VOL.69/2024.04

The Women We Don’t Want to Know

Bookstore Manager’s Pick: Korean Books

2023.10.04

There’s a book I got to read at a book-reading meeting after becoming curious about it when someone left a review on Twitter. The title seemed quite intriguing, and what about the colors used on the cover? I got to think, “What kind of book is that?” as soon as I saw it. It’s the book #plandid: Deciphering the “Pic of the Day” Trend Among Girls (Maybooks). I like books that are ridiculously unique – books that either dig into one specific topic or are just hilarious. This book is both the former and the latter. Would there be any other book in the world that summarizes Korean selfie culture like this? Beginning with the evolution of the Korean selfie in the prologue, it goes on to discuss not only “shots of one’s life” through interviews about them, but also the digital self and human relationships, which leads to a discussion of feminism.
It’s fascinating to look at the tables in the prologue and Chapter 1, which chart the genealogy of selfies and the photo editing apps’ retouching features, like a dissertation. The interviewees’ comments in the following chapters make me wonder, “Were they all thinking this while Instagramming?” The women’s struggles with their digital selves and their real lives in Chapter 2 are relatable to anyone who uses Social Media. Meanwhile, Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the digital feminism movement in Korea, which has been active since 2015, and discuss feminists and “shots of one’s life,” inviting readers to think about the aspects of feminism in the digital space. The author’s fragmented writing in Chapter 4 is not unique to her. We do it every day, every hour, presenting different sides to others at different times. We need to be more forgiving of ourselves and stop habitually judging and criticizing others and ourselves. The book #plandid: Deciphering the “Pic of the Day” Trend Among Girls explains, instead of criticizing, the “shots of one’s life” culture as she writes in the afterword. It makes you think twice about how closely selfies and social media have come to us and how much we brushed them under the rug.

Ever since the bestselling Kim Jiyoung Born 1982 (Minumsa) came out a few years ago (and before that, too), there have been quite a few novels about misogyny and girl-child abortion in South Korea. One of them, 280 Days: Who Said Being Pregnant Was Beautiful? (GU-FIC Publishing Company), focuses on women in their mid-30s to early 40s and reveals the cold reality of Korea. Four friends of similar age, who either want or don’t want to be pregnant, become pregnant around the same time and face different challenges. Seon-Gyeong works at a large company but miscarries her in-vitro child twice due to overwork; Ji-Won is confirmed for a promotion, but her pregnancy prevents her from joining the homicide squad; Jae-Hee gets pregnant after a single IVF session, only to discover that she has multiple pregnancy symptoms including hydrops abdominis; and Eun-Ju, married at forty, starts thinking about getting pregnant. The book 280 Days: Who Said Being Pregnant Was Beautiful? is not an anti-pregnancy book. However, it does depict the real-life discomforts of pregnant women.
A few years ago, I saw a middle-aged man at a bus stop threatening a young woman with a toddler. Everyone around him glared and clenched their fists, and a middle-aged woman grabbed a taxi for her, telling her to get in. This threat cost the woman a taxi fare for her safety. Luckily, there were plenty of people around to help her that day, but there’s no guarantee that will always be the case, and she might have felt unsafe all the time. In a country where you can be threatened for simply carrying a child, the decision to have a child is a huge one. The country just wants you to have children, but doesn’t want to make the world a better place for it. As fellow citizens, we have a responsibility to make the world a better place.

Written by Park Gyeoul (Manager at Yes 24, Gangseo NC branch)