Oh Misook’s Work of Survival

Oh Misook’s life moves from foreclosed educational ambitions and reproductive pressure toward practical independence, family provision, and a belated recognition of the cost of her sacrifices.

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An Education Interrupted

A Young Worker’s Abandoned Ambition Schooling Given to Sons Oh Misook is one of five children in a rural family. Although she excels academically, limited resources are directed toward educating her brothers, reflecting a family expectation that sons will bring honor and prosperity. She and her sister later study after work, but their chance to pursue education arrives only after the family has already invested in the boys. Misook gains a diploma through determination, yet her early ambition to become a teacher has been sacrificed to the needs of others. Factory Labor At fifteen, Misook moves to Seoul and works in a textile factory, sharing cramped dormitory accommodation with other young laborers. The girls endure heat, dust, exhaustion, and low wages that support male siblings’ schooling. Her experience establishes a lifelong pattern: her work helps sustain other people’s futures, while her own possibilities remain secondary. That history informs both her later choices and her efforts to provide differently for her daughters.

Pressure for a Son

Reproductive Pressure Repeated Disappointment After giving birth to two daughters, Oh Misook faces the expectation that she must produce a son. Her mother-in-law, Koh Boonsoon, speaks warmly while repeating that the next child should be a boy, and Misook’s husband offers no reassurance when she asks what he would do if the baby were another girl. Misook’s fear is not an abstract worry: family expectations and wider social practices make the sex of the child a source of intense pressure. When a doctor indicates that her third pregnancy is another girl, Misook is left alone with the consequences. A Painful Decision Misook ends the pregnancy through sex-selective abortion. The narration emphasizes the physical and emotional suffering she endures without family comfort, even though the pressures surrounding the decision are not of her making. Years later, she becomes pregnant again and gives birth to a son. The episode reveals how patriarchal preference is enforced through women’s bodies and how Misook’s apparent acceptance of family custom is bound up with coercion and grief.

Making a Living at Home

Work Inside the Household Piecework and Care While raising three children and living with an elderly mother-in-law, Misook takes piecework she can do at home: assembling boxes, folding envelopes, peeling garlic, and rolling weather strips. The work brings money into the household but also fills the living space with debris and exposes her to fumes and cuts. Her children help around her as she works. Jiyoung observes a mother whose labor is continuous, combining paid production with domestic duties rather than replacing them. A New Trade When Jiyoung’s father objects to the mess and smell of weather-strip work, Misook stops doing it. Encouraged by a delivery driver, she learns basic hairdressing and begins making house calls in the neighborhood. She develops a clientele through skill, careful attention, and business sense. This work gives her a measure of control over her earnings and demonstrates that she can turn limited opportunities into a livelihood.

Investing in Stability

Family Risk and Resourcefulness A Household Under Strain The 1997 Korean financial crisis threatens the security of Misook’s husband’s civil-service job. He eventually retires early and considers investing his severance pay in a China-related business, but Misook firmly refuses to let the family’s savings be risked in a venture she distrusts. Her position comes from practical knowledge of the household’s obligations. With children approaching adulthood and uncertain income, she insists that her husband pursue a less reckless path. Building a Business Misook sells an investment apartment and combines the proceeds with her husband’s severance money to purchase a commercial property. The family’s first ventures struggle, but she identifies a later opportunity in a porridge shop near a pediatric hospital. The shop succeeds well enough to improve the family’s finances and help fund the children’s futures. Misook’s planning and business judgment become the foundation of a security the household could not rely on from her husband’s former salary alone.

A Mother’s Regret

Recognizing the Sacrifice The Teacher She Might Have Been When Jiyoung is in elementary school, Misook tells her she once wanted to become a teacher and had earned the best grades among her siblings. She could not pursue that future because she worked to educate her brothers; later, she explains, she works to educate her own children. The parallel exposes how one generation’s sacrifices are inherited by the next. Misook’s love for her children is genuine, but it does not erase her awareness that her life has been repeatedly organized around other people’s needs. A Different Kind of Support Misook helps her daughters in concrete ways, including defending Jiyoung when her father tells her simply to avoid trouble and marry. She encourages Jiyoung to run wild, offering permission that contrasts with the restraint expected of women. Her achievements in business bring the family material stability, but the story does not treat success as compensation for every lost possibility. Misook’s trajectory holds both truths: she builds a life of agency and provision, and she carries the regrets of the ambitions she surrendered.

Rural childhood and move to Seoul at fifteen

Early 1980s, after Kim Jiyoung’s birth

Jiyoung’s childhood, approximately the late 1980s

After the 1997 financial crisis, through the early 2000s

Jiyoung’s school years through the family’s later success