All I have is my voice

At university, I had to defeat male students in drinking parties unless I wanted to be dismissed. If I had shown my femininity like putting on a skirt or pretending to be a pretty girl, my older peers blamed me for not doing well. I behaved like a boy, at the time, that was convenient because the political situation was not that good. Usually, once a week, to avoid being arrested by the police, we had to run away. It was a tough time.

Life in the workplace was not much better, in fact it was much worse than before. In my first job, the owner of the company was a nasty, macho, archetypal patriarch. Whenever we had lunch together with all of our colleagues, he was always exclaiming about the differences between men and women. I tried to feel nothing so I wouldn’t be hurt by his annoying preaching. He paid women low wages to produce the content of the magazine, but he valued men’s performances even if they screwed up, because all the men in the office were people he already knew, like his brother, a nephew, a junior of his university etc. Nepotism abounded. He had one daughter and one son, but he seemed to cherish his son in particular. He always worried about outstanding girls because they discouraged his son. He was particularly concerned about the future his son would end up with, but was not as concerned about his daughter. As it turned out, his remarkable daughter got into medical school on her third try, even though she didn’t want to go to medical school. I don’t know what his son is doing now, but I am sure that his daughter might not be that happy, because no one can be content with someone else’s decision for their life, even if it seems glorious or glamorous.

Anyway, I got extreme praise from him, the guy who was so patriarchal, as I always performed beyond his expectations. My secret was simple. Going the extra mile. Even on holidays, I would go to the office to complete my work early or to improve on it. I didn’t want to hear that I was not doing well because I was a woman. I was hard on myself because that was the only way I could make a change. I was not able to change the system or the perceptions of others, but I could do something about myself. I was becoming accustomed to exploiting myself.

When the murders in Gangnam station occurred 4 years earlier in South Korea, I remained silent. Frankly speaking, I ignored the case. Actually, I was too busy to resonate with the case even though it transformed Korean society a lot. My whole life was stuck in my work, and how to survive, handle life’s hardships. I had no time to brood over my ontological concerns.

In the meantime, there’ve been children who are abused or even killed by their parents, and we should still worry about male teachers who put cameras in the female students’ toilets in highschools. Recently, we encountered the last Seoul mayor, Park won soon, who committed suicide due to a sexual harassment case. It was so shocking, because it was not just one individual’s deviation. It was a case amidst a series of sexual harassment by public officials. It’s not an accident but obviously a systematic issue. More than that, Mr. Park was quite different from previous criminals. He was a symbol who rewrote the history of the feminism movement in South Korea. He was the lawyer of a case which revealed the possibility of sexual abuse. At the time, no one could articulate what it is and why it is criminal.

I was frustrated.

Where are we now? What is this time that we are in? What is the systematic and structural problem? How can we solve this situation?

I brooded over it. I am determined to study feminism. Amazed at how ignorant I was, I got closer to feminism. That is not a branch of study. It is likely an epistemology, (the theory of knowledge), to reverse my common sense about what I have believed was right. I didn’t look into my sexual relationships closely, I didn’t make an issue of sexual jokes in the workplace. I didn’t think about the murder case about someone being killed only because she was a woman. It wasn’t in my world and didn’t affect my daily life. However, I was not free from the system that we live in where people hardly noticed that it was wrong.

I might have thought that was acceptable and self exploitation is the same. True femininity encourages us to not abuse others because they are weak. Throughout history, we’ve abused lots of poor people because they are vulnerable. Sometimes they were Africans in the name of slaves, sometimes they were Asians being exploited in the name of modernization. However, women have always been there.

Still, we are not willing to pay them enough and we believe that caring for children is the role of women, that they are unable to manage their emotions so they are not accepted in politics, even being considered to encroach on men’s territory, privilege, and jobs!

Feminism is so difficult

Since it is interconnected with class issues, racial issues, religions and cultures etc, sometimes it seems impossible to detect the issue amidst these complex connections.

However, feminism is so easy

Because we can spot the issues if we look at the people who are vulnerable. Feminism is another word for equality.

Feminism is a looking glass to reflect on ourselves. With feminism, we can detect where we are doing well and where we are going now. If most of us are not happy on this road, we might be on the wrong track.

I’ve got a feisty invisible power from Adunni’s voice in the book, the girl with the louding voice.

She refuses to be silent.

When her husband told her, who was older than her father, not to talk in front of him, she asked, so where should I talk? To your back? Whenever she ended up in difficult situations, she never stopped helping others who needed a hand, even if they were mean to her.

Malala is the one who gave an insight to the author of the book, she is a Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban because she continued to go to school in a country where women are prohibited to get an education. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. I was mesmerized by her speech at the Nobel Prize Award ceremony. She claimed and insisted that we have to speak up. Because all we have is our voice.

I silenced myself for a long time. But I am not going to be silent any more.

As she said, if not now, when? if not me, who?