The former residence was an odd mix of traditional and modern due to years of partial renovations. The dining and living room that was formerly a small courtyard didn’t have underfloor heating, and the perfectly tiled bathroom did not have a sink or a tub—just a tap in the wall. The family had to fill a plastic basin then scoop the water with a ladle to wash their face and hair, and throw water on themselves with the ladle to shower. The cramped water closet with a modern toilet was in a separate location by the door. The new place had heating in all the rooms and communal areas, and the bath and toilet were both inside the door, which meant they didn’t have to put their shoes on to go to the toilet once they were in the house.
And the girls got their own room. The master bedroom went to the parents and the youngest, the second largest to the girls and the smallest to the grandmother. Father and Grandmother suggested that the girls share with the grandmother as before and give the boy his own room, but Mother was firm. She said that Grandmother was too old to share a room with the girls, that she needed her own space to listen to the radio and Buddhist sutra tapes, and to take naps.
“What does he need a room for?” said Mother. “He’s not even in school yet. He’s going to come scuttling into our room with his pillow every night anyway. Do you want to sleep by yourself, or with Mommy?”
The seven-year-old boy strongly insisted he would never, ever sleep without his mommy, and that he had no use for a room. The girls got their own room, as per their mother’s plan. Mother had money set aside, without telling Father, to furnish the girls’ room. She put two new sets of desks and chairs by the sunny window and a new closet and bookcase by one wall, and gave them each a new sleeping mat, blanket, and pillow set. On the opposite wall, she hung a large map of the world.
“See this here? This is Seoul. It’s just a dot. A dot. We all of us are living in this tiny, cramped dot. You may not get to see all of it, but I want you to know: it’s a wide world out there.”
A year later, Grandmother passed away and the boy inherited her room. But he grabbed his pillow and ran into his mommy’s arms to sleep for many years after that.
1 Park Jaehyun, Statistical Family (Mati Books, 2015), pp. 57–58; “Roots of Misogyny?,” Cheon Gwanyul, September 2015, Sisa In Magazine.
2 “Sex Ratio at Birth by Birth Order,” Statistics Korea.
3 Kim Sihyung, Work Unrecorded (Samchang, 2016), pp. 21–29.
4 Park Jaehyun, Statistical Family (Mati Books, 2015), p. 61.
5 “Girls Can Be School Presidents, Too!,” Hankyoreh News, May 4, 1995.
ADOLESCENCE, 1995–2000
Kim Jiyoung attended a middle school that was a fifteen-minute walk from home. Her elder sister, Kim Eunyoung, attended the same school, which was still an all-girls’ school when Eunyoung started there.
Even up until the 1990s, the sex ratio imbalance at birth was a serious issue in Korea. In 1982, the year Jiyoung was born, 106.8 boys were born to 100 girls, and the male birth ratio gradually increased, ending up with 116.5 boys born to 100 girls in 1990.6 The natural sex ratio at birth is thought to be between 103 and 107 boys to 100 girls. The number of male students was already large and obviously increasing, but there weren’t enough schools to accommodate them. Coed schools already had about twice as many boys’ classes as girls’, but the high male-to-female ratio was a problem, and it didn’t make sense for students to be assigned to girls’ schools and boys’ schools far away when there were schools closer to home. The school became coed the year Jiyoung entered, and all other schools in the area followed within a few years.
It was a typical school—small, run-down, public. The school field was so small that the 100-meter sprint track had to be drawn in a diagonal line across it, and plaster constantly crumbled off the building walls. The school dress code was strict, especially for girls. According to Eunyoung, it became stricter when the school went coed. The skirt had to be long enough to cover the knees and roomy enough to hide the contours of the hips and thighs. As the thin, white fabric of the summer blouse was rather sheer, a round-neck undershirt was mandatory. No spaghetti straps, no T-shirts, no colors, no lace, and wearing just a bra underneath was absolutely not allowed. In the summer, girls had to wear tights with white socks, and just black tights in the winter. No sheer black tights, and no socks allowed. No sneakers, only dress shoes. Walking around in just tights and dress shoes in the middle of winter, Jiyoung’s feet got so cold that she wanted to cry.
For boys, the trouser legs could not be too tight or too loose, but everything else was generally overlooked. Boys wore undershirts, white T-shirts and sometimes gray or black T-shirts. When it got hot, the boys undid a few shirt buttons and walked around with just their T-shirts on during lunch or in between classes. They were allowed to wear dress shoes, sneakers, soccer cleats, and running shoes.
One time, a female student who was held up at the school gate for wearing sneakers protested it was unfair to allow T-shirts and sneakers to male students only. The student discipline teacher explained that it was because boys were more physically active.
“Boys can’t sit still for the ten minutes between classes. They run outside to play soccer, basketball, baseball, or even malttukbakgi. You can’t expect kids like that to button their shirts all the way to the top and wear dress shoes.”
“You think girls don’t play sports because they don’t want to? We can’t play because it’s uncomfortable to play wearing skirts, tights, and dress shoes! When I was in elementary school, I went outside every break to play red rover, hopscotch, and skip rope.”
As punishment for the dress-code violation and backtalk, the female student had to do laps of squat walk around the school field. The teacher told her to hold the hem of her skirt together so as not to reveal her underwear, but the girl refused. Her underwear showed each time she took a step in squat position. The teacher stopped her after one lap. Another student called down to the teachers’ office for dress-code violation asked her why she didn’t hold her hem together.
“I wanted the teacher to see with his own eyes just how uncomfortable this outfit is.”
The official dress code did not change, but, at some point, the prefects and teachers started to overlook girls wearing T-shirts and sneakers.
There was an infamous flasher who lurked around the school gate. He was a local who’d been showing up at the same time and place for years. He sometimes turned up along the path to school early in the morning and sent the horrified young students fleeing in all directions. On cloudy days, he would appear at the empty lot that directly faced the windows of the all-girls’ classroom eight. Jiyoung was in that class in the eighth grade. When girls found out that they were assigned to that class, they shuddered in horror and then later giggled to themselves.
It was early spring not long after the new semester began. Spring showers came before dawn and a thick fog hung around the city all morning. During break after the third period, a girl who was known as the class bully shouted something like a catcall or a cheer out of the window at the back of the classroom. Some of the less “well-behaved” girls rushed to the window and shouted, “Mister Flasher! Encore! Encore!” They clapped and laughed their heads off. Jiyoung, whose desk was far from the window, stayed seated and craned her neck, but couldn’t see anything. She was curious but too shy to run over and look, and she couldn’t work up the nerve to see the flasher with her own eyes. She later heard from her friend who sat by the window that the flasher, encouraged by the girls’ response, gave them the show of his life.