buket's Reviews > Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

nothing i’ve read in this book was new or unheard to me (i wasn’t expecting it to be)

my grandmother was raised by a single mom because her father left them when she couldn’t give him a boy. years later when my mother get in the law school, her father didn’t allow her to go because it wasn’t necessary for her to study more when she could start working.

but my mother went to law school at 38 while raising two daughters and working full time. she later opened her firm at 48. she also inspired one of her daughters to go to law school and other one is a doctor<3 as for my grandma…she’s an annoying boy mom but we love her 😒

now if i can stop talking about my life,

from the moment Kim Jiyoung was born she carried the burden of not being a boy.

the book follows Jiyoung’s life from the moment she was born to the point she became a mother. even though i couldn’t relate to the part about her motherhood, every part before that was so relatable.

she was harassed by a boy at school because he liked her, she was anxious if her parents could afford to send her to college, she couldn’t get some jobs because she was a woman, she was accused of being infertile by her husband’s relatives because they didn’t immediately have kids, she had to quit her job because she had a baby to raise, she was even shamed by people for getting coffee with her husband’s money and many more things happened to her. while it looks like a lot when it’s written like this, they’re just daily events nearly every women suffers.

when a boy from school followed Jiyoung to home at night and a random woman saved her, i remembered not taking the bus for a year when i was 13 because a woman was murdered by the bus driver in my neighborhood. when everyone praised and loved Jiyoung’s younger brother just because he is a boy i remembered how my grandma ignores my mom when she is in the same room as my uncle. when Jiyoung’s sister went to teaching school because that was a respectful job for a woman i remembered how my sister went to med school because that was what my parents expected her to do.

well, i couldn’t exactly stop talking about myself but this book was exactly like that. as i read Jiyoung’s memories i couldn’t help but remember the similar things happened to me, my family or my friends.

i believe everyone should read this. women, because they can find pieces of themselves in this. men, because maybe they can understand how deep misogyny runs in society and how it feels like to be a woman in male dominated fields of life‼️

anywaysssss i understand the 4B movement better now, i thought being a woman in Turkey was hard but i guess it’s not easy in anywhere

‼️ The world had changed a great deal, but the little rules, contracts, and customs had not, which meant the world hadn’t actually changed at all.