Lee Suyeon resigns during a high-risk pregnancy

Lee Suyeon resigns during a high-risk pregnancy after years of trying to conceive, a decision that exposes how pregnancy and anticipated caregiving are treated as workplace problems even when an employee is valued. Her departure is presented through an understated final exchange: Suyeon comes to the clinic on her last day, completes administrative work, and says goodbye, while her employer registers the loss to the clinic and resolves to hire an unmarried replacement.

The Circumstances of Her Departure

The clinic director had recommended Suyeon a year before she left, and she had worked at the clinic since then. After six years of marriage and years of trying, she became pregnant, but was warned that the pregnancy was unstable. Following several scares that threatened miscarriage, she decided to give up her job temporarily. The narrator initially disliked the decision, wondering why she could not simply take a couple of months off. He then recast her resignation as convenient for the clinic: she would soon be on maternity leave, and her absence would avoid the disruption of future sick days for herself or her child.

That reasoning makes the departure legible as more than an individual choice. Suyeon’s pregnancy creates a need for rest and the prospect of leave; the narrator measures those needs against the clinic’s operating convenience. His description of the resignation as temporary does not erase the fact that she leaves her job before giving birth, while his concern turns quickly toward the inconvenience her continued employment might entail.

Her Last Day at the Clinic

On the evening of her final day, Suyeon walks gingerly into the narrator’s office and places a small cactus on the windowsill. She offers the familiar courtesies of a farewell, thanking him and apologizing that she has to leave, while hoping they might work together again. He responds in kind. The exchange is polite and routine, but the small plant and the formality of the goodbye mark a real ending to her employment.

The narrator notices that Suyeon is still at the clinic late, especially since her doctor has told her to rest. She explains that she has been organizing referral files. Her decision to finish the work before leaving is thus a concrete final act of responsibility, not an abandonment of her duties. Yet the clinic’s routine continues to claim her time even at the point when her pregnancy has made rest medically important.

The Employee the Clinic Loses

The narrator describes Suyeon as a strong employee: she is quick-witted and charming, warm with coworkers and patients, and consistently cheerful. She remembers how he takes his coffee, including the shop and the number of espresso shots, and brings it on her way to work. He also remarks on her polished appearance and neat, crisp dress. These details establish how thoroughly she has attended to the social as well as professional life of the workplace.

Her departure has an immediate consequence for the clinic. Several patients choose to terminate therapy rather than be referred to another counselor, producing a financial loss. The narrator recognizes that Suyeon’s work has mattered to those patients, but frames the situation as a problem caused by the childcare issue not being settled. His response is to make sure her replacement is unmarried, treating the absence of marriage—and, by implication, the anticipated family responsibilities attached to it—as a safeguard for the employer.

A Wider Pattern of Constrained Choices

The novel places Suyeon’s departure alongside other women’s restricted choices around work and family. When Kim Jiyoung considers having a child, she worries about the effects on her body and whether she can sustain both childcare and her career. She and Jung Daehyun set out three possible plans—returning to work immediately, returning after a year of maternity leave, or not returning—and compare childcare arrangements, costs, and disadvantages. Sending a child to Daehyun’s parents in Busan is impractical because they are elderly and his mother has had back surgery; a live-in nanny would be expensive and would share the family’s everyday life. They conclude that one parent must stay home, and that it will be Jiyoung because Daehyun’s work is more stable, pays more, and fits the more customary division of family roles.

The employment context is restrictive before motherhood as well. During Jiyoung’s job search, Yun Hyejin points out that the alumni appearing at job fairs are men; Jiyoung realizes she has not seen a female alumnus at the events she attended. A 2005 survey cited in the novel found that women made up 29.6 percent of new hires at 100 companies, while 44 percent of recruiting managers surveyed at large corporations preferred male candidates with equivalent qualifications. Later, the account notes that more than half of women who leave work cannot find new employment for over five years, and that those who return often enter smaller workplaces or lower-paid service jobs. Suyeon’s resignation is distinct from Jiyoung’s eventual decision to leave work, but both episodes show how pregnancy and care responsibilities can narrow women’s professional options—and how employers can treat that narrowing as an administrative matter rather than a consequence of unequal expectations.

The Resignation’s Institutional Irony

The narrator’s final decision sharpens the episode’s irony. Suyeon is not portrayed as unreliable or uncommitted: she is a valued counselor whose departure leads patients to leave, and she spends her last evening organizing referrals despite being told to rest. Nevertheless, her pregnancy and the possibility of future care-related absences become, in her employer’s account, reasons to seek an unmarried successor. The clinic loses a capable employee and some of its patients, yet the narrator turns that loss into a hiring rule that reproduces the very exclusion that made Suyeon’s departure consequential.