“They’re all standing on their heads”

“They’re all standing on their heads” is Yeong-hye’s declaration that trees stand with their arms buried in the earth, a phrase that turns a familiar landscape upside down and gives form to her imagined transformation into a plant. Recalled by In-hye in the hospital, it remains suspended between dream, bodily conviction, and the unbearable reality of Yeong-hye’s failing condition.

The Vision of Inverted Trees

Yeong-hye introduces the image as a discovery: she had thought trees stood upright, she says, but has only just realized that they stand with both arms in the earth. She springs up, points through the window, and laughs frantically as she insists that they are all standing on their heads. Her description reverses the ordinary relation between trunk, branches, and roots, making the trees seem to share the posture she has taken herself.

She traces this knowledge to a dream in which she stood on her head, leaves grew from her body, and roots sprouted from her hands and dug endlessly downward. She wanted flowers to bloom from her crotch and spread her legs to make that growth possible. The upside-down trees therefore do more than provide a striking comparison: they place Yeong-hye’s own body within a vision of transformation that she describes as already legible in the world around her.

Dream, Body, and Speech

The image returns in more than one form. In an earlier half-sleep vision, In-hye hears Yeong-hye’s voice describe leaves growing from her body and roots entering the earth; the voice begins low and warm, becomes childlike, then breaks into a distorted animal sound. In-hye wakes frightened and is pulled back into sleep. The expression’s dreamlike force thus reaches her not only through Yeong-hye’s spoken explanation but through a voice that shifts beyond ordinary speech.

When Yeong-hye explains the vision directly, she speaks with feverish eyes and frantic laughter. In-hye recognizes an expression from their childhood in her sister’s face, but that recognition does not make the present scene easier to understand. Yeong-hye’s account joins vivid, concrete bodily images to a certainty that In-hye cannot verify from the outside; the phrase makes that gap between the sisters audible rather than resolving it.

In-hye’s Recollection and the Hospital Present

Later, as In-hye packs containers into her bag, the remembered handstand opens into a sequence of questions. She wonders whether Yeong-hye mistook the hospital’s concrete floor for the woods’ soft earth, whether white roots seemed to grow from her hands, and whether sunlight and water might have passed through her body until flowers bloomed from her crotch. These are In-hye’s conjectures, not confirmed events. Their accumulating detail shows her trying to inhabit the vision without claiming to know what Yeong-hye experienced.

That effort meets a hard limit. In-hye speaks aloud, first protesting, then telling Yeong-hye that she is lying in bed and dying. Her words accompany an impulse to seize Yeong-hye’s insensible face and shake her, but the violence remains a desire she wrestles with. Against the remembered image of a body balanced upside down and reaching toward the earth, the hospital bed marks Yeong-hye’s present physical helplessness. The phrase persists as both the language of an imagined escape from ordinary human form and a vision In-hye cannot make a substitute for the immediate fact of her sister’s decline.

Significance of the Expression

The expression overturns the ordinary distinction between a tree’s upright trunk and buried roots, making transformation appear at once impossible and self-evident within Yeong-hye’s perception. Its repeated links among handstands, roots, leaves, flowers, earth, sunlight, and water give the phrase a wider imaginative shape: the body is no longer simply human flesh but a possible site of vegetal growth.

Yet the image does not settle into a single explanation. It belongs to Yeong-hye’s dream and delirious speech, while also becoming the material of In-hye’s recollection and speculation. In-hye can picture the transformation in minute physical terms, but she ultimately names the danger her images cannot undo. The phrase holds that unresolved tension: Yeong-hye’s vision of becoming something other than human, and her sister’s confrontation with the dying body in the bed.