Jung Daehyun

Jung Daehyun is Kim Jiyoung’s husband and the father of their daughter, Jung Jiwon. A mid-size IT company employee whose work often keeps him away until midnight and sometimes takes him in on weekends, he is both a loving partner and a participant in a family arrangement that leaves Jiyoung with most of the daily care. His efforts to comfort her are sincere, but the gap between his understanding of parenting and the costs she anticipates becomes a recurring fault line in their marriage.

Identity and Household

In autumn 2015, Daehyun is thirty-six and lives with Jiyoung and their one-year-old daughter in a small rented apartment on the outskirts of Seoul. He and Jiyoung married three years earlier, after two years of passionate romance. Their daughter attends a half-day daycare in their apartment complex, while Jiyoung, who left her marketing job shortly before giving birth, remains her primary caregiver. Jiyoung’s parents run a restaurant, and Daehyun’s parents live in Busan, so neither set of grandparents is readily available for routine childcare.

Daehyun’s working hours matter to the household’s choices. He usually comes home around midnight and goes into the office at least once on weekends. Before their daughter was born, he and Jiyoung shared the driving on long trips; afterward, he took over the driving while Jiyoung kept the baby calm with play and snacks. The division reflects practical demands, but it also establishes a pattern: his employment continues, while Jiyoung’s time and work are reorganized around care.

Witness to Jiyoung’s Episodes

Daehyun notices Jiyoung’s abnormal behavior on September 8, the morning of Baengno (White Dew). He remembers the date because, while he is eating breakfast, she opens the veranda window despite the sunny weather and speaks in a singsong manner about the cold morning. In the first instance he observes, her ordinary surroundings remain unchanged; it is her manner of speaking that makes the moment unsettling.

A few days later, Jiyoung speaks as if she is Cha Seungyeon, a college friend who died giving birth to her second child. Seungyeon and Daehyun entered university in the same year, while Jiyoung was three years behind them. Daehyun and Jiyoung did not meet at college: they first encountered each other at Seungyeon’s wedding reception. Jiyoung had been suffering from postpartum depression when she learned of Seungyeon’s death, and the news made ordinary tasks harder to manage. This history gives the episode an intimate connection to grief that Daehyun knows about, even as he struggles to understand what is happening to his wife.

One evening, after their daughter has gone to sleep, Daehyun and Jiyoung drink beer together for the first time in a while. Jiyoung speaks as though she is Seungyeon and urges Daehyun to praise and appreciate Jiyoung for the emotional work of raising a toddler. He responds affectionately, treating the shift in her identity as an oddity and pinching her cheek; she swats his hand away. The next morning, Jiyoung massages her temples and appears not to remember the exchange. Daehyun considers whether she simply drank too much, but finds that explanation difficult to accept after only one can of beer.

The episodes continue sporadically. Jiyoung sends him unusually cute text messages and makes dishes she neither likes nor cooks well. Her changed behavior makes her seem unfamiliar to him despite their shared history and their daughter. The account emphasizes his disorientation as a husband: he recognizes the intimacy of their life together, yet cannot readily reconcile it with the person he sees in these moments.

Parenthood and Unequal Stakes

When Daehyun suggests that they have a child, he treats the decision as a natural next step after marriage. Jiyoung, by contrast, has little firsthand experience of pregnancy or newborn care and worries about the changes to her body and whether she can combine childcare with her career. Both of them work late and on weekends, and their parents cannot provide the support that might make that combination easier. Jiyoung also feels guilty for considering care by someone else before a child has even been born.

Daehyun listens to her concerns and offers to change diapers, feed the baby, and wash the baby’s clothes. He also asks her to consider the meaning and emotional rewards of parenthood, adding that if childcare cannot be arranged, he can support the family financially and she need not keep working. The reassurance is genuine, but it does not answer the question Jiyoung is asking about what each of them will have to give up. She names the stakes for herself: her youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future. When she asks what he would lose, his list centers on seeing friends less often, coming home earlier, feeling bad about work dinners and late hours, and doing chores after work; he also identifies financial support as his responsibility. Jiyoung finds these prospective costs slight beside the possible disruption to her own life.

As her due date approaches, the couple put three plans on a large sheet of paper: returning to work immediately, returning after a year of maternity leave, or not returning at all. They compare childcare arrangements, costs, and disadvantages. Sending the child to Daehyun’s parents in Busan is impractical because they are elderly and his mother has recently had back surgery. A live-in nanny would be expensive and would share the family’s everyday life, not merely look after the child. With both of them working, those are the available options; they conclude that one parent must stay home.

Daehyun’s job is more stable and pays more, and the familiar expectation that husbands work while wives care for children reinforces the decision that Jiyoung will leave her job. He suggests occasional babysitting and daycare later, presenting the time as an opportunity for her to study and look for other work. Jiyoung recognizes that he means to support her, but objects to the repeated framing of shared housework, their child’s care, and her future job search as tasks he will help with. Her point is that the home and child belong to both of them, and that her earnings would also support their household. After her outburst, she apologizes for snapping at him; he accepts the apology without prolonging the argument.

Care, Work, and Attempts at Comfort

The decision to leave paid work becomes real the day after Jiyoung’s departure from the marketing company. She does not cry when she informs her manager, when team leader Kim Eunsil expresses hope they might work together again, or while she gradually takes her belongings home. The realization arrives later, as she wakes and imagines an ordinary workday—commuting, lunch, a film, and a bank errand—before understanding that she no longer has an office to go to. The account places Daehyun alongside this transition as the partner whose steadier job helps determine the decision, even though Jiyoung bears its immediate professional and daily consequences.

After Jung Jiwon begins daycare shortly after turning one, she adjusts well and attends from 9:30 in the morning until before 1 p.m. The interval gives Jiyoung about three hours, most of which goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food. The daycare teacher suggests that Jiwon might nap there and stay later, but Jiyoung initially continues to collect her after lunch. The arrangement eases some pressure, without making childcare and housework disappear. Meanwhile, a higher rent deposit forces the couple to take out another loan, adding financial pressure as they consider future housing and education costs.

Daehyun’s most visible response to Jiyoung’s distress comes after she is insulted by office workers at a park while drinking coffee near her sleeping daughter. She rushes home, forgets meals and parts of the household routine, and tells him she has been called a derogatory name for a mother who stays home. Returning after midnight from a business dinner, he has brought red-bean-filled fish-shaped cakes. At first, he assumes the insult exists only in online comments and tries to reassure her that people do not use it in person. Jiyoung tells him she heard it from men in suits at the park and explains how humiliated she felt.

She dwells on the price of the coffee, the pain of childbirth, and the career, dreams, routine, and sense of self she believes she surrendered to raise their daughter. Daehyun draws her toward him, embraces her by the shoulders, and repeats that the insult is not true. The gesture offers comfort, but it follows a failed attempt to dismiss the experience as unreal. His response shows both his affection and the distance between his initial assumptions and the contempt Jiyoung has encountered directly.

Narrative Role and Significance

Daehyun is not presented as indifferent to Jiyoung: he listens to her concerns about having a child, tries to reassure her about work and money, and reaches for physical comfort when she is upset. Yet his good intentions do not make the arrangement equal. His employment remains the stable basis for household income, while the decision about childcare turns Jiyoung into the stay-at-home parent; his description of taking on shared responsibilities as helping her makes that imbalance audible.

The novel also uses Daehyun as a witness to Jiyoung’s changing behavior and as a source for the later clinical account of her life. The psychiatrist’s summary draws on accounts from both spouses, and the psychiatrist initially considers Daehyun’s description when assessing Jiyoung’s symptoms. Daehyun can report what he sees, but witnessing does not immediately give him a full understanding of its causes or of the social and domestic pressures surrounding it. His place in the story is therefore double: he is Jiyoung’s intimate companion, capable of tenderness, and a measure of how easily care work and its costs can remain obscure to the person who benefits from the household arrangement.