Father

Father is Yeong-hye and In-hye’s father, a forceful patriarch whose abuse and control over food shape the sisters’ family history. His attempt to make Yeong-hye eat meat at a family gathering leads to her self-harm, an incident that In-hye later revisits with lasting guilt and a clearer understanding of their childhood.

Identity and Family Background

Father is a Vietnam veteran who boasts of receiving the Order of Military Merit for his service. His loud voice and firmly held opinions make his authority unmistakable; In-hye recalls that he had beaten Yeong-hye on the calves until she was eighteen. The violence was not shared equally among the children: In-hye later recognizes that Yeong-hye, docile and unable to resist or deflect his temper, was its particular target.

The Family Gathering

At a housewarming after In-hye, her husband, and Ji-woo had moved to a new apartment, the family gathered and Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat became a public point of conflict. As food was served, she quietly declined a dish containing beef. Her father’s response was not to accept her refusal: he struck her and forced meat into her mouth. When she spat it out, she picked up a fruit knife and slit her wrist. Her husband rushed her to hospital.

The gathering exposed a conflict between Yeong-hye’s stated refusal and her family’s expectation that she comply. The later family reunion continued that pressure through dishes of beef, pork, chicken, and octopus placed before her, alongside demands that she eat. In-hye tried to intervene, but later wondered whether she could have changed what happened by grabbing their father’s arm more forcefully before he struck Yeong-hye.

Authority and Its Contradictions

Father’s authority is reinforced by his history of physical punishment and by the family’s anticipation of his judgment. After the incident, relatives expected a future gathering to become an occasion for reprimanding Yeong-hye. His conduct is not softened by the one moment in which he apologizes: his son-in-law is shocked to hear him express shame, having known him for five years without hearing such words. The apology briefly interrupts the image of a man whose voice and convictions dominate family life, but does not undo the violence that prompts it.

The family’s attempts to restore Yeong-hye through food extend beyond the gathering. Her mother secretly brings black goat meat to Seoul, asking that it be passed off as herbal medicine because Yeong-hye has grown thin and lost blood. This concealment echoes the family’s insistence that nourishment must mean meat, even when Yeong-hye has refused it. In-hye, by contrast, experiences the family’s earlier violence as a source of responsibility and doubt rather than as a settled matter of parental authority.

In-hye’s Retrospective Understanding

Years later, In-hye connects Yeong-hye’s childhood vulnerability to her own behavior in the family. As the eldest daughter, she had taken over from their exhausted mother to prepare broth for Father, and he treated her with a degree of care that Yeong-hye did not receive. In-hye had understood her industrious, self-sacrificing role as maturity; looking back, she calls it a survival tactic. Her sister had absorbed the suffering instead of finding a way to resist it.

That reinterpretation sharpens In-hye’s memories of moments when she might have acted differently: the day of the forced feeding, her introduction of Yeong-hye to Mr. Cheong despite her initial misgivings, and an earlier childhood episode when the sisters were lost on a mountain. At nine, Yeong-hye had suggested that they simply not return home. In-hye had not understood her then. As an adult, she sees the remark in the light of the violence awaiting her sister at home, while recognizing that her repeated attempts to calculate how events might have changed cannot restore the choices she did not make.

Narrative Significance

Father’s abuse is presented through its effects on Yeong-hye and through In-hye’s delayed reconsideration of family history. The forced meal makes the family table a site where care, authority, and coercion collide: relatives treat meat as necessary nourishment, while Yeong-hye’s refusal is met with force. In-hye’s recollections complicate any easy division between a violent father and a safely protected sister; her own relative security within the family was bound to a role of service and accommodation. The account thus traces how childhood violence continues to shape the sisters’ adult lives, even as In-hye confronts the limits of her power to change the past.