Kim Jiyoung–Cha Seungyeon Friendship

Kim Jiyoung–Cha Seungyeon Friendship begins in a university hiking club and outlasts their shared student years. Cha Seungyeon becomes Kim Jiyoung’s close friend and an example of how women might support one another without accepting the club’s unequal terms. After Seungyeon’s death in childbirth, that bond returns in Kim Jiyoung’s dissociative episodes: she speaks as her friend, bringing a private history into her marriage and the strain of new motherhood.

Meeting Through the Hiking Club

Cha Seungyeon and Kim Jiyoung belonged to the same university hiking club, though their time there did not begin together. Seungyeon and Jung Daehyun entered university in the same year, while Kim Jiyoung was three years behind them. Jung Daehyun took time away from university to complete his military service and work in Busan; Kim Jiyoung joined the club and became active while he was away. Thus the women’s friendship was already established before Jung Daehyun and Kim Jiyoung met.

The club gave the two women an unexpected point of likeness: neither actually enjoyed hiking. Their connection instead formed through company and mutual understanding. Seungyeon was good to the women who joined, and she took Kim Jiyoung under her wing when Kim Jiyoung was new. The friendship did not end when Seungyeon graduated. They kept in touch and met frequently, so Seungyeon remained part of Kim Jiyoung’s life outside the club as well as a defining presence within it.

Their shared dislike of hiking also makes the club less a common passion than a setting in which their friendship took shape. Kim Jiyoung’s later attachment to the group came in part through Seungyeon: even after she felt awkward about returning, she sometimes went back to look after new female recruits. She was not as devoted to the club as Seungyeon, but carried forward the welcome she had received.

Friendship as Solidarity and Example

The club’s apparent generosity toward women concealed their exclusion from its authority. Male members called the women Flowers among weeds, carried their belongings despite refusals, let them choose meals, and gave them the better rooms on trips. Yet the club’s president, vice-president, and secretary were men, and its members also maintained a boys-only alumni group. Special courtesies did not give women equal responsibility or the opportunity to lead.

Seungyeon named that distinction and opposed the idea that women’s presence was itself their contribution. She argued for the same responsibilities and opportunities as men, including the chance to run for club president, rather than being treated as guests to be indulged. One older male member repeatedly insisted that club work was too much for women and that they improved the group merely by being there. Seungyeon answered that if the club needed brightening, it could get a lamp. She intended to keep fighting until a woman became president.

That goal was not achieved before Seungyeon graduated. Years later, Kim Jiyoung heard that a woman who had entered university exactly ten years after her had taken the presidency. Seungyeon responded without triumphalism, observing that time moves mountains and rivers. The delayed change gives the friendship’s legacy a concrete measure: Seungyeon’s challenge did not immediately remake the club, but the position she had demanded eventually went to a woman. Kim Jiyoung’s own, quieter practice of checking on new recruits carries the same solidarity forward through care rather than leadership.

A Friendship That Connects Their Lives

Seungyeon’s wedding reception became the occasion on which Kim Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun first met. Their later marriage therefore links Kim Jiyoung’s friendship with Seungyeon to Jung Daehyun’s own past. Seungyeon and Jung Daehyun had entered university together; Kim Jiyoung had been their junior in the club, but she and Jung Daehyun did not know each other during their university years. The wedding brought together two people whose earlier lives had overlapped through the same friend in different ways.

Seungyeon had once confessed her feelings to Jung Daehyun in the middle of a summer day on the university athletics field. He did not return those feelings, and Seungyeon quickly accepted his answer, asking him to forget the confession and treat her as before. Nearly twenty years later, Kim Jiyoung, speaking as Seungyeon, recalls the scene and asks whether Jung Daehyun still sees her as the lovestruck twenty-year-old who trembled while confessing. The recollection makes the friendship’s history newly intimate for him: Kim Jiyoung’s adopted voice brings back an episode he had not expected to hear again, and Seungyeon’s old affection becomes part of the couple’s present conversation.

Grief and the Friend’s Return

Seungyeon died giving birth to her second child from an amniotic fluid embolism. Kim Jiyoung was experiencing postpartum depression when she learned of the death. The shock compounded the difficulties she was already facing, making ordinary tasks hard to manage. The loss was not simply news of a former clubmate: it was the death of a friend who had welcomed her, stayed close after graduation, and connected her to Jung Daehyun.

A few days after Kim Jiyoung begins speaking as her mother, she says she is Cha Seungyeon. Later, after their daughter is asleep, she tells Jung Daehyun that Kim Jiyoung is having a hard time and urges him to tell his wife that she is doing well, working hard, and appreciated. The shift in voice turns friendship into an act of advocacy. Kim Jiyoung’s words ask her husband to recognize the exhaustion of raising a toddler, even as the person making that request is identified as a friend who died before their family life began.

Jung Daehyun initially responds as though Kim Jiyoung is joking and offers affection in return. The change comes when she refers to Seungyeon’s long-ago confession with details that make him recognize the person she is imitating. The episode binds the friendship’s separate strands—the club, the wedding where the couple met, Seungyeon’s unreturned feelings, and her later death—into one unsettled present. Seungyeon’s place in Kim Jiyoung’s life is therefore shown both through remembered companionship and through the care Kim Jiyoung tries to secure for herself by speaking in her friend’s name.