With Flowers Of Fire, Hawon Jung Tells A Story Of South Korean Feminist Rebellion 

When journalist Hawon Jung was covering South Korea’s #MeToo movement in 2018 and 2019, her inbox flooded with follow-up questions from thousands of women around the world. “I noticed that a lot of women who reached out to me – not all of them, but a lot of them – were fans of South Korean pop culture who wanted to know more about the country,” says Jung.  

This isn’t particularly surprising. In the past 15 years, South Korea has become one of the world’s notable distributors of popular culture, with K-media exports reaching an all-time high of $12.45 billion in 2021. The country’s TV drama and music industries have been particularly successful internationally, forming the backbone of ‘the Korean wave’ by appealing especially to girls and women, looking for songs and stories that centre the female gaze.

For many in the Western world, the cathartic fantasies of K-pop and K-drama are predominantly shaping how contemporary South Korea is understood. But pop culture – whether it comes from the US, South Korea or elsewhere, is not usually designed to be fully reflective of a culture’s complex realities. “There’s only so much you can learn if you don’t know the social or cultural or bigger political context,” says Jung. “These pop culture products are, to a degree, highly sugar-coated versions of reality.”  

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The questions in Jung’s inbox were proof that many of the girls and women around the world who love South Korean media want to better understand the country. But, in 2018 and 2019, when Jung looked for an English-language book about South Korean gender issues to recommend, she couldn’t find any for a general audience. So she decided to write one herself. Over the next four years – through a pandemic, the birth of her son, and a move to Germany – Jung wrote Flowers Of Fire: The Inside Story Of South Korea’s Feminist Movement And What It Means For Women’s Rights Worldwide. The book chronicles the “loud, raucous world of South Korean feminists,” and it’s a vital resource for K-media fans and feminists around the world. 

If someone formed their understanding of South Korea solely from K-drama and K-pop, then they’d probably think the country is a relatively easy place to live as a woman. However, this is not the case. South Korea has the world’s 10th largest economy, but its economic and social progress has not been equally distributed across genders. In 2021, the World Economic Forum ranked it 102 out of 156 countries in terms of gender parity; it has the largest gender pay gap of any OECD country, despite having the most educated women amongst the 38 member nations. South Korean women do a majority of the housework and child-rearing, and are often pressured to give up their careers in the process.  

Social and economic conditions have informed the country’s declining birthrate, which has been the lowest in the world since 2013. Many straight women have opted out of heterosexual dating, marriage, or parenting – a political movement known as 4B. It’s an understandable choice, given rates of sexual and gender-based violence. In a 2014 study conducted by Korea Women’s Hotline, nearly 90 percent of women who responded said they had experienced physical or emotional abuse from a romantic partner.  

While Flowers Of Fire may highlight these infuriating realities, it isn’t a depressing read, as Jung centres the girls and women who are fighting back. She interviewed more than 100 women, and relayed on-the-ground reports from major feminist protests staged in the late 2010s and into the 2020s. These include 2018’s spycam protests, which saw tens of thousands of South Korean women turning out to demand harsher consequences for the men who make, share, and watch molka videos. Molka is a Korean term for the tiny cameras, illegally hidden in public restrooms, hotels and changing rooms to record videos, usually of women. The images are then uploaded to websites where people, usually men, pay to access them. “I’ve never seen anything like [the molka protests],” says Jung. “All these women gathering in one place, screaming and shouting. This public, collective display of anger of women that South Korea probably has never seen before, and I have never seen before.” 

In the #MeToo section of the book, Jung tells the story of a gathering organised by an activist known as Witch. Witch is a survivor of sexual assault, who has helped other women to defend themselves against ‘revenge counteraccusations’ – criminal complaints brought against women after they publicly accuse men of sexual assault. In February 2019, shortly after the birth of her son, Jung snuck out of a post-natal care facility to attend a cathartic burning ritual organised by Witch for survivors. “I took the bus two hours to get there, with this doughnut-shaped cushion because I couldn’t walk for long hours,” recounts Jung. “That happened, actually, five days after I gave birth, but I really wanted to go there. I thought, ‘This is something that I have to watch.’” 

In Flowers Of Fire, Jung bears witness – and allows readers to bear witness – to the deep emotions of the girls and women who share their stories. “I wanted to help [fans] better understand Korea, especially the lives of ordinary people in the country,” says Jung. The title of the book was inspired by a Korean word, 불꽃 (or bul-kkot), which means ‘fire flower’. “In South Korean society (and elsewhere),” Jung writes in the book’s introduction, “women are often treated like flowers: pretty objects of desire to be seen and not heard. But these women have found ways to flare against the everyday sexism they experience, so I chose Flowers Of Fire as a metaphor of their ongoing struggles – and their indestructible hope.”  

Below, find a list of Jung’s recommendations for TV and film that captures the complex lives of women in South Korea…

1. House Of Hummingbird (2018) 
2. Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982 (2019)  
3. Cart (2014) 
4. Han Gong-Ju (2014) 
5. Miss Baek (2018) 
6. The Bacchus Lady (2016)
7. An Old Lady (2020) 
8. Moonlit Winter (2019) 
9. Samjin Company English Class (2020) 
10. Queenmaker (2023)  
    
    

Katyi Burt is a writer and editor who covers, pop culture, TV and entertainment for publications including Time, Vulture and Den Of Geek

_{Seoul, Getty; Flowers Of Fire; Han Gong-Ju; Miss Baek, Netflix; Moonlight Winter; Queenmaker, Netflix; The Bacchus Lady, Netflix}