Son preference and sex-selective abortion

Son preference and sex-selective abortion are presented as connected expressions of a social order that values sons more highly and places the costs of that preference on women. In Kim Jiyoung’s family, the hierarchy shapes daily life before she can recognize it, leads her mother, Oh Misook, to terminate a pregnancy after learning the fetus was female, and reappears when Kim Jiyoung herself is pregnant with a girl. The novel follows that preference beyond the question of who is born: it also bears on women’s standing in the family, their expectations of motherhood, and the work and care they are expected to provide.

Family Hierarchies and the Value of Sons

Kim Jiyoung grows up in a household where her younger brother receives the freshest rice and the intact pieces of food, as well as new, matching belongings. She and her sister share umbrellas, blankets, and treats, while their brother’s possessions are provided for him individually. The children’s grandmother, Koh Boonsoon, treats the boy’s things as precious and regards the girls as having less claim to them. The difference is so habitual that Kim Jiyoung does not initially understand it as special treatment. Their mother praises the sisters for sharing and caring for their brother, making it harder for either girl to object.

Koh Boonsoon’s own history gives the preference a generational context. She struggled to raise four sons through poverty, doing paid and domestic work while her husband did not provide for the family. In old age, only Kim Jiyoung’s father among the four sons takes responsibility for her. Even though Oh Misook prepares his mother’s meals and bedding, Koh Boonsoon attributes this care to having sons and insists that a woman needs several. Her experience therefore contains a contradiction: she has borne the burden of raising sons, yet interprets their existence as the source of security, even when a daughter-in-law performs the care she credits to them.

That expectation is directed at Oh Misook from the births of her first two daughters. When Kim Eunyoung is born, Oh Misook apologizes to Koh Boonsoon; when Kim Jiyoung is born, she apologizes to the infant. Koh Boonsoon reassures her that a later child will be a boy. The repeated assurance makes the daughters’ births seem provisional, as though a son is still the hoped-for completion of the family. In childhood, the preference is reinforced not only through explicit expectations but through the ordinary distribution of food, possessions, and permission to complain.

Abortion and the Wider Social Context

Less than a year after Kim Jiyoung’s birth, Oh Misook becomes pregnant again. A dream of a large tiger leads her to expect a boy, but the doctor’s examination indicates that the fetus is female. Oh Misook becomes intensely distressed. The novel places her decision within the family-planning policies then used to control population growth, and notes that sex determination followed by abortion of female fetuses was common. Although abortion for medical reasons had been legal for a decade, the text describes female sex itself as treated in practice like a medical problem.

Oh Misook goes to a clinic alone and has the pregnancy terminated. The account makes clear that she bears the responsibility and physical and emotional consequences without support from her family. The narrator also gives the event a wider demographic frame: the practice continued through the 1980s, and in the early 1990s, when the birth sex-ratio imbalance was at its height, the ratio for third children and later exceeded two boys for every girl. This context connects an intimate family decision to a widespread pattern without presenting Oh Misook as its sole cause or treating her choice as freely made of social pressure.

Years later, Oh Misook becomes pregnant again and gives birth to a boy, five years younger than Kim Jiyoung. The boy’s arrival fulfills the family’s long-standing expectation, but it does not erase the earlier loss or undo the unequal treatment that shaped the girls’ childhood. When Kim Jiyoung first menstruates, the family’s limited food supplies provide another small but telling instance of hierarchy: her younger brother fills his bowl, and Kim Eunyoung intervenes to ensure their mother is served before him. The preference is not confined to birth or pregnancy; it continues in everyday claims on family resources.

The Preference Reappears in Kim Jiyoung’s Pregnancy

When Kim Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun discuss having a child, they have not previously made a detailed family-planning decision, and both have assumed that children are a natural next step after marriage. For Kim Jiyoung, however, pregnancy raises questions about bodily change, childcare, and whether she can sustain her career. Their work schedules make daycare or a babysitter seem insufficient, while neither set of parents is well positioned to provide regular care. The novel places these worries alongside the earlier generations’ assumptions: the prospect of motherhood carries consequences that are not shared equally between the parents.

During the pregnancy, the obstetrician tells the couple to buy pink baby clothes, confirming that the fetus is a girl. Neither parent had expressed a preference, but Kim Jiyoung knows the family elders had expected a boy. Her mother responds that the next child can be a boy; Jung Daehyun’s mother says that she does not mind. Kim Jiyoung minds both responses. The apparent reassurance that a future son remains possible, and the claim of indifference that does not address the expectation, make the old preference audible again at the moment her daughter’s sex is known.

The pressure also comes from women of Kim Jiyoung’s generation. She hears mothers describe their relief at having a boy, their improved standing with in-laws, or their ability to take pride in bearing a son. Kim Jiyoung wants to claim equal dignity and pleasure in her own pregnancy, but holds back rather than risk appearing bitter. The scene shows how son preference can be repeated by people who have themselves had to navigate it: family status and approval make the birth of a boy something women may be expected to celebrate.

Care, Work, and the Unequal Costs of Parenthood

Kim Jiyoung asks Jung Daehyun what he stands to give up if they have a child. She lists the stakes for herself as her youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future. His answer includes seeing friends less often, coming home earlier, and helping with household chores, as well as the financial responsibility he sees himself carrying as head of the household. Kim Jiyoung understands these losses as slight beside the prospect that her own life and work will be redirected. The exchange exposes an inequality related to, but broader than, the preference for sons: parenthood is discussed as a shared decision, while its anticipated costs are allocated by gender.

As the birth approaches, the couple writes down three possibilities: Kim Jiyoung returns to work immediately, returns after a year of maternity leave, or does not return. They compare childcare arrangements, expenses, advantages, and disadvantages. Sending the child to Jung Daehyun’s parents in Busan is not practical because they are elderly and his mother has recently had back surgery; a live-in nanny would be costly and would become part of the household’s daily life. They conclude that one parent must stay home. Jung Daehyun’s work is more stable and better paid, and the familiar expectation that husbands work while wives raise children helps determine that Kim Jiyoung will leave her job. Knowing this outcome in advance does not make it less depressing for her.

The book also links family decisions to the broader limits on women’s employment. Before Kim Jiyoung begins applying for jobs, her friend Yun Hyejin points out that the college alumni appearing at job fairs are men. In the year Kim Jiyoung graduates, women make up 29.6 percent of new employees at 100 companies; a separate survey finds that 44 percent of recruiting managers would prefer a male candidate when qualifications are equivalent. These figures describe a labor market in which women already face unequal access to work, while motherhood can further interrupt their careers. After her daughter starts daycare a little past twelve months, Kim Jiyoung has about three hours to herself, much of which goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food. A cited comparison puts the daily time available to mothers of children under two at four hours and ten minutes for those whose children stay home and four hours and twenty-five minutes for those using daycare. The difference is only fifteen minutes: childcare may create a brief interval without the child beside her, but it does not remove the housework.

Significance

The pattern running from Koh Boonsoon’s insistence on sons to Oh Misook’s isolated abortion and Kim Jiyoung’s unease over her daughter’s reception is not presented as a sequence of identical choices. It changes form across generations: household favoritism, pressure to produce a boy, sex-selective abortion, and assumptions about who should surrender paid work for childcare. The continuities lie in the unequal value assigned to girls and in women’s responsibility for absorbing the consequences.

By setting intimate family scenes beside demographic and employment figures, the novel makes son preference more than a private attitude. Its effects enter the allocation of food and possessions, decisions about pregnancy, women’s standing with relatives, and the distribution of time and career opportunity after childbirth. The daughter’s birth does not resolve those inequalities; instead, it makes visible the conditions into which Kim Jiyoung is expected to bring and raise her child.