Great World Texts in Wisconsin connects high school teachers and students across the state with scholars at UW-Madison through the shared project of reading and discussing a classic piece of world literature. During the 2024–25 academic year, Minnesota Writing Project Teacher Consultant Paul Glembocki helped lead the inaugural year of Great World Texts in Minnesota with the support of the team from Wisconsin. With additional funding and support from the University of MN Imagine Fund, Northrop Auditorium, University of Minnesota Libraries, and the University of Minnesota English Department, the Minnesota Writing Project provided 500 copies of books to students at six schools around the state, from Rochester to Red Lake County and around the Twin Cities metro. Together, students and teachers read Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo. 130 of those students, along with teachers, chaperones, and members of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, came together in April 2025 for a student conference. Students presented original artwork, podcasts, dioramas, critical essays, and other projects while discussing their interpretations of the book.
To start the conference, local actor and author Sophia Epony Kim gave a keynote to frame the time at the conference, underscoring the ways in which a novel can resonate within the bell of our lives, shaking edges of our experiences and reverberating out into the world around us through our relationships, our embodied histories, and our individual longings. Kim’s talk challenged students to ask complex questions and consider new ramifications for the text they had all read. I hope that reading Kim’s keynote address inspires you to read Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 and maybe recommend it to a family member, friend, or student. With great thanks to Sophia for sharing her words then and now.
— Lee Fisher, former Director of the Minnesota Writing Project
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. I want to give you a little background on how I came to find 82년생 김지영, Kim Jiyoung Born 1982, and my own reading and writing journey so that you can see how to follow your interests, and get to know and feed yourself as a reader, writer, and thinker. Academics do this all the time. They look at the footnotes to lead them to primary sources. Writers and readers can do this kind of research, too.
In 2015, when I began writing my first novel, my mentor, Neela Vaswani, asked me to share a list of books that had influenced me. I found that I had a hard time coming up with this list because I was reading less and less. I was bored by American fiction and had a hard time relating to any of the books others around me were reading. One day, I read an interview with the actor and playwright Sam Shepard in which he was asked what he was reading, and he said the most exciting literature was coming from South America. Because I liked his plays, and therefore trusted his taste, I started to look for those writers. It’s how I became aware of translations.
Some time later, a neighbor read a review of Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung Sook and asked me to read it with her. It’s a story about how the rapidly industrializing Korea was leaving behind the older generation, something I’d observed in my time living in Korea. It piqued my interest in Korean literature and afterwards I read her book The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, a book of autofiction, about the author coming to terms with the shame she felt about having worked in a factory. Until then, Shin Kyung Sook had only been known as an award-winning novelist. But one day, she received a letter from a former coworker who asked her why she never wrote about them, the factory girls, which forced her to confront a period of her life she wished to forget.
In Kim Jiyoung Born 1982 the protagonist’s mother worked in a factory to help support her brothers’ education. She did this with the belief that she’d eventually get her chance to study once the brothers became established. Instead, when the brothers graduate, they skip over her and her sister and send the youngest brother to school. These girls were called Factory Girls. They lived and worked in deplorable conditions and sent money back to their families. And it was on their backs that Korea became one of the fastest industrialized countries.
Then, I read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, a story about psychological and sexual violence inflicted on two sisters, followed by her phenomenal Human Acts about the Kwang-ju uprising and massacres after martial law was instituted in 1980. Han Kang’s family fled Kwang-ju right before the uprising, and in the story she is contending with her guilt and grief.
These books taught me how a writer’s history is inextricably intertwined with her art. How a writer’s sensitivity is her gift. And how violence has been the thing that has both fascinated and repelled me.
The writers I just mentioned are all from the international community, but translations are not just from abroad or even exclusively for adults. The Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri after having written books in English, gained fluency in Italian, then wrote a memoir, a novel, and a book of essays in Italian, which were then translated into English. From her book, In Other Words, I was introduced to the Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf, which then led me to her fellow countrymen, Szilárd Borbély, then Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk.
But why was I so drawn to translations?
In a recent essay by the Vietnamese American writer Viet Than Nguyen, he writes that most contemporary American fiction is the literature of empire, meaning US centric, often excluding huge swaths of the world, essentially disregarding other countries (Nguyen). This helped me understand why I gravitate toward translations. It’s where I could see resonances of myself.
In 2021, I read Kim Jiyoung Born 1982 and this book affected me very differently. It showed me myself, a woman who has had to contend with misogyny and sexism from birth.
After I read it, I sent the book to my older sister who happens to be named Kim Jiyoung, I ordered a copy in Korean for my mother, gave one to my therapist, and asked my husband to read it. I wanted everyone to read it, to be awakened to the reality of sexism and misogyny and the cost to a woman. But I especially wanted those near me to understand our family, what we endured and why we were so fractured now. Because misogyny and sexism affects men as well. I wanted them to understand the broader context so that they could see it was not just our family but a whole country. I’d say our whole world.
My sister didn’t say much, my mother said “I don’t know,” my therapist never finished it, but my husband understood.
There is a phrase: Fish don’t know they’re in water. It was the subject of a commencement speech by the writer David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. In his story, one day there were two young fish swimming when they pass an older fish who says to them, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” After they pass him, one looks at the other and says, “What the hell is water?” (Foster Wallace)
So what was the water like?
My mother’s earliest story about me was from the day I was born: my grandfather upon hearing news of my gender, went back to bed. This shocked my mother because when my two older brothers were born my grandfather bought her special food and decorated the entrance of the house with a garland of peppers. In other words, my arrival brought disappointment.
I immigrated to Minnesota when I was two, the youngest of four children, two boys bookended by two girls, me and my sister. I think this is significant because as with anything, starting and finishing things are the most difficult to do. My sister at age 13 paved the way, interpreting, and bearing the brunt of nearly every new experience we had alongside my parents. Meanwhile, as the youngest, I was my parents’ steadfast witness, interpreter, and now my mother’s caretaker.
At a very young age, I became a keen observer and listener. Because I gained fluency in English before my parents, I was tasked with accompanying my mother everywhere. And because she was never sent to ESL classes as my father was advised to do, to this day, 51 years later, I still accompany my mother to all of her appointments.
But then, as a child, I grew up observing the ways others misunderstood her. I learned how powerful language was and it shaped me like a chisel. With exacting precision, I learned how to explain by observing, anticipating and preparing, to avoid misunderstanding. In those times, I had to become my mother in order to convey her feelings and thoughts to others. I had to embody the listener, too, to understand what information they needed, by identifying the gaps in knowledge so that they could comprehend her fully.
My father became an insurance agent when I was in elementary school. For me, elementary school was a period of tremendous growth as I gained fluency in English, when I moved from one level of reading to the next, from one level of math to the next. And I was also very aware that no one thought much of me. I often wore my brothers hand-me-downs, and compared to my brothers who were excellent students, and popular with friends and teachers, my report cards had comments like: Does not get along well with others. But all of this ignited something in me. The more opposition and doubt I felt, the more it fueled this fire. I was dogged, determined, jealous, and relentless. By the sixth grade I was in the highest math class. But it was very hard for me, so my teacher, Mr. Goerke, sat me at the back table surrounded by the smartest girls, knowing they would help me.
At home, it was another matter. My father, as I mentioned, had just started to work as an insurance agent. One of the things that insurance agents do, in fact all day long, is they fill out forms when their customers get into car accidents. But because, as we all know, writing is a different skill than speaking, he needed help. So in the evenings, as I would be trying to do my difficult math homework he would interrupt me.
“Sophia!” he’d scream. I’d have to drop everything and run downstairs. And I grew to hate the sound of my own name.
If I showed any annoyance or frustration, he would become very angry. And this frustration was inevitable because as my English was improving, I was losing my Korean. He would be explaining, using both Korean and English, and because my Korean was terrible and his English wasn’t any better, he would become very angry. What a terrible girl I was. He always had to emphasize the girl part and that soon became a part of the insult. To be a girl. Such a terrible personality I had. This happened several times a night, nearly every weekday. The only way to avoid it was to dig deep to develop a superhuman ability to listen and interpret the things my father couldn’t even articulate. That probably nobody could understand. I had to read his face, the sounds he made, his hands, the way they mimicked the car driving down the road, the curve, the speed of the oncoming car.
How the crash happened.
Even though I was in the 6th grade and I had obviously never driven a car before. Somehow I was supposed to help him explain all of this. Where were my brothers? I don’t know. I can’t even see them in my memory in those moments. Most likely in their rooms doing homework uninterrupted, or at hockey practice, soccer practice, or with their friends having fun.
The ideal, I came to understand, was to be like my mom. “Beautiful and noble,” is how Kim Jiyoung saw young mothers: devoted, endlessly patient to the point of being nonhuman, devoid of need, only there to serve others (Cho 138). I want to point out the similar examples Cho Namjoo uses in Kim Jiyoung Born 1982 to show the ways women serve as helpers, providers of support and pleasure for men. The spycam scandal when the security guards installed cameras in the women’s bathroom stalls then uploaded those images on a website that the women’s coworkers viewed was such a perfect example of this. They never considered what the impact would be on the women. The women who, as a result of the sexual assault, had to seek therapy or medication to cope or simply quit. To the men, the women are not even human.
So as a child, I tried to swallow my anger but inside I felt a lot of rage and this rage was something that was pointed out to me quite a lot like a bad habit that I should break. Because I was told, this would turn people away from me. Of course, no one ever asked what might be causing such rage. And that this rage was a symptom and might help us understand that there was a cause and therefore a potential solution. But that wasn’t my family. A country is like a family, too.
Early on my father saw that I was a liability because in addition to being angry, I talked. What did he fear? Well, he was physically violent. As I grew older and the violence escalated he saw the risk I posed and did something very effective. He told me a story. It went like this: There was a Korean family in New Jersey and the daughter told people that the father beat her and they were deported.
In high school, when my father was at his worst, I wrote about it in an in-class writing exercise I thought was just for my own eyes. The teacher walked around and read over our shoulders. She stopped and lingered near me, then took mine and read it out loud. It was about the aftermath of one of my father’s episodes. I was shocked for two reasons: one, of course, because of what I wrote and two, because she thought it was good. But from this experience, I started to get an inkling about what good writing was, something to do with an attentiveness to emotional truth. Even so, I was aware of how I recoiled at the thought of others, particularly white people, knowing about the abuse, of pitying or stereotyping me.
Because in addition to the story my father told me, there were the stories others told me about what it meant to be Korean, to be me. All of them, some version of the model minority myth, a stereotype usually about Asian Americans being higher achieving than other minority groups. Let me explain.
When I was in high school, I went to a summer program at Stanford where for the first time I met a lot of other Korean Americans. In a political science class, the professor asked if I knew the word ‘constituents.’ I didn’t and because I was embarrassed I made a joke, and he said: “Sophia, you are the most listless Korean American I have ever met.” I didn’t actually know what listless meant, but knew it wasn’t good. But I was most struck by this Korean American identity he, a white man, seemed to know so well. I had no idea there was such a thing. Which made me wonder: who made up this identity, us or them?
What I didn’t know is that the trope of the model minority is just that, it’s an idea or a literary device. The villain, for example, is a trope. It’s one-dimensional and not real. It’s a short-cut. Those positive traits of a model minority: perfectionism, relentless worth ethic, all, yes, positive, are developed as survival strategies and then are often mistaken as our or our parent’s countries’ culture. They are often used to control us when we deviate from what others think we should be like. And they are often used to pit one group against another. But it took me a while to understand this. And it began in college.
At Macalester College, I majored in English but what I really secretly wanted to do was what I’d been doing since elementary school. I wanted to be an actor. I did a lot of social things, joined organizations, met new people, and paid attention to flyers advertising opportunities. One thing led to another which led me to the broader Asian American community, specifically writer David Mura who asked me a very simple question: what are you interested in? When I said acting, he didn’t laugh or dismiss it, he took it seriously and introduced me to playwright Rick Shiomi and Dong-il Lee, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. Together, they were just starting Theater Mu, an Asian American theater company. Rick Shiomi, originally from Canada, was new to Minnesota. He was already an established playwright, and with fresh eyes could see the richness of the Asian American community in the Twin Cities. He offered a playwriting workshop to teach us how important it was for us to tell our own stories. Because you have to understand, up until then only a bunch of white men wrote Asian and Asian American characters, usually awful stereotypes. So a group of us college kids who had no writing experience each took a stab at writing a play. And then we did a table reading, which is when people sit around a table and the roles are assigned and you act with script in hand. It allows the writer to hear the story. I wrote mine about my family and abuse, and after it was done there was dead silence, and in the discomfort I joked about how sad it was. What I didn’t know was that Rick was crying.
Later, he asked me if he could send it to a theater company in San Francisco that was holding a festival of Korean American plays. I said no. I was scared people would know it was autobiographical or they would assume all Koreans were abusive. And when I think about this, I feel a lot of regret for the missed opportunity because the truth is opportunity begets opportunity. But I also think about support and that the throughline of my life is the absence of it. It’s hard to believe now since you only have to watch a K-Drama to know of Korea’s problem with domestic violence, but then in 1992 I thought it was just our story.
Instead, I felt more comfortable acting other people’s stories, but it got very old very quickly. It was hard to feel excited or act well with lines like: “Mr. Lee say no charge,” as I was pulling down my dress, or trying not to laugh at the dance callbacks for Miss Saigon on Broadway when the choreographer screamed: “Come on girls, work it! It’s your last chance to get out of Vietnam!!”
Eventually, I made my way back to writing.
What I’m talking about when I share my struggle to write freely, to be seen and read, is about self-censorship. One might argue that it’s a choice, but it’s a choice made under threat, made under duress, made out of self-protection, often to protect a family, which means it was not made with freedom.
“The state of being able to act without hindrance or restraint.” (“Freedom, N.”)
Freedom is central to creativity. Both are under threat now more than ever.
It has taken me a long time to take that freedom as my right. For so long, though I felt it and talked about it, I felt alone in my grievance about how misogyny and sexism shaped me. It required being able to see and understand my own story in a larger context.
At 22, I returned to Korea, 20 years after I immigrated, and saw with my own eyes the diversity of Koreans. They were everything: mailmen, cobblers, tailors, businessmen and women, doctors, too. And this full spectrum liberated me. But I also saw violence and sexism everywhere. This last part took me some time to connect to my own life. It took me reading Kim Jiyoung Born 1982.
The book liberated me. It allowed me to mourn myself through others. To feel outrage for myself through others. The stories of thwarted opportunities and dreams, of girls and women treated as dispensable and important only in the service of men, and the system—fathers, husbands, brothers, and yes, even women who enabled it. It gave me confidence because it allowed me to own my truth.
Kim Ji-Young Born 1982 pointed out what misogyny looked like in each stage of a female’s life. The fact that it was so widely read speaks to how the story resonates, not just with Koreans, but with many all over the world. Why? Because readers are alert to truth. Like my high school English teacher, like my playwriting instructor.
I want to talk to you now about time and the role of difficulty. I’m sure you hear it all the time: You’re young, you have time. But it’s hard to understand what that means when you’re young. When I was 34 and in graduate school and pregnant with my son, I left to take care of my mom because my brothers had just finished graduate school and were getting started in their careers. I thought I’d have time to go back, but some opportunities are lost, never to be offered again.
A male director I worked with once said to me: “Be ruthless with your talent. Don’t let anyone take it away from you.” But how could I have known that anyone he was speaking of would be my own family? These bits of advice are hard to apply to every life. Can we be ruthless with our talent in humanistic terms? What I know is you need to have support. The image of someone accomplishing greatness alone and with ease is not real. Nothing of great value is accomplished easily or quickly, whether it is cooking or writing. But if you look at difficulty differently, not as something to avoid, but to learn from, it can make you stronger.
Writing well takes time and it’s not talked about enough, but it goes hand-in-hand with inner growth, because whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, you are reflecting on your relationship with the world and yourself. It requires humility, time to practice, a sense of play, and determination. It requires study, reading, and reflecting on what you respond to and articulating to yourself why. And it requires the protection of your time.
Some of you, perhaps many of you, have something to say about the world, whether it is through writing or other mediums. You must understand that this will, ability, and desire are what make you powerful and unique. But it’s not enough to just rely on your experiences alone. Reading voraciously and widely allows you to step into other people’s lives. It feeds your imagination. It gives you knowledge. Knowledge is dangerous. Knowledge is powerful. Do not be afraid to know things. Look for those openings and opportunities in your life, they often look like nothing or something to avoid.
Say yes to them.
Works Cited
Cho, Namjoo. Kim Jiyoung Born 1982. Liveright Publishing Corporation 2020.
Foster Wallace, David. “This is Water.” May 21, 2005. http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html.
“Freedom, N.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1110149697.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “Most American Literature is the Literature of Empire.” April 11, 2025, https://lithub.com/viet-thanh-nguyen-most-american-literature-is-the-literature-of-empire/.
Learn more about the author on our 2026 Contributors page.
MEJ 