Constitutional Court of Korea

The Constitutional Court of Korea enters Kim Jiyoung’s story through its finding that the Hoju system was incompatible with the Constitution’s gender-equality clause. Its significance lies in the gap between that legal challenge and the slower transformation of family custom: reform widened the choices available to parents, but did not make those choices socially ordinary.

Constitutional challenge

The Hoju system required family members to be registered under the patriarch. The novel places the challenge to this arrangement within a public dispute that gained force in the late 1990s, when organizations began arguing for its abolition. In February 2005, the Constitutional Court of Korea found the system incompatible with the constitutional guarantee of gender equality. The court’s finding helped make possible the system’s eventual abolition, but the novel distinguishes that constitutional judgment from the later legal change itself.

From ruling to legal change

The Hoju system was abolished in January 2008 and replaced by a new law. Under the resulting arrangements described in the novel, there was no longer a family registry of the old kind; people were identified through an individual identification system. Parents could also choose, when registering their marriage, to give a child the mother’s surname and place of family origin rather than automatically passing on the father’s. The account gives a measure of how rarely that option was used: since abolition in 2008, only 200 children had taken their mother’s name.

Reform and persistent custom

The distance between legal permission and social practice becomes concrete when Kim Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun fill out their marriage registration. The form asks whether their future child should take the mother’s surname and place of family origin. They consider the consequences of departing from the usual paternal surname: others might assume there was a story behind the choice, and the family could face repeated explanations and questions. Kim Jiyoung checks no herself, despite the availability of the alternative.

The scene frames the court’s constitutional intervention as consequential but incomplete. The legal framework had changed enough to make a different choice possible, yet the expectation that children bear their father’s name still shaped what seemed practical. Through the contrast between the ruling and the couple’s decision, the novel asks whether laws and institutions change social values or whether values must change before legal options can be used without added social cost.