Sunday book pick: ‘Miss Kim Knows’ by Cho Nam-Joo is an escape route out of Korea’s sexist culture

Cho Nam-Joo’s Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories, translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, brings back more Kims after Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, her breakthrough novel in English. The issues she takes up in her novel – gender inequality and systemic misogyny in South Korea – are probed with greater urgency and a sharper eye in this short story collection. Over the course of eight stories, Cho Nam-Joo, writing in Korean, gives shape to women’s distressing lives in Korea, which is not only limited by social vices but also moulded by gender-specific expectations inside the home. Her cast of characters includes schoolgirls, office-going women, mothers and wives, and most refreshingly, elderly women.

Women around men

The opening story, “Under the Plum Tree”, is narrated by Mallyeo, whose name literally means “the last girl.” A grandmother now, she still hates her name and has it amended when she reaches adulthood. During her visits to her elder sister at the old age home, the two women reminisce about their childhood, as family relations change and sour. Besides old age and death, the story ruminates on the lifelong wounds of women’s childhood neglect in cultures where male children are preferred.

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