Lee Hae-rin is a City Desk reporter at The Korea Times, covering social issues, tourism and taekwondo. She is passionate about speaking up for the rights of minorities, including women, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities and animals as well as discovering the latest makgeolli trend in town. Feel free to reach her at lhr@koreatimes.co.kr.
INTERVIEW Memories of #MeToo will shape coming generation's worldviews despite ongoing anti-feminist wave
Jung Ha-won, the author of "Flowers of Fire" and former AFP correspondent, speaks during an interview with The Korea Times at the paper's headquarters in Seoul, Aug. 22. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk
By Lee Hae-rin
Inside story of Korea's feminist movement sheds hopes for future gender equality
Korea remains a hostile environment for women’s rights amid an intensifying gender divide and ongoing anti-feminist backlash in politics.
But the #MeToo movement as a generational experience will shape the mindsets of young Koreans and ultimately contribute to uprooting sexual discrimination and violence, according to journalist Jung Ha-won.
In her first book “Flowers of Fire,” Jung chronicles the firsthand inside story of the “both crushing defeats and hard-won victories” of Korea’s feminist movement between 2015 and 2021, based on nearly 100 interviews with survivors, activists, academics and experts.
As a former correspondent for the AFP news agency, Jung, born and raised in South Korea, wrote about the two Koreas for over a decade from the death of then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in 2011 to the rise of K-pop on the world stage.
She then brought the spotlight to Korea’s #MeToo movement in global news media, which tended to primarily focus on North Korea issues and chaebol, or South Korea’s family-owned conglomerates, at the time. Her extensive coverage was shortlisted in the 2019 Awards for Editorial Excellence by the Society of Publishers in Asia.
During a recent interview with The Korea Times, Jung said that the Korean women she met while reporting are trailblazers, advocates and champions who led one of Asia’s most remarkable feminist movements with their “hidden inner strengths.”
“Prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun, for example, looks tender on the outside and sounds quite soft-spoken, but she is a very strong person. Most of the women I met were like that, too, soft on the outside but fierce on the inside,” she said, referring to the prosecutor at the Tongyeong branch of the southeastern Changwon District Prosecutors’ Office, who gave force to the country’s #MeToo movement with the disclosure about her sexual harassment experience from her male supervisor in January 2018. In May 2020, Seo was appointed as the ministry’s supervisor in gender equality policies and led a digital sex crime task force, which ended last year.
This is in contrast to Western stereotypes of Asian women, in Jung’s view.
“For all Westerners who still fantasize about the sweet and docile Asian women like Miss Saigon, I’d say, ‘Wake up! Your Miss Saigon was dead and gone a long time ago. She’s not here anymore,’” Jung wrote in her book.
As a reporter, she witnessed their transformations over the years from traumatized victims into champions who stepped up in solidarity to raise their voices for other victims of sexual violence and brought institutional changes for gender equality in the economically advanced yet culturally patriarchal nation.
A protester reads out text messages during a rally demanding justice for public prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun, who alleged she had been harassed by her senior supervisor, in front of the Daegu District Prosecutors' Office, Feb. 1, 2018. #MeToo is written in the back of the paper, with the Korean sentence saying "You're are not alone." Yonhap
However, these hard-won victories are “definitely under attack” amid an ongoing anti-feminist backlash in Korean politics, she said, explaining that’s not how she expected the story to unfold when she started writing the book in 2019.
“I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy. The sociocultural atmosphere has changed, but on a central government level, the gender ministry is on the verge of extinction with its role weakened, while local government offices in charge of gender equality are downgraded or rebranded into something in charge of family, population and child care, focusing primarily on women’s reproductive roles as mothers and caretakers,” she said.
Rep. Lee Jun-seok, the ousted chairman of the ruling conservative People Power Party (PPP), as well as President Yoon Suk Yeol swept into power on a wave of anti-feminist sentiment among young men in recent years, while conservatives are engaging in campaigns to ban books on gender equality and diverse forms of families from public libraries, she explained.
Jung believes Korea’s battle for gender equality is going through a long, harsh winter.
Demonstrators supporting the #MeToo movement stage a rally to mark International Women's Day in Seoul, March 8, 2018. For years, the story of South Korean women has been defined by perseverance as they made gradual but steady progress in the workplace and fought against a deeply entrenched culture of misogyny and harassment. AP-Yonhap
“An explosive moment like 2018’s #MeToo movement is very rare and unusual,” she said, forecasting a little possibility of another strong momentum like the #MeToo movement to arise and overthrow the backlash.
However, many Korean young men have made remarkable improvements, growing to embody the values of gender equality and abandon the patriarchy while living next to young women, although they still have strong antipathy even against the term “feminism,” she said. The memories of the #MeToo movement and social issues and protests revolving around sexual violence will be imprinted on their minds as generational experiences, in Jung's view.
“We still have a long way to go, but changes are afoot. This generation wants to differ from their fathers and I think that’s the silver lining. There could be political, government-level and policy-wise regression (in gender equality), but what has happened over the years ― like the #MeToo movement ― will shape people’s worldviews and mindsets and lead to cultural changes. That’s something difficult to reverse, I think,” she said.
She added her hopes for the book to become a “time capsule” in testimony of Korea’s changing times and a lighthouse of hope for future feminist movements.
“I hope this book can serve as an inspiration for them to take up their own fights at home,” she said.