Kim Jiyoung–Kang Hyesu Colleague and Friendship

Kim Jiyoung and Kang Hyesu’s relationship begins as a close workplace friendship among colleagues who entered the company at the same time, and continues after Jiyoung leaves her job. Their bond is tested by gendered differences in opportunity and by the silence that follows a workplace promotion, but it also makes room for candid conversation, practical help, and companionship without demands that Jiyoung perform an idealized version of motherhood.

Colleagues and Unequal Opportunity

Jiyoung and Hyesu are both women among a group of four employees who began at the company together. They had established good reputations, and older colleagues joked that the two men hired alongside them had a steeper learning curve. The men were not incompetent, but they received easier clients. When the company assembled a new planning team, Jiyoung told Kim Eunsil, who was to lead it, that she wanted to join. Eunsil encouraged her, yet the team went to three capable middle managers and the two male colleagues from Jiyoung’s hiring group. The company treated the new team as an elite unit, leaving Jiyoung and Hyesu feeling that they had been deprived of an opportunity they had earned.

The decision altered the group’s everyday intimacy. Before the appointments, the four colleagues’ chat had buzzed through the working day; they took brief, secret coffee breaks, met for lunch, and went out for drinks. After the two men moved to the planning team, the chat went quiet, those routines ended, and chance encounters in the hallway became awkward nods without eye contact. The shift shows how professional sorting can damage relationships even when no prior conflict had divided the people involved: a promotion changed not only who did what work, but who still felt able to be together as before.

A Friendship That Makes Room for Candor

Hyesu eventually organized a bar night to break the silence. The gathering began unusually seriously when she disclosed that a brief office romance had ended and asked her friends for comfort, while also asking them not to identify the person, speculate, or tell anyone. Jiyoung tried to work out who the colleague might be, then worried that he might not even be single; the uncertainty briefly left her with a migraine. The men at the table also shared their concerns, including one colleague’s worry about a younger brother unable to find work while burdened by student debt. The evening’s candor contrasts with their former easy routine of jokes and gossip: the friendship group had to find a new way to speak after its ordinary habits had broken down.

At work, the need to manage uncomfortable interactions was part of Jiyoung’s daily experience. Older male clients made persistent jokes that she could neither understand nor comfortably answer: laughing seemed to encourage them, while not laughing invited questions about what was wrong. At a business lunch, a client company head used the misogynistic term Doenjangnyeo after Jiyoung ordered soybean paste sauce with rice. The client’s staff laughed because he did, and Jiyoung and a senior colleague smiled awkwardly and changed the subject. At a later client dinner, Jiyoung was steered into the seat beside a division head and made to drink beer he forced on her. Hyesu was not described as intervening in either episode, but the scenes establish the work environment against which the women’s collegial connection took shape: they faced expectations to smooth over behavior that left them uncomfortable.

Contact After Jiyoung Leaves Work

Hyesu’s friendship with Jiyoung persists after Jiyoung leaves the company to care for her child. During a visit, Hyesu brings onesies, diapers, and lip gloss. When Jiyoung asks why she brought the makeup, Hyesu explains that she liked its color on herself and thought it would suit Jiyoung’s similar skin tone. Jiyoung is relieved that the gift is not accompanied by advice that mothers should dress up or make an effort to look feminine. Hyesu’s gesture is personal without turning into a prescription: she offers something she genuinely likes, and Jiyoung tries it on, pleased that the color suits her.

Their visit unfolds around Jiyoung’s care of Jiwon. While they order Chinese food and catch up on news and gossip, Jiyoung breastfeeds the baby, gives her solid food, changes her diaper, carries her to comfort her when she cries, and settles her for a nap. Hyesu is initially reluctant to hold Jiwon because she fears hurting her, but she warms the baby food in the microwave, fetches clean diapers, and does the dishes. Her contribution is specific and useful, not a claim that she knows better than Jiyoung how to mother. She admires the sleeping child while making clear that finding the baby lovely does not mean she wants one herself. Jiyoung answers without pressuring her, offering Jiwon’s hand-me-down clothes if Hyesu ever does have a child; their exchange keeps affection separate from expectation.

The Spy-Camera Scandal and Shared Vulnerability

During that same visit, Hyesu tells Jiyoung about the Marketing Company Women’s Restroom Spy-Camera Scandal. A building security agent had hidden cameras in the women’s restroom cubicles and uploaded images to a pornography site. A male section manager at Jiyoung’s former company recognized the restroom and the women’s clothing in the images, but shared them with male colleagues rather than reporting the matter to the police or the women who had been filmed. A woman secretly dating one of the employees who had seen the images pressed him for an explanation, then confided in Hyesu.

Hyesu says that she alerted every woman in the office; together they searched for cameras and reported the case to the police. The security agent and employees who circulated the images were under investigation. The disclosure reaches Jiyoung personally: she wonders whether her own image might have been captured and who might have seen it, before Hyesu clarifies that the cameras were installed the summer after Jiyoung left. Jiyoung thinks that, had she remained, she might have been shaken in the same way as her former colleagues and perhaps eventually left the job.

Hyesu describes seeing a therapist and feeling as if strangers could recognize her from the images. Ordinary eye contact can make her wonder whether someone has seen them; a stranger’s smile can seem like mockery. Many women at the office are taking medication or receiving therapy, and one employee overdosed on sleeping pills and needed her stomach pumped. Some women left the company. The accused male employees, meanwhile, objected to being treated like sexual offenders because they had not installed the cameras themselves, despite having distributed the images. Hyesu is disturbed by their refusal to recognize their complicity and says she will never be able to trust men again. Jiyoung can offer little beyond calling the situation repulsive, but her attention and concern register the intimacy of the conversation: Hyesu tells her what is happening to the women they once worked beside, and Jiyoung listens while confronting how narrowly she escaped the same violation.

Significance of the Relationship

The friendship connects two distinct periods in Jiyoung’s life: her employment, where the women experience unequal advancement and the burden of managing clients’ behavior, and her life at home, where Hyesu visits without reducing her to a mother in need of correction. Their bond does not undo the lost promotion, the strained workplace group, or the lasting fear produced by the cameras. Instead, it supplies forms of recognition and assistance that those structures fail to provide. Hyesu’s work in organizing the women’s response, her practical help during the visit, and her unvarnished account of distress make solidarity concrete, while Jiyoung’s receptive companionship allows that solidarity to continue beyond the office.