Lee Suyeon

Lee Suyeon is a counselor at the psychiatrist’s clinic whose departure during a high-risk pregnancy reveals how a valued employee can be recast as a professional inconvenience once she needs care herself. Warm, capable, and attentive to patients and colleagues, she leaves after years of trying to conceive; the psychiatrist’s final decision to seek an unmarried replacement makes the gendered assumptions behind her exit explicit.

Identity and Work

Suyeon is one of the clinic’s counselors, recommended to the clinic director a year before the events of the closing narrative. She has worked there since. The psychiatrist remembers her as a strong employee: she dresses neatly, is quick-witted and charming, and brings warmth to coworkers and patients. Her attentiveness appears in small routines as well as formal work; she remembers how the psychiatrist takes his coffee, including the coffee shop and number of espresso shots, and brings it on her way to work.

That portrait is not simply a list of agreeable traits. Suyeon’s skill and consideration have become part of the clinic’s ordinary operation, and the psychiatrist’s account makes their value legible when her departure disrupts it. Her patients are not all willing to transfer to another counselor: some end therapy instead, producing a financial loss for the clinic.

Pregnancy and Resignation

After six years of marriage and years of trying to become pregnant, Suyeon finally does. Her pregnancy is described as unstable, and after several scares she decides to give up her job temporarily. Her doctor has put her on bed rest. The circumstances make her departure a response to medical risk, not evidence that she has lost interest in her work or failed at it.

The psychiatrist initially dislikes her decision. He wonders why she cannot take a couple of months off rather than resigning, but then tells himself that leaving is probably best because she will soon take maternity leave and might otherwise need time away for her own health and her child. His reasoning turns a high-risk pregnancy and the need for leave into anticipated disruption for the clinic. The word temporarily leaves open the possibility of returning, but the narrative gives no outcome for that possibility.

Her Last Day at the Clinic

On her final day, Suyeon enters the psychiatrist’s office carefully, puts a small cactus on the windowsill, and offers routine farewells. The psychiatrist responds in kind. He notices that the doctor has ordered bed rest and wonders why she is still at work so late. Suyeon explains that she has been organizing referral files. Even as she leaves, she is finishing practical work for the clinic and arranging the transition of patient care.

The scene’s modest gestures sharpen the contrast between courtesy and consequence. The cactus marks her departure from the shared workplace; the referral files show her continuing responsibility to it. Her patients’ decisions to end therapy rather than see another counselor demonstrate that her contribution cannot simply be replaced without loss, even as the psychiatrist interprets her pregnancy-related absence through staffing and revenue concerns.

Narrative Significance

Suyeon’s brief appearance gives the psychiatrist’s developing awareness a concrete workplace test. Elsewhere in his reflection, he recognizes how women’s careers can be narrowed by childbirth and care responsibilities, in part through the compromises made by his own wife. Yet when Suyeon resigns, his first response is to measure the inconvenience to the clinic. The scene therefore shows the distance between recognizing a structural pattern in retrospect and changing the assumptions applied to a colleague in the present.

His concluding intention is to make sure Suyeon’s replacement is unmarried. That decision converts her pregnancy into a hiring criterion and makes the clinic’s preference plain: it wants to avoid the possibility that another employee’s family responsibilities will interrupt work. Suyeon’s story ends at the point of departure, without a return or a new career being recorded; what remains is the contradiction between her demonstrated value and the institution’s effort to prevent the same kind of disruption from recurring.