The psychiatrist plans to replace Suyeon with an unmarried employee

The psychiatrist’s plan to replace Lee Suyeon with an unmarried employee turns a colleague’s pregnancy-related departure into a test of what the clinic considers a desirable worker. Suyeon is described as highly capable and valued by patients, yet the psychiatrist concludes that a woman’s possible childcare responsibilities make her a business risk. The decision is especially pointed because it comes from the doctor treating Kim Jiyoung, whose account has led him to question his own understanding of women’s lives.

The decision

The clinic director had recommended Lee Suyeon a year earlier. After six years of marriage and years of trying to conceive, she became pregnant but was warned that her condition was unstable. Following several scares involving possible miscarriages, she decided to give up her job temporarily. The psychiatrist had initially wondered why she could not simply take a couple of months off, but accepted her departure as convenient because maternity leave would soon follow.

Suyeon’s absence carries an immediate consequence for the clinic: several patients choose to end therapy rather than transfer to another counselor. The psychiatrist registers this as a financial loss. He then moves from assessing the disruption caused by her departure to a hiring decision, resolving to make sure her replacement is unmarried. The proposed qualification is not a measure of counseling ability; it is a way of avoiding the childcare issue he associates with women employees.

Suyeon as an employee

The psychiatrist’s own account establishes that Suyeon had been an excellent worker. He describes her polished appearance, quick wit, warmth toward colleagues and patients, and attentiveness to his coffee preferences. Her charm and competence are not in dispute, nor is the fact that patients valued her enough to leave the clinic when she could no longer see them. The contradiction lies in the weight he gives these qualities: they make her a good employee, but do not outweigh, in his calculation, the inconvenience of her pregnancy and anticipated care responsibilities.

His description also exposes how easily personal service becomes part of the standard by which women are judged. Suyeon remembers the psychiatrist’s usual coffee order and brings it to work; he recalls this as evidence of her appeal and diligence. Yet when her own health and pregnancy require her to stop working, he reframes her as a source of operational trouble. The workplace benefits from her attentiveness while treating the circumstances that interrupt her employment as a problem to screen out of future hiring.

The wider pattern of care and work

The decision echoes the pressures surrounding Kim Jiyoung’s own working life. At her marketing agency, she could enjoy her work and value her colleagues, while interactions with older male clients subjected her to persistent sexist jokes and expectations of polite accommodation. At one business dinner, clients maneuvered her into a seat beside a division head, pressed drinks on her, and subjected her to sexualized remarks. Those encounters show a workplace in which women were expected to manage discomfort without disrupting client relations.

After becoming a mother, Jiyoung’s time was similarly shaped by care work that remained easy for others to discount. When her young daughter began daycare, Jiyoung had about three hours to herself, much of which went to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food. The statistics discussed in the narrative put the average time available to a mother with a child under two at four hours and ten minutes if she stayed home, and four hours and twenty-five minutes if the child attended daycare: only fifteen minutes apart. Daycare changed where Jiyoung did the housework more than whether she had time to rest. The psychiatrist’s plan for Suyeon belongs to this same pattern: care responsibilities follow women into employment decisions, while the work and costs of care are treated as private complications.

Irony and narrative significance

The plan gains force from its position at the end of the psychiatrist’s account. He has been treating Jiyoung for depression and insomnia, prescribing medication and seeing her twice a week. He first suspected a dissociative disorder, then settled on postnatal depression that had progressed into childcare depression. As treatment continued, however, he began to doubt that initial certainty: Jiyoung could describe long-buried memories calmly and clearly, and he recognized that he might have diagnosed her hastily. He ultimately acknowledges that her life has revealed a world he had not known.

His response to Suyeon shows the limit of that recognition. He can reconsider the diagnosis of an individual patient while still describing a pregnant employee’s departure as a problem and planning to avoid a similar situation by hiring an unmarried woman. The ending does not establish that he recognizes this contradiction. Instead, his own practical conclusion supplies it: the doctor who has learned to question his interpretation of Jiyoung’s suffering continues to reproduce a workplace assumption that women’s care responsibilities make them less reliable employees.