A few months ago, I wanted to make more of an effort to understand more of the political landscape within South Korea. To avoid getting lost in the nuances and complexities of politics by trying to understand everything at once, I decided I would educate myself one issue at a time. For the first, I picked an issue that has always been close to my heart: Feminism.
I was fortunate at the time, that the author and journalist Hawon Jung had recently released her book, ‘Flowers of Fire’, which explores this topic in great detail (within the context of South Korea). I reached out to Jung (pictured right), who very kindly agreed to answer a few of my questions.
The Title of the book, ‘Flowers of Fire’, is quite a powerful choice. Can you explain a little bit about the symbolism and meaning behind it?
In South Korea (and perhaps in many other places), the word “flower” is often used as a metaphor for a woman — a pretty, fragile object of desire to be seen but maybe not heard. For instance, many women in South Korean workplaces may be relegated to supporting roles for men or sidelined from promotional opportunities. But during business lunches or hoesik — after-hour drinking sessions common in many workplaces – women are often and customarily pushed to sit next to the most powerful or senior figure on the table with a tacit obligation to “brighten up the mood” by chit-chatting with him, or smiling at his jokes. And one of the most common jokes in this situation is how great the powerful figure feels about being “surrounded by flowers.”
But while I was covering the country’s feminist movements in the late 2010s, I noticed that a lot of women played with the word and used it as a metaphor of defiance against those patriarchal oppressions (In the Korean language, the word 꽃 (kkot) refers to a flower, and 불꽃 (bulkkot), which literally combines the two words “fire” and “flower,” means flame). For instance, in many street protests in support of women’s rights that I witnessed in the late 2010s — most notably a series of anti-spycam protests in 2018 — women chanted together, “We are flames, not flowers.” In another case, a team of two student journalists who in 2019 uncovered a vast network of sextortion chat rooms that victimized dozens of women and girls dubbed themselves as “Team Flame.”
So, I chose Flowers of Fire as a metaphor for the hopes and struggles of these people fighting against patriarchal oppression that often reduces them to mere flowers.
How has the book been received?
When I decided to write the book — and while I was writing it — one of the audiences I had in mind were people who mostly saw South Korea through the lenses of its pop culture, but were eager to learn more about the country, whether its history, politics, or the state of women’s rights and LGBTQ rights. I was hoping that the book would be able to help them better understand the lives of ordinary people in South Korea, especially women, beyond what is portrayed in the country’s pop culture products. And many of those who read the book have eventually told me something similar. They say the book opened their eyes to the sides of South Korea they hadn’t seen or hadn’t’ been aware of before. Something they didn’t see in many K-dramas which, to a degree, offer highly sugar-coated versions of reality on the ground. Or something they vaguely noticed in the K-dramas they watched, or in the news about their favorite K-pop stars, but they couldn’t fully understand due to the lack of a bigger social, cultural, or historical context, some of which are explained in Flowers of Fire.
And there were many other readers who might not necessarily be interested in South Korean pop culture but were simply wanting to learn more about how women in other parts of the world were fighting against sexism or gender violence. Some of them said it was deeply inspiring to get to know the stories of women fighting for equality in Asia, which had remained relatively unknown in the global, western-centric conversations about women’s lib movements.
Was there a specific moment, catalyst or event that prompted your decision to write this book?
There was no particular “a-ha” moment that made me decide to write this book. It was more of a gradual process through the mid-and late-2010s that convinced me that this was a story definitely worth telling in a book. There was the 2015 rise of Megalia — the controversial feminist website that shed light on rampant misogyny in the country’s cyberspace. There was the 2016 murder of a young woman, which is widely called Gangnam station murder and sparked a national wave of mourning among so many young women. There was a growing fight against spycam porn and other forms of the so-called “digital sex crimes.” There was a campaign to condemn the growing government crackdown on abortion, which had previously been a criminal offense only on paper for decades. And I could see that the impact of all these social developments were changing the conversations among friends, family, or colleagues at school classrooms, corporate offices, news media, or online chat rooms in South Korea.
Not a whole lot of foreign media paid attention to these shifts at first. After all, gender issues were not exactly a kind of topic South Korea is known for internationally. It’s not about military confrontations with North Korea. It’s not about Samsung. And it’s not about K-pop. But things started to change in 2018 when South Korea’s #MeToo movement took off, and tens of thousands of young women took to the streets for months to condemn the widespread spycam porn crimes. These two events put the women’s rights issues in South Korea in global headlines throughout the year.
And during this period of time, I had the privilege of witnessing these developments firsthand and of meeting the people who made them possible. It was a heady, exhilarating time as a journalist. I thought that this was one of the key moments of the South Korean history that might be remembered for decades to come, and I needed to record this in a form that would be more in-depth than daily news stories, for those outside the country.
To what extent has there been male engagement in South Korea with regards to the movement?
Not so much, at least publicly. It’s not easy for a woman in South Korea to publicly call herself a feminist because of potential bullying or harassment. And in this environment, it’s not easy for men to call themselves a feminist, either, especially for young men — considering the strong anti-feminist sentiment in this demographic group. But although not a whole lot of men in South Korea may consider themselves feminists or explicitly call themselves one, I think that many changes are already afoot, as the shift in the social and cultural climates in the era of #MeToo sent the language of feminism – and the values championed by feminists – seeping into people’s lives and conversations.
For instance, although South Korean families in general still have extremely uneven division of domestic work, a state survey showed that married couples in their 20s share domestic responsibilities almost equally. Also, thanks to aggressive policy push by the gender equality ministry, men account for a third of those who take parental leave in the country – almost an unthinkable idea only a decade ago. Young men are also more likely to embrace the norms of traditional femininity shunned by their fathers’ generation, like cooking or doing household chores, another survey showed.
South Korean poet and #MeToo trailblazer Choi Young-Mi once said, “#MeToo is not the fight between men and women but the fight between the past and the future,” and I think that many men and women have already taken steps towards that future, although the term “feminism” still remains a loaded word in South Korean society.
I note that you said in an interview that your target audience is young people. Is there a specific reason behind targeting the youth?
When I was a Seoul correspondent for the AFP, there were many people who reached out to me via email or on social media and asked about what was going on in South Korea in terms of women’s rights issues, what made women in the country so angry and protest on the streets, etc. Many of them were young women in countries like Spain, Sweden, the US, or China who had certain interest in South Korea, and it seemed to me that there was this groundswell of interest among some young people outside South Korea to learn how women in the country were mobilizing and fighting against patriarchy — especially at a time when people across the world were speaking up against the similar problems in recent years. While these problems surely affect people of all ages, I felt that there seemed to be more keen sense of urgency about how to tackle the issues of gender violence and sexism among young people. I thought a book like mine could help them learn how people in other parts of the world were fighting and perhaps find an inspiration from those stories.
How did it feel to be there at the ‘anti-spycam protest in 2018?
It was an overwhelming experience. As a journalist based in a country where raucous and colorful street protests are common, I was quite accustomed to seeing all kinds of protests and public display of anger. But the protests I saw back in 2018 was nothing like I had ever seen before. It was simply incredible to see so many women – tens of thousands at the peak months – gathering together to protest, and the atmosphere was not only angry and furious but also festive and electrifying. I attended almost every single protest throughout 2018, and oftentimes I could hear the high-pitched voices of so many women shout together slogans like “Our Life Is Not Your Porn!” from several blocks away from the protest venue. You could really feel that all the pent-up anger and frustration many women felt about the spycam porn epidemic – as well as the sense of injustice they felt about misogyny and gender violence in wider society – bursting out all at the same time. In many ways, the series of protests marked the culmination of the new wave of feminist movement that emerged in the country back then.
After four years of preparation and comprehensive research, how does it feel to have published this book?
Thinking back, writing this book was a huge challenge. When I first set out to write the book, I was so clueless about how the US publishing industry worked that I didn’t even know about the concept of a literary agent. I was lucky enough to have found such a wonderful agent and publisher in the end, but, as someone who was not based in the US and had little connection in the US publishing industry, or the in the country itself, it had already taken me huge efforts, time and energy just to get to that point. Even after I got the book deal, writing book about such a controversial, lightening-rod issue in a language that is not my first also turned out to be much harder than I’d thought; I can’t even remember how many times I banged my head against the keyboard, bemoaning why I had gotten myself into this project and screaming in my head, “what the hell were you thinking?”
So, I often had to remind myself why I’d gotten myself into this seemingly formidable project; I wanted to chronicle the extraordinary years that changed so many aspects of South Korea’s gender dynamics. I wanted to write about the remarkable women and men who made it possible and allowed me into their lives with hopes of reaching out to the people elsewhere in the world. I wanted to share their stories with many people from around the world who were eager to know more about the country they’d come to love, often through its pop culture. With this book, I wanted to connect the people in these two worlds, and I’m so happy to have finally put this baby out in the world, ending the journey for the past four years. I hope it will continue to reach people everywhere, finding its new life among readers.