Cho Nam-joo (1978~) is a Korean novelist. She became a million-selling author with her Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (82년생 김지영, 2016), a book that reports gender inequality in Korea through the life of an ordinary woman named Kim Jiyoung, as it recorded accumulated sales of one million copies. She is famous for her witty prose and writing realistic episodes whose form is similar to a reportage. Cho identifies as a feminist and explores the lives and experiences of women in her writing.
1. Life
Cho Nam-joo was born in 1978 in Seoul. She majored in sociology in university and worked as a freelance scriptwriter for a current affairs TV show for ten years. Upon marriage and childbirth, she took time off from her work and became a fulltime housewife. Cho grew tired of committing her life only to childrearing and started to write novels at home. She made her first literary debut with her When You Listen (귀를 기울이면, 2011).
After four years of career break, Cho received the Hwangsanbeol Youth Literary Award (황산벌문학상) for her For Gomanechi (고마네치를 위하여, 2016), and published her second book. The novel, which follows a family living in a poor hillside village on the outskirts of Seoul, was inspired by her childhood experiences. Her next big hit Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (82년생 김지영, 2016) was written in just three months. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (82년생 김지영, 2016) reflects her own experiences of living as a housewife, and it has been said that Cho wrote the piece aiming to address directly the discrimination and inequality that Korean women face in society. After Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (82년생 김지영, 2016) became a million-seller in just nine years, which is unprecedented for a Korean novel, Cho published books mainly related to women’s issues including feminist essays and novels. In 2019, she published Saha Mansion (사하맨션, 2019), a story about the so-called minorities and the marginalized such as seniors, children, LGBT, refugees, or the disabled.
2. Writing
The writer said, “I want to write a novel that deals with the questions that come up depending on the situations,” and true to those words, her novels are usually written in a simple style, without any flowery language to address down-to-earth issues. Moreover, her books are judged to have depicted realistic and highly relatable stories about the daily lives of the marginalized.
Her debut novel When You Listen (귀를 기울이면, 2011) deals with the story of a boy named Kim Il-u who has Savant Syndrome and is treated as a retard. He somehow finds out that he has an excellent sense of hearing and participates in the “three cups competition” known as “yabawi.” The book was reviewed as having a strong sense of reality and realistically depicted the world where people have become used to snobby desires and the middle class citizens living there. Cho Nam-joo’s unique, magnetic, documentary-like style of writing also garnered attention.
For Gomanechi (고마네치를 위하여, 2016), published after her four years of career break, depicts the life of a girl who used to dream of becoming an athlete, admiring and identifying herself with the global gymnast Komanechi, but is now a jobless young woman in her late 30s living with her family in a region under renewal. This book has received comments that while its topic is similar to that of Cho’s debut novel in a sense that it deals with the lives of ordinary middle class people, it has described in more detail the problems of Korean society like poverty being handed down to generations and economic polarization.
Cho’s next novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (82년생 김지영, 2016) was praised for telling the story of common, everyday lives of Korean women, through a character Kim Jiyoung who was born in 1982, and that it realistically and convincingly showed how invisible discriminations limit and oppress the lives of women. The author’s unique, documentary-like writing style of using various statistics, media reports, and other data has been effectively realized in this book, and the novel created a huge social backlash against the backdrop of the popularization of feminist discussions and even gained worldwide attention, being translated into sixteen languages in England, France, Italy, Japan, and many more within a very short period of time.
Her short story collection Her Name Is (그녀 이름은, 2018) also deals with gender issues and depicts the lives of women in their teens to seventies, like a married woman with kids, a temporary worker who is forced to work passionately without getting paid, or an old woman who looks after her grandchildren. Her novel Saha Mansion (사하맨션, 2019) is set in a virtual city made through company acquisition, and it depicts bizarre, dilapidated communal house and the lives of refugee community that is neglected from the nation’s system in a dystopian worldview.
