“I do not eat meat”

“I do not eat meat” is Yeong-hye’s concise, recurring declaration of refusal. Across a business dinner, a family confrontation, and later hospital care, it marks a boundary that others repeatedly try to reinterpret or overcome, while her increasingly direct use of the words makes the refusal harder to treat as a passing preference.

First Uses and Social Meaning

At a dinner attended by her husband’s boss and other guests, Yeong-hye has been sitting silently as food is served. When the waiter is about to place mung-bean jelly dressed with mushrooms and beef on her plate, she first says quietly that she will not eat it. The surrounding conversation stops, and the guests look toward her visibly emaciated body. She then states, “I don’t eat meat,” making the reason for her refusal explicit in a setting where the meal and the expectation of joining it are part of the social occasion.

The response turns her statement into a subject for others to explain. Her husband’s boss places vegetarianism within changing social attitudes and speculates that avoiding meat might be a way to live longer; his wife questions whether a person can live without it. Neither response engages with the refusal as a boundary Yeong-hye has set. The sentence is instead translated into a dietary fashion or a debatable claim about nutrition, while the diners’ attention shifts to her body.

Repetition Under Family Pressure

The words become more emphatic at a family gathering where Yeong-hye’s relatives place meat dishes before her and urge her to eat. Her mother brings stir-fried beef, sweet and sour pork, steamed chicken, and octopus noodles to the table, insisting that her vegetarianism must stop. Her father joins the demand. Yeong-hye first answers clearly, “I won’t eat it,” then says, “I do not eat meat.” The narrator notes that she speaks distinctly and without apology, in contrast to the apologetic answer he had expected.

Her father’s insistence escalates into physical force. After he strikes her and forces pork into her mouth, Yeong-hye spits it out. When her father again presses her to eat, she repeats, “Father, I don’t eat meat.” The address acknowledges their relationship, but the sentence itself does not yield to his authority. The episode exposes the distance between the family’s language of care and its demand for obedience: her father presents eating as being for her own good, yet her refusal is answered by further pressure rather than consent.

Refusal Beyond the Table

The family’s attempts to manage Yeong-hye’s eating continue after the confrontation. Her mother prepares black goat with medicinal ingredients and proposes passing it off as herbal medicine, hoping to feed it to Yeong-hye without her knowing. The plan converts the dispute into concealment: where direct persuasion has failed, the mother proposes disguising meat rather than accepting the refusal. The recurring declaration gives this episode its context, even though the attempted deception is described by the mother rather than answered by Yeong-hye in the scene.

Later, in the psychiatric hospital, Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat is discussed in clinical terms. A doctor says that her condition has not improved and explains that she is refusing food while suffering from schizophrenia, while acknowledging that the staff do not know exactly why she refuses and that medication has not helped. He warns that some patients with anorexia nervosa starve to death and says the hospital must consider transferring her to a general hospital because its first duty is to preserve life. These explanations establish the danger of her condition, but they do not supply a motive that the evidence itself leaves uncertain.

From Speech to Embodied Resistance

In the hospital, the effort to sustain Yeong-hye’s life proceeds through increasingly coercive intervention. Staff check her belongings for strings or pins before admitting her to a six-person ward, and later the doctor attempts to feed her through a tube. When the carers approach, she summons enough strength to break free of their hold; she then uses her mouth and throat to block the tube, forcing the first attempt to stop. Her resistance is no longer primarily conveyed through the repeated sentence, but it remains continuous with the refusal that the words made audible.

The phrase’s force lies in its recurrence across distinct settings. At the dinner table it disrupts polite convention; among her relatives it holds its ground against familial command; in the hospital, the conflict persists even as professionals frame intervention as necessary to preserve her life. The sentence does not explain every aspect of Yeong-hye’s condition, and the doctor explicitly says its cause remains unclear. It does, however, make her refusal unmistakable: other people repeatedly name, judge, conceal, or treat it, while Yeong-hye’s own words insist that she does not eat meat.