Eunyoung chooses teacher training college

Kim Eunyoung’s decision to attend a teacher training college begins as a practical proposal shaped by economic anxiety, but becomes a choice she makes after testing the path against her own interests. Set against the 1997 Korean financial crisis, the episode turns on a distinction between directing a daughter toward security and allowing her to claim a future that genuinely suits her. Her eventual acceptance and departure bring relief and opportunity, but also expose the mother’s fear that she has asked her daughter to repeat a sacrifice she herself regrets.

Economic pressure and the proposal

The family’s circumstances changed when the 1997 Korean financial crisis reached Kim Jiyoung’s household. Her father, a low-level civil servant who had considered his position secure, was asked to leave. He had been a conscientious and dependable employee; the threat to his livelihood visibly shook him, in part because supporting his family was a central source of pride. With two younger children as well as Kim Eunyoung to consider, Oh Misook began to weigh her eldest daughter’s education against the family’s precarious finances and the worsening prospects facing both older workers and new graduates.

Oh Misook cautiously suggested that Kim Eunyoung attend a teacher training college outside Seoul. The proposal was not simply a judgment about her ability. Teacher training colleges charged less tuition and seemed to offer a reliable route into work at a moment when job security had become an urgent concern. Yet the suggestion carried a cost: Kim Eunyoung had a choice of universities in Seoul, but not of the city’s teacher training colleges. The practical solution therefore required her to study farther from home and relinquish the educational direction she had already begun to pursue.

The proposal also reflected a gendered idea of security. Oh Misook presented teaching as a particularly suitable occupation for women because teachers finished work early, had school vacations, and could take time off—advantages she associated with the demands of working motherhood. Her reasoning joined a sincere wish to protect her daughter’s future to an assumption that women’s careers should be selected with their anticipated caregiving responsibilities in mind.

Refusal and the question of gender

Kim Eunyoung was in her final year of high school when the proposal arose. She had maintained her grades, hoped to become a television producer, chosen journalism as a prospective major, and begun looking through previous essay-test materials for the schools she was considering. She refused her mother’s suggestion immediately. Her objection was not only to studying outside Seoul; she questioned why the supposed advantages of teaching were being offered specifically to a daughter. If the schedule and stability made it a good job for parents, she argued, those qualities should make it a good job for anyone, not a reason to direct women toward the profession.

That exchange gives the choice its central tension. The parents had not raised their daughters with explicit instructions to marry well, become good mothers, or learn to cook. The sisters had done household chores, but understood them as helping busy parents and looking after themselves. Their parents’ recurring lessons had instead concerned habits, manners, and studying hard. Still, the expectation that a woman’s work should accommodate future family care surfaced at a pivotal moment, narrowing the options presented to Kim Eunyoung just as she was trying to define an ambition of her own.

The episode places her resistance within a period of expanding educational and professional expectations for women. Girls were increasingly expected to study, plan careers, and compete for their goals, while new measures against gender discrimination and the formation of the Ministry of Gender Equality signaled broader social change. The narrative’s contrast is not between an entirely restrictive past and a fully open present. Rather, women could be encouraged to pursue ambition in general while encountering older assumptions at consequential turns in their lives. Kim Eunyoung’s question makes that contradiction explicit instead of allowing the language of a stable job to pass as neutral advice.

A revised choice

After the initial disagreement, Oh Misook acknowledged that teaching did have genuine advantages. Her concession unsettled the dispute: she was no longer presenting the profession only as a sensible arrangement for a woman’s future family, but recognizing that it might be an appealing occupation in its own right. Kim Eunyoung, in turn, began to reconsider. She looked into elementary education, consulted the school careers adviser several times, visited a teacher training college outside Seoul, and brought home an application.

This time, Oh Misook opposed the plan. She knew from experience what it meant to give up one’s own ambitions for the sake of a family. As a young woman, she had sacrificed the chance to see her brothers, and the decision had left a regret that deepened rather than healed with time; she connected that unchosen sacrifice with lasting resentment and family rupture. Her reversal matters: the mother who first urged her daughter toward a secure profession now feared that her own advice had made Kim Eunyoung surrender a dream as she once had.

Kim Eunyoung explained that her earlier certainty about becoming a television producer had rested more on the idea of the job than on knowledge of what it involved. Teaching, by contrast, connected with things she had enjoyed since childhood: reading to her younger siblings, helping them with homework, and doing crafts and drawing with them. She also valued the profession’s stability and schedule, but described the pleasure she anticipated in teaching young children as part of the attraction. The decision thus did not amount to the simple triumph of her mother’s original plan. She had investigated the field, reconsidered her earlier goal, and identified a fit between the work and activities she already loved.

Acceptance and departure

Kim Eunyoung applied to the teacher training college she had visited and was accepted. She also secured a place in its dormitory. On move-in day, Oh Misook laid out essential dorm items and offered practical advice, while her twenty-year-old daughter was so excited that she scarcely attended to it. The departure made the mother’s ambivalence visible: after returning home, she lowered her head onto Kim Eunyoung’s empty desk and cried for a long time, wondering whether she had sent her daughter away too soon, prevented her from attending the school she had wanted, or pushed her to become like herself.

Kim Jiyoung tried to console her mother by pointing out that Kim Eunyoung had genuinely wanted to attend the college. She had even slept with its brochure, whose dog-eared pages were worn and beginning to tear. The physical condition of the brochure offered a small but concrete answer to the mother’s fear: this was not merely a path imposed on a reluctant daughter. When Oh Misook looked through it, the tears stopped. The episode leaves both truths intact. Family finances and gendered ideas about suitable work shaped the discussion, but Kim Eunyoung’s research and final choice gave the decision a different meaning from an inherited sacrifice. Her departure is both an entry into a chosen profession and a measure of how difficult it can be for a mother to distinguish her daughter’s wishes from the losses of her own past.