Cha Seungyeon

Cha Seungyeon is a university hiking-club member, Kim Jiyoung’s friend, and a determined challenger of the club’s male-dominated leadership. She is remembered both for looking after younger women and for insisting that they be offered responsibility rather than ornamental “special treatment.” Her death from an amniotic fluid embolism while giving birth to her second child makes that remembered presence painful: Jiyoung hears of it while experiencing postpartum depression, and later speaks to Jung Daehyun as though she were Seungyeon.

Identity and Background

Seungyeon began university in the same year as Daehyun; Jiyoung entered three years later. The three shared membership in the university hiking club, although Jiyoung and Daehyun did not know each other during their college years. Seungyeon was known for being good to the club’s female members, and she and Jiyoung found common ground in an unpromising fact about their shared hobby: neither actually enjoyed hiking.

Their friendship continued after Seungyeon graduated. They kept in touch and met frequently, so she remained an important presence in Jiyoung’s life beyond the club. Seungyeon’s wedding reception was where Jiyoung and Daehyun first met. The club, in other words, connected the two women first; Seungyeon’s life outside it later brought Jiyoung and Daehyun together.

Friendship and Care for Younger Women

Seungyeon’s support of women in the club became a model for Jiyoung. After her own relationship with the club had grown awkward, Jiyoung still returned from time to time to look after new female recruits. Women often left after only a few meetings, while Seungyeon had once welcomed Jiyoung and drawn her into the group. Jiyoung’s later visits were an attempt to pass on the care she had received.

That care was not simply a matter of being kind within an unchanged hierarchy. The club’s men carried things for women, let them choose meals, and gave them the better rooms on trips, while reserving its president, vice-president, and secretary positions for men. Women could be praised as “flowers among weeds” and treated as honored guests, yet still be kept from the responsibilities and authority that defined membership. Seungyeon recognized the difference between being accommodated and being included.

Opposition to the Club’s Gender Hierarchy

Seungyeon argued that women did not need privileges that left the club’s structure intact; they wanted the same responsibilities and opportunities as men, including the chance to run for president. One devoted male member, a ninth-year PhD student, repeatedly dismissed that demand by saying that the work was too much for women and that their mere presence brightened the club. Seungyeon answered that if the club needed brightening, it should get a lamp. She declared that she would keep fighting until a woman became president.

It did not happen before Seungyeon graduated. Later, Jiyoung heard that a woman who had entered university ten years after Seungyeon had taken the position. Seungyeon responded without triumphalism, observing, “You know what they say—time moves mountains and rivers.” The delayed change gives her campaign both a limit and an afterlife: she did not see the outcome she wanted as a student, but the office she challenged was eventually held by a woman.

Relationship with Daehyun

Seungyeon’s relationship with Daehyun enters the story through a college memory recalled during Jiyoung’s later impersonation of her. On a blazing summer day at the university athletics field, Seungyeon confessed that she had feelings for him. Daehyun did not return them. Seungyeon quickly withdrew the confession, telling him to forget it and promising to treat him as before. The scene presents her as emotionally exposed, but also quick to protect the friendship from the awkwardness of rejection.

Years later, while drinking beer with Jiyoung, Daehyun heard his wife address him as Seungyeon. Jiyoung challenged him about whether he still saw Seungyeon as the lovestruck twenty-year-old who had trembled while confessing her feelings. The precise detail startled him: the exchange belonged to a memory from almost twenty years earlier. Seungyeon’s remembered voice thus brings a private moment between her and Daehyun into Jiyoung’s present, where it becomes difficult for him to dismiss her imitation as joking.

Death and Narrative Significance

Seungyeon died while giving birth to her second child, from an amniotic fluid embolism. Jiyoung was experiencing postpartum depression when she learned of the death; the shock added to the strain that was already making everyday tasks difficult. Seungyeon’s loss is therefore not merely a fact in her biography. It is bound to a period when Jiyoung was struggling, and later resurfaces through Jiyoung’s speech and behavior.

The contrast between Seungyeon’s remembered insistence on equal participation and the vulnerability of her death in childbirth gives her story two distinct forms of significance. In college, she challenged a structure that welcomed women’s presence while withholding authority. In Jiyoung’s adult life, she persists as a friend whose death remains emotionally active. Her brief return in Jiyoung’s voice links the intimate force of friendship and grief to the novel’s broader attention to women’s lives, work, and unequal burdens.