of how women of her time lived and thought. Its Japanese translator, Saito Mariko, caught the design in a single line of her afterword: it is a medical chart, but there is no prescription.

The narrator is a man, and a sympathetic one. He has learned, he says, from watching his own wife give up her career. And the book’s last turn is famous for good reason. A woman on his staff is leaving because of her pregnancy, and his closing thought is that he will have to make sure her replacement is unmarried. The listener who understood everything reproduces, on the final page, the very thing he understood.

The film keeps the doctor and changes almost everything about the role. The psychiatrist is a woman now, and, as Cho Hye-young notes, the part shrinks to listening: she hears Ji-young and her husband out and does not narrate them. The case notes are gone as a frame, and the last act of writing goes to Ji-young instead. At her doctor’s encouragement she starts to keep a notebook. With her brother’s pen she starts to write, and her pieces begin to appear in magazines. In the final scene she sits at a desk and begins a book, and the lines she types give the same facts, in the same order, as the lines with which the novel begins her life story: the date, the clinic in Seoul, her length and weight, her father a civil servant and her mother at home. They are in the third person. It is the voice of the file. Only now she is the one writing it.

This is the film’s real argument about becoming, and it is quieter than it looks. Becoming, here, is not the discovery of a truer self hidden behind the roles. It is a transfer of authorship. The novel was a record of a woman made by a man who could not see himself in it. The film ends with the woman making the record. She still borrows a voice to do it, the flattest and most authoritative voice there is, the voice of case notes and statistics. But this time the voice is hers to use, and the name at the top of the page is her own.

The novel sold more than a million copies in Korea within about two years, the first Korean novel to do so since 2009, and it became something larger than a book: a test. In 2018 a singer in a popular girl group mentioned at a fan event that she had read it, and some of her male fans destroyed photographs of her and posted the videos online. In parts of the internet, reading it was treated as taking a side.

The film met the same hostility, and it began before anyone had seen it. Jung Yu-mi, cast in the lead, received thousands of hateful comments on her Instagram in a single day. A petition asked the president not to allow the film’s release. People went to the big portal sites to give it the lowest score, on the kind of public rating that, as the Korean Film Council noted, does not require anyone to have seen the film in question.

Proportion matters here, and the numbers supply it. Once the film was showing, the same portal’s separate rating from verified ticket-holders told another story. By the end of the opening weekend, women who had seen it gave it 9.6 out of ten and men who had seen it gave it 9.5. Most of the early audience was female, but not all of it, and the men who went did not come out feeling accused. The film went on to draw about 3.67 million admissions in Korea.

The objections deserve to be stated fairly. Critics of the book said it generalised, portrayed men as endorsing discrimination actively or passively, and deepened the conflict between the sexes. One comment quoted in the press at the time pointed out that women of Ji-young’s generation had overtaken men even in going to university. That is true, and it is the book’s premise rather than its refutation. Cho has said she wanted to write about the limits and the discrimination that seep into ordinary life even when the institutional inequalities have gone, and Jamie Chang told the BBC that Kim Ji-young’s struggle comes from being told for a very long time that equality has arrived. A generation told the battle was won is exactly the one that finds the leftovers hardest to name. It is the generation Kim Bora’s House of Hummingbird remembers at fourteen, in Seoul in 1994; Ji-young would have been twelve that year.

The anger this essay would keep is aimed elsewhere: at a scoring system that lets a crowd rate a film it has not seen, and at a climate in which a young woman’s reading could be taken as an act of aggression. Those are mechanisms, and mechanisms can be changed. Jung Yu-mi, who took the brunt of it, said more than once that she did not believe the opinions visible on the internet were all there was. The box office, and the ratings of the people who actually went, suggest that she was right.

In Japan the book arrived at an awkward moment. Chikuma Shobo published Saito Mariko’s translation in December 2018, a year in which, Ito Junko recalls, the front tables of many Japanese bookshops had been taken over by books hostile to Korea. Saito asked Ito to write a commentary for the edition because, as Ito tells it, she did not want Japanese readers to come away thinking Korea was a terrible country.

Readers did something else with it. The book reached the top of Amazon Japan’s Asian literature list within days of publication, passed 130,000 copies by the summer of 2019 and, by the time the film opened in Japan in October 2020, had passed 160,000, a figure the business magazine Toyo Keizai called unusual for translated fiction. It is widely credited with setting off the boom in Korean literature on Japanese shelves. The cover may have helped. It shows a woman whose face is left blank and white, so that, in Ito’s image, anyone can step into it the way visitors step behind a painted board at a tourist spot, and become Kim Ji-young. The band around the book said: you and I are both among its characters.

What readers recognised was not Korea. The singer Wada Ayaka wrote on the publisher’s own site that in Japan merely saying the word feminism often draws open distaste, and that the book showed her a feminist way of seeing sitting quietly inside ordinary life. That is a Japanese sentence about Japan. For many readers the book was a way of looking at their own kitchens through a foreign one, which is both its gift and its limit. A Korean name lets a reader recognise her own family without having to accuse it.

The film’s Japanese release carried a tagline that began with the very word Ji-young hides behind: it’s all right, you are not alone. The writer Naoe Aki reported in ITmedia’s Nlab, soon after the film opened, that some of the novel’s readers had objected online that this was not what Kim Ji-young was about. The second half of the line is close to what Cho Nam-joo told NPR she most wanted, for women to know they are not alone. It was the first half that stuck in the throat. The word had come a long way. It had been Ji-young’s cover, then the comfort the director said she wanted to offer the Kim Ji-youngs of 2019, and now a line of marketing copy that some of the novel’s readers refused.

Men in Japan found their own way in. Asked by Toyo Keizai what stayed with them, several pointed to the parental-leave episode. One, a 41-year-old third-generation Korean resident of Japan, said that in Japan as in Korea it is hard for a man to take leave and hard for a woman to find opportunities afterwards; another, 28 and unmarried, said he honestly did not know whether, once married, he could make that choice himself.

It is tempting, watching this film in Japan, to turn it into a comparison with a winner. The temptation should be refused in both directions. Ito Junko, who began living in Seoul in 1990, argues that as things stand now, the situation of young women in particular may look harder in Japan than in Korea, and that many Japanese still picture Korea as a country behind their own, a picture she finds somewhat skewed. This Library’s essay “South Korea: The Beauty Standard, the Backlash, and the Politics of Opting Out” has argued the mirror image: that Korea’s open conflict and Japan’s quiet may be the same pressure in two forms, and that quiet is not the same as settled.

The official figures will not settle it either, because the two countries count different things. Japan’s national fertility survey found that of women who were working when they became pregnant with a first child born between 2015 and 2019, 69.5 percent were still working after the birth, up from the fifties only five years earlier. Korea’s statistics office, in the year the film opened, counted about 1.7 million married women aged fifteen to fifty-four whose working lives had been interrupted by marriage, pregnancy, childcare, their children’s schooling or care for family: roughly one in five married women of that age, and more than one in four among those with a child under eighteen. Childcare was the reason given most often. The first figure counts who stayed; the second counts who is out. Neither is a league table. Both describe the fork in the road that Ji-young took.

What the two countries plainly share is the shape of the problem. The holiday kitchen at the in-laws’ needs no translation for a Japanese reader who has spent a New Year or an Obon on her feet in someone else’s house, and this Library has argued, in “How Holiday Rituals Turn Intimacy Back Into Roles”, that an occasion like that summons the old roles back over whatever a couple has privately agreed. Nor does the arithmetic of a husband’s leave need translating. And Japan has its own forms of the borrowed voice. After My Husband Falls Asleep, a late-night talk show that began on TV Asahi in October 2023 and became a hit, is built entirely on a condition: two mothers say what they really think about childcare, housework and the men in their lives once the husbands have gone to bed. Ji-young borrows a voice; the show borrows an hour. Both are ways of getting a sentence said by arranging to be not quite oneself, or not quite on duty, when it is said.

And it would be too neat to let two stories stand for two nations. Set Ji-young beside another heroine of the same year, the Tokyo office worker of Nagi's Long Vacation, who reads every room, takes on everyone’s chores, collapses one day unable to breathe, quits and declares herself on leave from her own life. The difference between the two women is not the country. It is the child. Nagi can take leave from her life. Ji-young has a small daughter waiting for her lunch, and there is no leave from that. The borrowed voice may be what the wish to take leave looks like when leaving is not possible.

Now the objections, made as strongly as they can be. The film has serious critics in both countries, and some of them are right.

The first is that it softens the book into something easier to watch. The novel ends in a closed room: nothing changes, and the one man who seemed to understand turns out to be part of the machinery. The film ends in spring. The critic Kang Yu-jung said as it opened that its wholly hopeful ending made her uncomfortable, a popular choice that weakened the book’s force as an exposé. Cho Hye-young called it a tightly closed happy ending, and noticed that near the end, when Ji-young stands on her balcony at sunset as she did at the start, the light is so artificial it looks like a set: she is still alone up there, and the happiness can only be provisional. And the husband is the heart of the matter. The novel’s Dae-hyun barely registers; the film’s is played by one of Korea’s best-loved actors, and he weeps, and tries, and offers his leave. Ito Junko sums up a reaction she found among Korean viewers: I am Kim Ji-young, but my husband is not Gong Yoo.

The second objection comes from Japan, and it is sharper. Naoe Aki, herself the mother of a young child, argued that making Ji-young a writer turns a social problem back into an individual one: she gets out through a talent that most women caught in the same arithmetic do not have. Not everyone is a writer, she pointed out, and another celebrated film of the same year, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, also ended with its heroine holding a book of her own. A hundred and fifty years on, is authorship still the only door? She questioned the café scene too. Answering back to hostile strangers with a small child in your arms is not something many mothers could safely do.

These objections are right about something real, and this essay concedes it. The ending is a gift the film gives its heroine that life does not give most women, and a viewer who finds it too kind has read it correctly. Two things can be set beside that without cancelling it. Cho Nam-joo, who took no part in making the film, has spoken with evident satisfaction of its more hopeful ending, and a Korean magazine reported her calling it a film that went further than the novel. And Ito Junko suggests the hope may be partly reportage: between the novel’s writing in 2015 and the film’s making in 2019, Korean society changed a great deal. A more hopeful ending may be accurate for its moment. It is not accurate for everyone.

The third objection is aimed at this essay. The reading offered here, in which each borrowed voice carries a standing that Ji-young lacks, may be tidier than the film. Cho Nam-joo has said she thought of her heroine as a vessel for experiences and emotions common to every Korean woman, and critics have read the voices as a way of dissolving one woman into many, so that grandmother, mother and daughter speak as one. On that reading the device is about how much these women share, not about rank. It is a strong alternative, it may fit the novel better than this essay’s reading does, and the two may simply be true at once. The claim made here is narrower. In the film, the voices never say random things. Each says the one sentence its speaker was entitled to say.

The last objection is the simplest. A house like this one, whose business is giving women time and attention, has an obvious interest in the conclusion that women need somewhere to be heard. A reader who suspects this reading was waiting before the film began is entitled to the suspicion, and the section that follows tries to answer it by saying less rather than more.

Be plain about what helped Ji-young. A doctor, and the hours in her consulting room. A husband who stopped holding the evidence and handed it over. A mother who finally saw. A brother with a pen. A notebook. None of it is for sale, and this house is not on the list; it would be a small dishonesty to pretend otherwise.

What the house can take from the film is narrower, and it concerns the word fine and the question of standing. A great many women can say the true thing about what they want only in a borrowed form: as a joke, as a question about a friend, as a line from a character, after the husband is asleep. It is easy to read that as timidity. The film suggests reading it as evidence. A sentence that keeps finding a way out, in whatever voice is to hand, is a sentence that exists. What is missing is not the courage to have it. It is a place from which it can be said in the first person without costing more than it should.

You are not being described here, unless you recognise yourself. But if you have said fine so well, and for so long, that everyone believed it, perhaps including you, the film has one small thing to tell you. The sentences you have not been saying have not gone anywhere. They are intact, and they may be clearer than you think. What they have been waiting for is not courage. It is somewhere to stand. Some of that ground can only be given by other people. Some of it you can make yourself, the way Ji-young does at the end, by writing the first page in whatever person you can manage.

The last time Ji-young says she is fine, at a crossing in early spring, it is her husband who is in tears and she who is comforting him. It is the same word she has used all along. Whether it has become true, or has only changed hands, the film leaves open, and so will this essay.

This is a reading of a film and of the novel it adapts. It diagnoses no one, the fictional Ji-young included, and says nothing about any real person’s inner life. The figures are the ones their named sources report, and where two countries count different things, they are not set against each other as a score.

Is there a sentence you can say only in someone else’s voice: quoting your mother, a friend, a character, a joke? Try hearing it in your own. What would it cost to say it that way, and who would pay?

When you say you are fine, whom is it protecting? Is it keeping the peace, or keeping you in it?

Who holds the record of your days: the photographs, the notes, the version of events that gets told when the family gathers? Have you been shown it?

If you wrote the first page of your own life, would you write it in the first person or the third? And what would you put in that no file ever would?

And if you are the one who notices: have you told her what you noticed, or are you keeping it for her?