Editor’s note: In “My Feminism,” a series created in honor of Ilda’s 10th anniversary, diverse individuals document feminism through their experiences and share the meaning and of these experiences with readers to create an alternative discourse. The series is supported by the Korea Foundation for Women’s Funding for Gender-Equal Society. 모바일야마토
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If I were to write…
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I grew up in a small city in North Gyeongsang Province. Surrounded on all sides by mountains, it was a place so unfriendly to outsid 바다신게임 ers that they would say, “If a bird flew in from another place, our birds wouldn’t even let it sit on a power line.” As a child, I was educated against communism and wrote book reports on anti-communi 바다이야기게임 st novels like A Rising Reed and Red Clouds in a Blue Sky as homework. At school, the teacher that talked about consciousness-raising was called a commie. All I heard at home and school was that the o 사이다릴게임 nly way to succeed was to get out of this place and go to Seoul.
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I didn’t have many friends. I got up at seven in the morning to walk halfway up a mountain to my high school, a 바다이야기게임장 nd came back home at eleven after nighttime study hall ended. The world was nothing but home and school. Walking home at night, I also sometimes encountered men who whistled at or harassed girls wearing a school uniform
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When I got tired of studying, I climbed the hill in front of the school and looked down at the city. I felt stifled. The teachers who talked about the greatness of President Park Chung-hee during class were stifling, I hated being pressured into studying with the warning, “Girls who don’t study end up as hostesses at your age.” I was tired of parents who would abruptly open their daughter’s door to make sure she was studying, and I was scared by the rumors about girls being kidnapped and trafficked that ran rampant even after the “war on crime” was proclaimed.
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My favorite time was the hour I spent reading secretly in the early morning. One of the books that I read then was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I really liked it and felt like I had seen a new world.
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Around that time, childhood sexual assault survivor Kim Bu-nam made headlines when she murdered her assailant and said, “I killed an animal.” The “Kim Bo-eun, Kim Jin-gwan incident”[Kim Bo-eun, Kim Jin-gwan incident: In 1992, Kim Bo-eun murdered her sexually abusive stepfather with the help of her boyfriend Kim Jin-gwan.] was also in the news a lot. I thought to myself, “If I were to write, I would like to write this kind of story to let the world.” Those women taught me, “Ah, sexual assault is something like that, but it’s something that you can fight against... ah, they fought and felt hatred for years, but now they are not alone.”
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I wanted to fight overwhelming powerlessness, powerlessness that you encounter when you are voiceless. I wanted my future work to be remembering women who got angry and fought and got hurt, and crying out with them.

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▲ If I were to write… [출처: Pixabay / Pexels]



Listening to the stories of women who experienced the sex trade
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I came to Seoul for university, and after graduating, I got a job at a sexual violence counseling center. I really enjoyed the time during counselor training when we women shared our thoughts and feelings to our hearts’ content. After training, for a few years I went around to schools and shelters teaching sex education. I talked with students about sex and brought condoms, IUDs, and femidoms to teach them about birth control. It didn’t matter if they were male or female students?when I was explaining birth control, they were all ears. I wanted to give them the proper sex education that I had never received.
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At the shelters for unwed mothers there were young pregnant girls, some of whom had been raped. When my class ended, these children would come to me and tell me their stories in low voices. How they had been abducted while walking home, how they had been assaulted, and how they had hid it from their poor and uneducated parents... one was in so much pain after giving her child up for adoption that she couldn’t meet my eyes. Her eyes searched the ceiling, and then she turned her back on me and cried.?
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Once, when I told a member of the clergy that I taught sex education to women who had experienced the sex trade, that person laughed and asked, “What could you teach them?” This made me angry. Selling sex was entirely different from understanding your own body and knowing what to do. Once when I was teaching sex education while I was pregnant, some of those women kept looking at my swollen belly. “Will I be able to get pregnant like you?” There was envy in that question. And they spoke honestly about their experiences with pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth. To them, the idea of sex in which a woman’s will was respected was foreign.
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They also talked to me about things like this: “I make necklaces with beads?do you think I could make enough money with that to become independent? I’m not sure.” “I wanted to go to university, but my grandmother ripped up my school uniform and used it as a table cloth. So even now, when I see university students with their books, I want to snatch those books away from them.” “I lived at my uncle’s house after my parents passed away, and when I was 9 years old I learned to make kimchi and from that time I began getting raped. So I ran away.” “I’ll never forget my very first boyfriend. He sold me to a bar.” “You know that soccer player on TV? I slept with him, and his skin was so much nicer than mine that I hid in the morning.” Those kinds of stories.
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Voices that were uneducated, that didn’t know how to distance themselves from suffering and speak cynically, but wouldn’t say they were in pain. I found I wanted to write.?
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It was around that time that I started helping a [US] military camp town women’s activist write her autobiography. I took the bus back and forth from Songtan to listen to and write down the story of her life. I heard about what kind of treatment the camp town women received and how they were murdered silently, all in the name of “national security.” Even as I was helping to document all of this, though, I felt sad that a person’s life could be whittled down into a few words and become a single book. Worse, I had to exclude the stories that couldn’t be told to the world. It was hard to take.
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Marriage, family… conservative to an incredible degree
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While raising my child, I was shut up at home, and I wrote stories about everyday life. I was thinking a lot about the gendered division of labor at the workplace and at home, whether it was suddenly being pressured to change into a mother after getting married, having to become a different person, or not being able to resolve issues with my husband. I also wrote down the stories of the neighbor women that I met. Raising a child who suffered from atopy, I was depressed, and the guilt and reproach from those around me was difficult to handle for a couple years.
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My mother saw me like that and said, “You’re not good at all this,” but I thought that was unfair. I argued with her when she said, “There was no need to educate you after all. All women have to do is get married and take care of children.” What I went through after I got married was different from what I had gone through before that. This thing called “the family home” was unbelievably disconnected from the world, and so conservative and discriminatory to women. It may have already changed a lot, but seeing a woman treated like nothing but a rice cooker or a broom made it seem more like the Joseon Dynasty than a democratized society.?
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When I went to my in-laws house I was called “child,” and regularly criticized?“Some mother you are! You’re a mother but you can’t even do that?” It was worse because my child had atopy. Because the criticism was holding me to the standards of a perfect mother, it was ridiculous and unrealistic, but at that time it shook me up. Even though I was the one who couldn’t sleep at night because I was taking care of the child, the one who was worried sick. I also secretly believed that I had to become a perfect wife and mother, so I continued feeling guilty and sorry towards my family.
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I was a feminist, but that, too, was used a pretext for criticism. “You’re a feminist, so why are you depending on me?? Not going out to work or anything.” I was holding our 100-day-old baby when I heard those words, and they only made me feel ill-at-ease.
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My own inner conflicts, old habits that didn’t match my beliefs, things that I believed were part of my role in the house, they all smashed into each other. The knowledge and consciousness that I had built up degenerated and I ended up becoming nothing but a woman starved for love and conversation.
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The fight against dependence, the steps toward an independent life
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Luckily, I continued to participate in the writers’ group that I had joined before, and the other women listened to me and supported me. The people who saw me as a person and told me, “You are valuable, your existence is meaningful, keep writing,” were not my family but these friends.
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I wrote my stories when I could find time, and continued to listen to and write down other women’s life stories when I had the chance. I heard the story of a woman who had worked hard all her life at her own cosmetics store and as a traveling saleswoman in order to buy a house, only to be forcibly dispossessed of it, and the folk song of a woman who had been farming for a long time. There were many wonderful women in the world. There was a woman worker who bravely stood up and fought after bring sexually harassed, and many women who fought to block subcontracting, to stop the “part-timeization” of their jobs, to protect their workplace, take responsibility for their families and their own lives, and to survive.
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The words of one of them, a union member at Kiryung Electronics, have stayed with me:
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“It’s hard. It’s a difficult situation. Even now hired thugs are around all the time, and even these thugs watch their mouths in front of representatives from the full-time workers’ union and swear at non-permanent workers. It’s enraging. They are being paid with money we earned for the company. If I ask them, “Would you guys kill someone if you were paid to do so?” they say, “Yes!” without hesitating. They are so rude and abusive and now I don’t even want to stand there and yell back at them. When I sit and think about it, making them swear at people just like them, do that to people that are just like their parents or sisters?it makes me cry.”
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She said that when she hears cursing, she wants to cry. She saw the hired thug as a person, as connected to her. These people protecting human dignity?they have something I can’t even imagine. I was inspired to love life in the way that the women I met believe in and fight for the world and the future.
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It took me a long time to become independent. It took quite a while to dispel my sense of dependence, get rid of old habits of being competitive about everything, and realize that all I had to do was appreciate the present even if it felt slow and follow my own path faithfully. Despite appearances, my depression, sense of dependence, and hidden rage tormented me constantly. It took an almost embarrassing amount of time for me to psychologically divorce myself from my father, to stop hating my mother, to create an equal relationship with my younger siblings, to stop seeing the world as a hostile place, stop being unreasonably afraid, and believe in a meaningful future.

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▲ I would like it to be documented and kept as the voice of a complete life, with all the time, ambition, memories and wisdom that come from working, loving, and getting by. So that their voices can mingle with the voices of future women. [출처: Pixabay / alamin1622]



I want to record voices that convey the texture of life
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If the problem that women face is in the end the problem of how and of what life is made, then I think it is not something that can be completely reduced to a political issue or an activist issue. We have to make a system that can support policies that allow women living everyday lives to eat, find a place to live, get treated when they’re sick or hurt, raise children by themselves, form ties instead of being isolated, attain equality and receive welfare.
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I don’t know how many women are suffering unnecessarily inside the outdated patriarchal culture and system. It took so many tears to come to each new realization that feminists have had and spread.
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And I want each woman’s voice to be recorded with the texture of life. I would like it to be documented and kept as the voice of a complete life, with all the time, ambition, memories and wisdom that come from working, loving, and getting by. So that their voices can mingle with the voices of future women.
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At schools, shelters, strikes, military camp towns, and solitary rooms, the women who fought while dreaming of the stars; the hands that shook mine warmly just for being on the same path, and their owners who readily described their lives to me and my recorder. They are all still there. The worries and resolve passed down by women who were bus conductors in the 60s and now do irregular work are all still there. Every now and then when I go to do interviews, I am surprised to see similar faces telling stories that haven’t changed even though the times have.
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Even though they are not given respect, they live tenaciously. Even when women are downtrodden, they don’t stop demanding rights. Even in harsh times when death is near, we have the capacity to conceive of ourselves as people. I want to sow voices that are like stronger and riper seeds, the voices of other women and also my own, as it grows. [Translated by Marilyn Hook]
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*Original article: http://ildaro.com/6450 Published: September 16, 2013
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