Embodiment of jeong as an dramaturgical support method in 99 Histories

The paper will focus on the invisible and effective form of work in 99 Histories by Julia Cho, specifically labor performed by Korean American women across generations, such as the work of caregiving, suppressing or transmitting trauma, maintaining family continuity through silence, and maintaining the Korean identity with jeong. The play emphasizes caregiving, emotional restraint, and silence as a gendered form of labor. Through the intergenerational relationship between Sah-Jin and Eunice, Cho underscores the burden of inherent trauma and unspoken expectations placed on women to hold family and history together. This play is carried through a Korean concept called 정 , Jeong, a complex emotional bond rooted in Korean culture, connection, care, and obligation. It will serve as a tool to analyze how women’s emotional labor operates in the mother/daughter relationship, which is often in ways that are ambivalent, enduring and painful. 

Silence regarding Eunice’s father’s death and Sah-Jin’s past itself is labor; Sah-Jin withholds certain truths for protection, when Eunice actively tries to remember the past. This essay will also draw attention on how inheritance, both biological and emotional, is women's work. Eunice’s fear that she will reproduce and inherit her mental illness underscores how trauma is embodied and transmitted connecting reproductive anxiety to intergenerational labor of survival. .

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