Traditional Hoju Family Registry System

The Traditional Hoju Family Registry System was a family-registration scheme in which every member of a household was registered under its patriarch. In Kim Jiyoung’s story, it represents more than a legal arrangement: it makes male lineage the default framework for family identity, while the persistence of customary practice exposes the distance between changing the law and changing everyday expectations.

Definition and Historical Challenge

Under the hoju system, family membership was organized through a male head of household. The novel places opposition to this arrangement in the late 1990s, when organizations advocating its abolition began to press the issue openly. The debate concerned not only administrative procedure but who could count as the organizing center of a family and whose name would signify kinship.

The narrative also shows how that structure entered public understanding through personal stories. Some people publicly used both parents’ surnames; celebrities described painful childhood memories of being teased because their family name differed from their fathers’. A popular television drama about a single mother who risked losing custody of a child she had raised to an irresponsible father gave Kim Jiyoung another way to recognize the system’s absurdity. These examples made the consequences legible as lived experience, rather than leaving the issue at the level of a technical registry rule.

Opponents of abolition, however, argued that ending the system would turn blood relatives into strangers and make Korean society savage. The contrast reveals the stakes of the dispute: family unity was presented as dependent on preserving a patriarchal form, even as the system’s critics questioned why that form should define kinship in the first place.

Legal Abolition and Its Limits

The Constitutional Court of Korea found the hoju system incompatible with the constitutional guarantee of gender equality in February 2005. The system was abolished in January 2008 and replaced by a new law. In the account, the change also marks a move away from the family registry toward an individual identification system. A newborn was no longer required to take the father’s surname: a couple could choose the mother’s surname and family origin when signing their marriage registration.

That choice was legally available but remained unusual. The novel reports only 200 cases in which children took their mother’s name after the system’s abolition in 2008. The small number puts a limit on any simple story of reform: removing a legal requirement created an alternative, but did not make that alternative customary. The system’s formal end and the persistence of paternal naming therefore belong to the same account of change, rather than marking a clean break between an old order and a new one.

Kim Jiyoung’s Marriage Registration

The conflict becomes concrete when Kim Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun fill out their marriage paperwork at their dining table, consulting a laptop for information such as their family origins. One section asks whether their child will take the mother’s surname and family origin. Jung Daehyun treats the choice casually, while Kim Jiyoung raises the likely social consequences: people may assume a child with the mother’s surname has a story behind it, leading to repeated explanations and corrections.

Kim Jiyoung marks no. The form gives the couple a choice, but the expectation surrounding that choice weighs on her decision. She feels bad as she makes it, and the scene links the abstract history of the hoju system to a small act of handwriting. The old rule no longer compels the answer; nevertheless, a familiar paternal surname seems easier to carry through a world that treats it as unremarkable.

The scene also turns the marriage form into a measure of reform’s reach. The couple’s paperwork sits beside a laptop, an ordinary setting for a decision that invokes family origin, law, and social recognition. Kim Jiyoung considers whether laws and institutions change values or whether values drive laws and institutions. Her hesitation does not resolve that question, but it shows why formal permission alone cannot settle the practical meaning of equality.

Patriarchal Defaults Beyond the Registry

The novel sets the family-name decision alongside other gendered defaults without treating them as provisions of the hoju system itself. In school, boys came first on the roster and routinely led lines, presentations, and homework checks; the narrator compares that taken-for-granted ordering with the convention that men’s national registry numbers begin with one and women’s with two. The comparison makes visible how an unequal order can feel natural precisely because it is repeated in ordinary procedures.

Other institutional routines extend the contrast into adult life. Kim Jiyoung learns that unofficial recruitment requests could pass through university departments with only male students recommended, while a highly qualified woman who challenged her exclusion received explanations invoking employer preference, military service, and men as future heads of households. At a company, Kim Eunsil had tried to be accepted as one of the men by staying late, volunteering for trips, and returning to work a month after giving birth. Later, as a manager, she removed unnecessary company dinners and guaranteed maternity and paternity leave. These cases do not arise from the registry rule, but they echo the novel’s broader concern with the ordinary organizational practices that preserve male advantage even as formal arrangements change.

The same distinction appears in domestic life. When a doctor dismisses Kim Jiyoung’s workload because washing machines and vacuum cleaners have reduced physical labor, she recognizes that the machines do not perform the work themselves. The novel notes that domestic labor may be dismissed as idleness or praised as life-sustaining work, while its monetary value goes uncalculated. This episode is not an effect of the hoju system in a narrow legal sense; it belongs to the surrounding pattern in which women’s work and responsibility are normalized rather than accounted for.

Narrative Significance

The Traditional Hoju Family Registry System gives the novel a historical example of patriarchy made administrative: a rule can organize family identity while presenting its own hierarchy as ordinary. Its abolition demonstrates that institutional change is possible, and the constitutional ruling supplies a legal basis for rejecting the old structure. Yet the marriage form’s optional surname clause, Kim Jiyoung’s decision, and the rarity of children taking their mother’s name show that the removal of compulsion does not erase the social force of a convention.

By placing that family decision among classroom ordering, employment practices, and unpaid care work, the narrative distinguishes a specific legal system from the wider habits that can survive it. The result is neither a claim that nothing changed nor a celebration of reform as complete. The registry is gone, but the question raised at the dining table remains: whether altered institutions can transform what people regard as the natural shape of a family.