Korea functions in the novel not merely as a geographical setting but as the scale at which intimate decisions meet public policy and ordinary institutional routines. The country’s changing social climate opens new possibilities for girls and women, while family expectations, school customs, and workplace practices continue to narrow those possibilities. The contrast is visible across the lives of Kim Jiyoung and her family: formal change arrives, but its effects are uneven and do not by themselves redistribute responsibility or opportunity.

Family Policy and the Birth Ratio

During Kim Jiyoung’s childhood, government population-control programs were promoted as family planning. Although abortion for medical reasons had been legal for a decade, checking fetal sex and ending pregnancies because the fetus was female had become common. The novel places Oh Misook’s solitary trip to a clinic within that broader climate: under pressure to have a son, she ended a pregnancy, and the physical and emotional burden fell on her without family support. Years later, she gave birth to a son, Kim Jiyoung’s younger brother.

The demographic figures make that family history part of a national pattern. In 1982, the year Kim Jiyoung was born, 106.8 boys were born for every 100 girls; by 1990, the ratio had risen to 116.5 to 100, well above the stated natural range of 103 to 107. For third children and later births, the imbalance in the early 1990s exceeded two boys for every girl. These figures connect son preference to more than private belief: in the novel, it shapes decisions made within families under the wider pressures of population policy and social convention.

Schools, Custom, and Partial Change

The effects of demographic imbalance also alter the institutions children attend. When Kim Jiyoung entered middle school, a nearby school that had been all-girls became coeducational; other area schools followed over the next several years. The explanation is practical as well as demographic: rising numbers of boys and too few school places made the previous arrangement difficult to sustain. The school itself is small and run-down, with a 100-meter track drawn diagonally across its limited field and plaster crumbling from the walls.

The ordinary organization of school life gives gender hierarchy a quieter, habitual form. In elementary school, girls successfully challenged the lunch-line order and won a rotating arrangement, but the change did not unsettle the assumption that boys went first in other settings. Boys led lines and processions, presented first, and had their homework checked before girls. The novel compares this taken-for-granted order with the convention that men’s national registry numbers begin with one and women’s with two. Girls were often entrusted with detailed errands, quiz grading, and homework checks, and were described as smarter, yet boys repeatedly won class-monitor elections. The distinction between being relied upon for work and being chosen to lead recurs beyond school.

The school’s rules also placed particular scrutiny on girls’ clothing. After it became coeducational, the dress code grew stricter: skirts had to cover the knees and conceal the shape of the hips and thighs; girls were required to wear specified undershirts, tights, socks, and dress shoes. In winter, the permitted combination left Kim Jiyoung’s feet painfully cold. The detail situates regulation not in an abstract rulebook but in the student’s daily experience of moving through school.

Education, Employment, and Unequal Opportunity

By the time Kim Eunyoung and Kim Jiyoung came of age, girls’ education and ambition had become broadly accepted. Their parents urged them to study and cultivate good habits rather than directing them toward marriage or domestic roles. The sisters imagined careers and competed for their goals. New anti-discrimination legislation was introduced in 1999, and a national gender-equality ministry was formed in 2001. Yet the novel stresses the mixed signal: public support for women’s ambitions coexists with discriminatory practices at crucial points in their lives.

That contradiction becomes clear as Kim Jiyoung prepares to seek work. She initially hopes to find an organization whose values and work interest her, without insisting on a large company. Her friend Yun Hyejin, despite stronger grades, test results, credentials, and a business-management degree that employers favored, doubts that she will find a reliable employer. She points out that the alumni appearing at job fairs are men. Kim Jiyoung recognizes the pattern in the events she has attended: she has not seen a female alumnus there. In a 2005 survey, women made up 29.6 percent of new hires at 100 companies, a figure presented as a substantial improvement; in another survey that year, 44 percent of recruitment managers at fifty large corporations said they would prefer male candidates with equivalent qualifications, and none preferred women.

Recruitment procedures could reproduce that imbalance without an openly announced policy. According to Yun Hyejin, departments sometimes received unofficial requests to recommend candidates, and only male students were put forward. One highly accomplished graduate learned that her department had selected four men for interviews with a company she wanted to join. When she challenged the decision and asked for the criteria, the explanations invoked the company’s preference, men’s military service, and their expected status as household heads. The department head then dismissed her objection by treating a smart woman’s insistence on an answer as a burden. The process linked opaque institutional decisions to familiar assumptions about who should be hired and who should lead a household.

The workplace carries those expectations into employees’ time and prospects. Kim Eunsil, who had watched a small company grow from three employees, recalled trying to be accepted as one of the men by staying longest at dinners, volunteering for late work and business trips, and returning a month after giving birth. The men who had started alongside her had moved into senior roles or founded firms, while none of her female colleagues remained in the field. Looking back, she came to see that her own example had helped establish an unfair precedent. Once in management, she removed unnecessary dinners and work retreats, guaranteed maternity and paternity leave, and welcomed a team member returning after a year of maternity leave. A 2014 comparison places these workplace experiences against a national measure: women in Korea earned 63 percent of men’s earnings, compared with an 84 percent average across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and Korea ranked lowest on The Economist’s glass-ceiling index among the surveyed countries.

Marriage, Childcare, and the Cost of Choice

The novel also shows customary assumptions operating through the forms and conversations of marriage. As Kim Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun complete their marriage paperwork at a dining table, they encounter a question about whether a future child will take the mother’s surname and place of family origin. The form makes a family tradition into a decision the couple must confront, even as the established practice remains apparent in the question itself.

When Jung Daehyun suggests having a child, Kim Jiyoung weighs consequences he has not yet had to experience. She is unsure how pregnancy will change her body or whether she can continue her career while raising a child. Because both work late and on weekends, ordinary daycare or babysitting may not solve the problem, and neither set of parents is in a position to provide dependable help. She feels guilty even considering care by someone else, while also asking what it would mean to bring a child into a life in which the parents have so little time. Jung Daehyun offers to help with diapers, feedings, and laundry, but Kim Jiyoung presses the question of what he himself would give up. She names her youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future as being at stake; his anticipated losses, by comparison, center on less time with friends, discomfort about work dinners, and added household duties.

As the due date approaches, the couple writes three possible futures on a large sheet of paper: an immediate return to work, a return after a year of maternity leave, or no return. They consider the cost and arrangements for childcare in each case. Sending the child to Jung Daehyun’s parents in Busan is not feasible: although they offer to raise the baby, they are elderly and his mother has recently undergone back surgery. A live-in nanny is also troubling to the couple because the caregiver would share their household routines and family time, and the cost would be considerable. Their final conclusion is that one parent must stay home, and that Kim Jiyoung will do so. Jung Daehyun’s work is more stable and better paid, while the convention that husbands earn and wives care for children makes the choice seem ordinary even though it falls most heavily on her.

Childcare later gives this division a measurable shape. After Jung Jiwon starts daycare a little past twelve months, she settles in well. Her morning runs from a 9:30 drop-off through a snack, play, and lunch, and she returns before 1 p.m. The arrangement gives Kim Jiyoung about three hours without the baby, most of which she spends doing laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food. The novel compares that routine with statistics: mothers of children under two who stay home have an average of four hours and ten minutes to themselves, while mothers using daycare have four hours and twenty-five minutes. The fifteen-minute difference underscores that daycare often changes whether housework is done with a child beside the mother, rather than whether she has meaningful time to rest. When the daycare teacher says Jung Jiwon might soon nap there and stay later, the prospect of a little more time prompts Kim Jiyoung to consider beginning something new.

National Setting and Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, Korea is presented through systems that reach into ordinary life: population policy and birth statistics, school routines and dress codes, recruitment networks and pay, marriage paperwork, and the practical arithmetic of childcare. Some changes are real—girls’ educational ambitions gain legitimacy, laws against discrimination appear, schools adapt, and workplace leave is guaranteed in one company—but customary expectations continue to direct authority and care unevenly. The setting’s significance lies in this coexistence. Structural change is visible, yet decisions that appear personal repeatedly inherit the limits of the institutions and conventions around them.