“The face is inside my stomach”

“The face is inside my stomach” is Yeong-hye’s explanation for the recurring faces that continue to trouble her after she stops eating meat. The phrase marks a change in her understanding: vegetarianism has not made the dreams disappear, and she now locates their source within herself. Against the history of violence and coercion in her family and her later hospitalization, that inward explanation carries a force the people around her struggle to hear.

The Phrase and the Dreams

When Yeong-hye describes the face, she says it changes from one dream to another. Sometimes it feels familiar; sometimes she is certain she has never seen it. At times it is bloody, and at others it resembles a rotting corpse. These variations make the face less a fixed person than a recurring presence whose identity cannot be settled.

Yeong-hye had believed that the faces came from eating meat and that refusing meat would prevent their return. She tells her husband that this effort failed: the dreams continued. Her phrase, “The face is inside my stomach,” gives that failure a new explanation. She says the face rose from inside her stomach, then adds that she is no longer afraid. The statement does not resolve what the face is; it records a shift from trying to remove its cause through diet to treating it as something already within.

The Body and Others’ Interpretations

The phrase joins the novel’s attention to the body with Yeong-hye’s effort to explain an experience that others cannot readily understand. Her husband listens while growing drowsy and falls asleep as she speaks. The contrast is significant: Yeong-hye is agitated and trying to convey the cause of her affliction, while the person hearing her cannot remain attentive. Her account reaches the listener as he is losing consciousness, leaving its meaning largely unanswered in the scene.

Her attempt to refuse meat also occurs within a history in which other people have claimed authority over her body. At a family gathering, her father forces meat on her; she spits it out, and the confrontation ends with her being taken to hospital. In-hye later connects this violence to Yeong-hye’s childhood, when their father was the only family member he beat. These events do not explain the dreams as a diagnosis, but they place Yeong-hye’s language about an inward face beside a longer history of suffering that was imposed on her and held inside.

A Phrase Against Coercive Care

During Yeong-hye’s hospitalization, her refusal expands beyond meat: she stops eating other food as well. Staff report that she has not eaten for four days, is becoming dehydrated, and resists attempts to provide fluids and medication. In-hye asks why she will not eat, urges her to take nourishment, and brings her water when Yeong-hye says she is thirsty. The difference between asking for water and refusing food underscores that her condition is not simply a single, consistent refusal that others can easily interpret.

Later, when staff attempt to feed Yeong-hye through a tube, In-hye intervenes as blood appears and demands that the tube be removed. The scene makes the conflict over Yeong-hye’s body concrete: medical efforts to preserve her life and her resistance meet in an emergency, while her own capacity to communicate is severely constrained. Read alongside the phrase about the face within her, the scene sharpens the novel’s contrast between an experience Yeong-hye tries to express and the interventions through which others respond to her.

Meaning and Narrative Role

The phrase is not presented as an objective account of what causes Yeong-hye’s dreams. It is her own explanation, offered after the remedy she had expected from vegetarianism has failed. Its significance lies in that movement: the problem she had associated with what entered her body now seems, to her, to arise from within it. The words preserve her attempt to make sense of the dreams without making that attempt equivalent to a clinical explanation.

The face also carries an ethical implication without becoming a simple symbol. Yeong-hye speaks of a presence she cannot identify or expel, while the people around her alternately overlook, discipline, interpret, or medically manage her. The phrase therefore holds together the novel’s recurring concerns with dreams, bodily autonomy, family violence, and the limits of care: it is a statement of Yeong-hye’s own understanding, spoken in a scene where that understanding is not fully received.