South Korean Mandatory Military Service

South Korean Mandatory Military Service is presented through its effects on education, intimate relationships, and employment rather than through a detailed account of the rule itself. Men’s time away for service disrupts their plans and relationships, while the years spent serving are later cited as a reason to give men an advantage in hiring. Across these episodes, an obligation imposed on men also becomes part of a wider system in which women are expected to bear unequal costs and accept unequal treatment.

Interrupted Education and Personal Plans

Jung Daehyun had hoped to continue to graduate school, but family circumstances forced him to abandon that plan. After completing his third year of university, he took time off to fulfill his military service belatedly. He then returned to his home in Busan and worked part-time for a year. The sequence gives the obligation a concrete place in his biography: it comes between university and the life he had imagined, although the account does not specify the service’s duration or the details of its administration.

That interruption also explains why Jung Daehyun and Kim Jiyoung did not meet during their university years. He was away from university and then back in Busan while Kim Jiyoung, three years his junior, joined the same university hiking club. Their later connection came through the club’s social circle, but their different timelines had first kept them apart.

Strain on a Relationship

Kim Jiyoung’s boyfriend entered the army after completing his sophomore year. She met his parents, went with him to the training camp, and cried as she said goodbye. In the months that followed, she became intensely lonely: sometimes her letters were so long they barely fit in an envelope; at other times she became angry without an apparent reason and did not answer his calls.

The separation affected him as well. Before enlistment, he had been warm and relaxed; afterward, Kim Jiyoung experienced him as tightly wound and easily provoked. He worried that he was wasting the prime years of his life, moving from depression to anxiety and anger. When he came home on leave, the happiness of reunion gave way to arguments that lasted through the visit. Kim Jiyoung eventually ended the relationship. The aftermath included repeated drunk calls during his leaves, late-night messages, and a rumor around her family’s porridge shop that he had deserted his unit to take revenge. The account reports that claim as a rumor, not as a confirmed fact.

Service as a Hiring Argument

The rule also enters the story as a justification used in employment decisions. Yun Hyejin tells Kim Jiyoung that business-management departments sometimes receive unofficial requests from companies for candidates, either through the department office or individual professors, and that only male students are recommended. Because the process is kept out of view, it is difficult to establish whether the college is selecting men on its own or responding to companies’ requests.

Yun Hyejin describes a highly qualified woman who learned that her department had sent four male students for interviews at a company she wanted to join. After she complained and asked for the selection criteria, she was given several explanations, including that men should be compensated for the years they lost serving in the military and that they were future heads of households. The department head’s response was that companies found smart women taxing, and that her complaint itself demonstrated the problem. The woman eventually stopped pursuing the complaint and obtained a job through the company’s open recruitment. In this episode, service is not simply a personal interruption: its cost is treated as a debt that employers and universities may repay through male preference, while the woman challenging that preference is herself characterized as troublesome.

The Rule in a Wider Gender Order

The novel places these individual consequences beside ordinary practices that make male precedence seem natural. At school, boys went first in lines and presentations, and boys’ homework was checked before girls’ work. In the hiring dispute, the same sense of entitlement takes a more consequential form: years spent in service are invoked to support men’s access to recommendations, even when a woman has an outstanding academic record. The text does not equate these practices, but their juxtaposition shows how gender hierarchy can be reproduced through both routine procedure and explicit institutional reasoning.

The rule’s significance therefore lies in more than the time men spend away from university or relationships. Its effects differ by context: men experience interruption and strain, while institutions can translate that interruption into a claim for preferential treatment. The novel’s account exposes this imbalance without presenting military service as the sole cause of workplace discrimination; rather, it shows how the obligation is folded into arguments that preserve men’s advantage.