Jiyoung tells Daehyun about the park harassment

Jiyoung tells Jung Daehyun about the park harassment, confronting him with the fact that strangers had called her a “mom-roach” to her face. Her account makes a supposedly online insult immediate and personal, and connects that public contempt to the career, routine, and sense of self she has surrendered to raise Jiwon.

The Insult in the Park

Earlier that day, Jiyoung had managed to drink coffee in the park for the first time in a long while while Jiwon slept in her buggy. On a nearby bench, office workers around Jiyoung’s age were drinking coffee from the same café. One man glanced at her and whispered to his colleagues. She could not make out every word, but heard enough to understand their contempt: they described her as living off her husband’s pay, idling over coffee, and being one of the “mom-roaches” who had it easy. The speaker also said he would never marry a Korean woman.

Jiyoung rushed away, spilling hot coffee on the back of her hand. Jiwon woke and cried, but Jiyoung did not notice as she pushed the buggy home. For the rest of the afternoon she was dazed: she fed Jiwon cold soup, forgot to put on her diaper, and later had to change her out of soiled clothes. She had also forgotten a load of laundry and hung the wrinkled clothes to dry only after Jiwon had gone to bed. These lapses show the encounter following her home, disrupting the work of care it had been used to mock.

Telling Jung Daehyun

When Jung Daehyun came home after midnight from a business dinner, carrying red-bean-filled goldfish cakes, Jiyoung realized she had not eaten lunch or dinner. Asked whether something was wrong, she answered, “People call me ‘mom-roach.’” Jung Daehyun sighed and tried to reassure her that the term belonged to online comments written by dumb preteens, that nobody used it in real life, and that nobody thought of her that way. His response treats the insult as distant internet talk; Jiyoung corrects him with what she witnessed: the speakers were office workers in their thirties, wearing suits, across the street in the park.

As she recounts the scene, Jiyoung flushes and her hands shake. She had been shocked and mortified, and wanted to escape at once; telling the story brings the physical force of that humiliation back into the room. The distinction she insists on is not merely where the word appeared, but who said it: these were adult men in public, not anonymous children online.

The Cost Behind the Coffee

Jiyoung makes the price of the coffee her answer to the accusation of idleness. “The coffee was 1500 won. They were drinking the same coffee, so they must have known how much it was. Tell me—don’t I deserve to drink a 1500-won cup of coffee? I don’t care if it’s 1500 won or 15 million won. It’s nobody’s business what I do with the money my husband made.” The shared purchase makes the judgment especially pointed: the men could drink the same café coffee without having their right to it questioned, while Jiyoung’s cup becomes evidence, in their eyes, that she lives comfortably at someone else’s expense.

Her defense then turns from money to what that accusation erases. She reminds Jung Daehyun that she endured the pain of childbirth and gave up her routine, career, dreams, and sense of self to raise their child. Calling her vermin makes that labor disappear and recasts dependence as a moral failing. Her question, “What do I do now?” expresses the collision between the life she has relinquished and the contempt directed at her for living it.

Jung Daehyun gently draws her toward him, embraces her by the shoulders, pats her back, and repeats, “That’s not true. Don’t think like that.” His tenderness offers comfort, but the scene leaves the underlying contradiction intact: he can deny that anyone thinks of Jiyoung as a “mom-roach,” while she has just described hearing men say it. The telling forces the insult into their marriage as a shared knowledge, even though his reassurance cannot undo either the public humiliation or the sacrifices she names.