The Sword of Femininity
My mother often says that I came as a boon to her: like a small daisy blooming under the quelling, lifeless winter. Ironically, I was born a woman; at the start of winter amidst the firecrackers that set off festivals. I’ve loved being a girl; and ever since I started to menstruate, I would wait for the moment when I became a woman. Watching my body and connecting to my own womanhood- and subsequently romanticizing it through my words- I thought I would have the most beautiful transition to this stage of my youth. I would wake up one day and find myself to be a perfect woman in my own caliber; but who knew what the weight of my own femininity was? I think society is crushing the woman within, and dragging another in its place.
“Her life choices, being Kim Jiyoung’s mother- Oh Misook was regretting them. Jiyoung felt she was a rock, small but heavy and unyielding, holding down her mother’s long skirt train.”
As a child, I would see my grandmother walking around the house- shifting pictures, putting the clothes to dry, worshipping the Lord, cooking, talking and teasing- she did it all. It was hard to believe that she was so different from my paternal grandma who was as silent as a bee sucking honey: and I enjoyed her company. I asked her whether she had worked as a young woman, and she said that she wished to become a teacher, with her intelligence. Her father wouldn’t allow her, and so she stopped studying at 18. She tells me tales about how she studied under the oil lamps after cooking for her brothers, and how as a child she swam in the Tamirabarani river but stopped as her features developed. Her brothers, you ask? They finished their chartered accountancy degrees.
My mother works at a school. But she also works at home. She’s in a meeting with her friends discussing how to frame sentences for second-graders while cutting vegetables. She makes sheets of tables on Excel for the report cards of her class while teaching my sister how to distinguish between filtration and distillation. She attends her meetings at 8 am in the morning after boiling the milk and giving my father a hot cup of coffee. My mother sleeps at 12 am and then wakes up at the crack of dawn on a holiday to walk to the milk store and ask for fresh packets. She takes in the demands of her job and home as a way of life, as a way that ‘marriage works’. My father, you ask? He spends his days working on his computer and asking my mother for coffee and new things to eat. It’s called marital bliss, she says.
“Boys lined up first, boys led every procession no matter where they headed, boys gave their presentations first, and boys had their homeworks checked first while the girls quietly waited for their turn, bored, sometimes relieved they weren’t going first, but never thinking that this was a strange practice. Just as we never question why men’s national registry numbers begin with a ‘1’ and women’s begin with a ‘2’”.
My first memory is of questioning my father why I couldn’t do certain things. Of how men did penance or something similar to that and touching a woman bleeding from her body for the sustenance of mankind would defile them. Of how my aunt would talk about dresses and constantly tell my cousin to be ‘more feminine’. Of how I have to cover this beautifully wretched body of mine from the eyes of the world. Of how my hair defines my femininity, of how flowers turn from blossoms into the moniker of a female, a woman. Of how my body hair is a matter of shame. My mother says, ‘it’s the way of things’.
There was a time where I rejected my femininity. Took to pants and shirts, talking in lower tones, tucking my fingers into jeans. But even if they’re so comfortable, I would look at the skirts and the kurtis around me and the feeling of the silk running down my skin with flowers and anklets and long earrings; I feel feminine in both of them. But that too, feels like a sham: the fact that my idea of ‘femininity’ isn’t mine but the society’s; and that I’m just an empty vessel into which the world pours a liquid that feels mine, but in reality just isn’t. It feels like a scandal, a sham. Because you and me: our femininity is not ours. It never belonged to us, the puppets at the world’s strings.
“What do you want from us? The dumb girls are too dumb, the smart girls are too smart, and the average girls are too unexceptional?”
I am a smart woman. I know that for a fact, that I’m intelligent, and I know the world. But my father knows it better, better than anyone else. We’re at the table with a friend, talking about the environment when he interrupts me as I begin to speak. I stay silent as he talks and after he finishes, begin telling my view. And yet again, I’m cut off by his loud words resounding in my ears. They pound as he intervenes between the sweet and sour tones of my mother; his firm words making her oscillating voice sound like a teenager’s. I talk about sustainable development, he thinks it foolish. I watch from a distance, my own laughter at how he thinks tinkering in the horizon. He’s angry, and my mother scolds me for being disrespectful. That’s when I realized how fickle, how thin my own intelligence, my capability seems in front of my gender, my femininity.
“A stay-at-home mother with a baby under the age of two has four hours and ten minutes a day to herself, and a mother who sends her baby to daycare has four hours and twenty-five minutes, which makes only a fifteen-minute difference between those two groups. This means mothers can’t rest even when they send their baby to daycare. The only difference is whether they do the housework with their baby beside them or without.”
My aunt once told me that ‘a child is the purpose of life’. And to bring a child to the world, a woman is assigned. But the beauty of childbirth pales behind the darkness of life: that a woman has to give up her all to nurse her baby. My aunt became a mother late; and I cannot imagine how much she longed for a child, as well as the pressure of begetting one from family. My mother had me almost a year into her marriage because she ‘was getting older’. I need to marry early because ‘I have a biological clock ticking within me’. That sentence stayed with me every since she told me that, and it feels like a burden. My body-which is a temple of offering my love- has become the battlefield of society. They decide my womanhood, my conception, my birth and giving birth, and my death as an individual. Because I cease to be a woman; I am a mother. I cease to exist for myself. I cease to exist.
“The world had changed a great deal, but the little rules, contracts, and customs had not, which meant the world hadn’t actually changed at all.”
Everyone has a reason to be born. But mine seems like it was destined, prepared for me from the very beginning. The burden of being female and being feminine has been thrust onto me and expected of me. And like Jiyoung, I’m expected to follow. To educate myself only for better marriage prospects, not for dreams. To pause everything for a child. To stop being an individual, living like one, thinking like one, existing like one. Because the individual is by default, a man. Etymologically, spiritually, physically, a man. And therefore my femininity is a man’s dominion. He, unrealizing, controls my idea of femininity. And even if I tried not to, I would eventually succumb and drive myself to the point of crazed, marionette-like stature.
Because, as Cho Nam-joo says: “Kim Jiyoung is her woman. Kim Jiyoung is every woman.”
