Raquel Incertis Madrid

Madrid

Updated Monday, March 11, 2024-9:29 p.m.

  • Cinema Hong San-soo, the genius who always makes the same movie

  • Machismo #MeToo shakes South Korea

  • Interview Bong Joon-ho "The more extreme capitalism is, the more extreme inequality is"

In

South Korea

, when class roll is taken, the boys are called first.

They, Koreans, receive more financial support than daughters in families.

And when they, Korean women, get pregnant, their professional career goes down the drain.

Cho Nam-joo

(Seoul, 1978) knows what he is talking about.

She graduated in Sociology and worked for 10 years as a television scriptwriter, until her difficulties with work-life balance forced her to give up work to raise her daughter.

Like many other women without family help or sufficient resources, she emphasizes.

"It was a problem that I could not solve even though I put in all my ability and effort. In the end,

I had no choice but to take care of her myself

and only accept the jobs that could be done at home and in my free time. ", account.

After this voluntary break, the obstacles to resuming her professional career began to increase.

She then embarked on the adventure of writing, a hobby that she hibernated due to lack of time.

The publication of his most famous work,

Kim Ji-young, born in 1982,

coincided with the emergence of the

#MeToo

movement in South Korea and had a notable political influence:

several legislative proposals to combat labor and salary discrimination were baptized as " Kim Ji-young laws"

.

Something "totally coincidental and unexpected," in the author's words, that at no time did she think about practicing social activism.

"Now that I look at it from a distance, I think that it would have happened anyway, regardless of the existence or not of the novel. If I wrote it, it was because I was influenced by the voices that protested against the ridicule, violence and arbitrariness that are exercised. against women in Korea. That is to say, I wrote it following the wind of change that was in the air then," she says.

To know more

Culture.

'Koreawood': the new global dream factory

  • Editor: JOSÉ FAJARDO Madrid

'Koreawood': the new global dream factory

Literature.

Fear and loathing under the rising sun: "Japan has no hope, it is a country for grandparents"

  • Editorial: NOA DE LA TORRE Valencia

Fear and loathing under the rising sun: "Japan has no hope, it is a country for grandparents"

Kim Ji-young, born in 1982,

made her an international phenomenon, she was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Cho Nam-joo was bought the rights for its film adaptation in 2019. It was his first novel translated into Spanish, although with his two previous books,

When you listen carefully

(2011) and

Para Comaneci

(2016), he had already achieved multiple awards.

In the last decade, a certain romanticization of Asian culture has boosted the reception of South Korean literature.

Almond

, the young adult novel by Won-pyung Sohn, became known worldwide after a member of the band BTS recommended it in an interview.

That single mention skyrocketed sales among his fans.

Cho Nam-Joo thinks that there is a genuine interest in his literature, parallel to other successful phenomena such as

k-dramas

,

k-pop

or

k-beauty

.

However, most

Westerners only know the "luminous" part

that Korea is interested in projecting.

The author defines her country as a candy:

shiny and sweet on the outside, but bitter and strong on the inside

: "The streets are clean, and the appearance and way of dressing of the people is neat and elegant. Tourists are always surprised how safe it is to walk the streets at night and that no one will steal your cell phone or laptop even if you leave it forgotten in a cafe," he says.

"But those of us who live here know about the precarious conditions and low salaries received by the people who work to keep those streets clean, about

the obsession with appearance

that permeates society, about illegal filming and the fears that women suffer. by different types of violence".

She acknowledges that criticism and ridicule against her and her work has not stopped occurring, especially in her native Korea.

Sometimes she doesn't know if she's worth continuing to write

.

"I spoke about what I wanted with total sincerity, but now I'm not so sure. More than censorship or self-censorship, I feel helplessness. Whatever I write, it will be misinterpreted and criticized," she says.

Despite everything, Cho Nam-joo now returns with

What Miss Kim Knows

(Alfaguara), a compilation of self-contained and independent stories, written before, during and after the pandemic and which once again takes a depersonalized Kim as a recurring character. .

"While I was working on these stories and

Kim Ji-young

, I selected the episodes based on the experiences lived and told by women on social networks, Internet cafes or bulletin boards and in newspaper articles, statistics, reports, digital magazines and books that talked about the life and work of women," she explains.

I sought

to write about universal topics

with which the greatest number of readers could empathize.

In this new book, eight women of different ages tell of their lives facing obstacles such as machismo in their work and family environments.

Is Asian society more sexist than European society, or perhaps does it make less effort to hide it?

"I don't believe that only Asian women face discrimination and situations of violence at work and in the family. When you find out that a young Italian stabbed his ex-girlfriend to death, that a footballer from an English club was suspended for violence against his partners , that the list of those linked to the Epstein case was made public or that the EU is going to impose gender quotas in the management positions of companies, you realize that it is not a problem that affects only certain countries and societies" , he thinks.

"

It seems necessary that we start thinking about what each person can do

with the reality that they have had to live."

At first, Cho Nam-joo had serious doubts about whether the novel could be understood in other countries, especially in the Anglo-Saxon and European environments.

"When foreign editors told me that they empathized with the novel and that they wanted to present it without a doubt to readers in their countries, I knew that women have in common

a way of perceiving things

and becoming aware of problems that goes beyond of the places and societies from which they come," he concludes.