MISS KIM KNOWS

Eight stories of ordinary women living complex lives can also be seen as eight stories of complex women living ordinary lives.

In these stories, set largely in Seoul, Korean women ranging in age from 10 to 80 navigate the everyday with a quiet determination to allow themselves joy. Often, the stories give the reader insight into family dynamics in the context of the larger society’s repression. In the collection’s tender opening story, “Under the Plum Tree,” the narrator’s oldest sister, Geumju, is set adrift from a life controlled by the labor of duty by Alzheimer’s disease, finally affording her time to enjoy simple pleasures. In “Runaway,” the narrator’s elderly father runs away from home in order to “start living [his] life” in the years he has left. Though his children and their mother are at first distraught, the father’s absence allows them the space to reveal themselves to each other as fully rounded humans, rather than automatons fulfilling their familial roles. Other stories take on the foundational misogyny of a patriarchal culture more directly: In “Grown-up Girl,” a woman who self-identities as a feminist finds herself conflicted by the way her high school aged daughter stands against unwanted sexual attention. In the sublime “Night of Aurora,” an aging woman struggles with her aversion to being asked to help raise her grandson as society expects, while her daughter struggles with her own aversion to quitting work to dedicate herself solely to motherhood. Throughout the collection floats the specter of Miss Kim—a model for the possibilities of Korean womanhood who is sometimes an icon for the rights of women to live self-determined lives, sometimes a literal incarnation of the invisibility of women’s labor, and sometimes a foil for the narrator’s own complicated feelings about gender roles, duty, aging, and the relationships between mothers and daughters. Spare but never stark, weary but never despairing, Cho’s trim prose examines the under-seen world of women with a keen appreciation for all the possibilities for their lives—including the ones they themselves may not be able to imagine.

 This subtle collection is elegant, honest, and empowering.