In-hye and Yeong-hye’s sisterhood

In-hye and Yeong-hye’s sisterhood is both the novel’s most enduring bond of care and a painful measure of how little care can guarantee understanding. In-hye has long looked after her younger sister; as an adult, she continues to visit, advocate for, and pay for Yeong-hye’s care. Yet Yeong-hye’s refusal of meat develops into a wider refusal of food and treatment, and In-hye’s efforts to protect her become entangled with the very pressure Yeong-hye resists. Their relationship ends without resolution: In-hye remains beside her sister, but cannot make her return to ordinary life or secure her consent to the measures intended to preserve it.

Childhood and the making of responsibility

Yeong-hye is four years younger than In-hye. Their age difference meant they did not compete with each other growing up, and their childhoods were marked by their father’s violence: both sisters’ cheeks were often left aching by his heavy-handedness. For In-hye, the younger girl’s vulnerability fostered a responsibility resembling maternal affection. She felt she had to spend her energy looking after Yeong-hye, a protective orientation that would continue into adulthood.

In-hye watched Yeong-hye grow up from a child who played in the dirt and suffered recurring heat rash to a married woman. She remembered her as capable of cheerfulness and sociability, even though she had always had a quiet side. Over time, however, Yeong-hye became more taciturn and increasingly difficult to read. The change was gradual rather than sudden, and it made her seem at times like a stranger to her sister. Their bond thus carried both familiarity and estrangement well before In-hye became responsible for her care.

Visits, care, and growing distance

After Yeong-hye was hospitalized, In-hye visited with food: fruit, rice cakes, and fried tofu stuffed with vinegared rice. In the visiting room, Yeong-hye would silently chew and swallow, as if carefully completing a task. When In-hye tucked her hair behind her ears, Yeong-hye sometimes looked up and smiled quietly. Those small exchanges lifted In-hye’s spirits and allowed her to imagine that her sister might be able to live indefinitely in the hospital, where she did not have to speak when she did not want to or eat meat that repulsed her.

For a time, In-hye visited monthly; later, she went every Wednesday. Her devotion did not remove the distance between them. Yeong-hye’s quiet compliance during visits could seem reassuring, but it did not mean that she was well or that In-hye understood what she wanted. The relationship repeatedly turns on this difference: In-hye reads moments of calm as grounds for hope, while Yeong-hye’s silence leaves her sister without a reliable way to know what that calm means.

The family’s wider response sharpened In-hye’s sense of obligation. After Yeong-hye’s condition worsened, their parents stopped visiting and severed contact with In-hye, who reminded them of the way they had treated Yeong-hye. Yeong-ho and his wife also withdrew. In-hye could not abandon her sister: someone had to pay the hospital fees and act as her carer. She continued running her shop and raising her son, Ji-woo, while carrying that responsibility largely alone.

Care under pressure

When Yeong-hye stopped eating altogether, her needs became more urgent and the conflict within In-hye’s care more visible. A doctor explained that Yeong-hye was refusing food while suffering from schizophrenia, that medication had not helped, and that the hospital could not be sure of keeping her alive. In-hye was also told that doctors’ primary duty was to preserve life. These medical judgments framed her sister’s refusal as an immediate threat, but did not resolve why Yeong-hye would not eat or what she understood her refusal to mean.

Yeong-hye described being pressured to eat, becoming sick after eating, and receiving injections she disliked. She asked In-hye to let her leave the hospital. In-hye answered that Yeong-hye could not walk properly and was managing only because of the intravenous treatment; she offered to seek her discharge if Yeong-hye promised to eat at home. That condition made the difference between their positions plain. In-hye was trying to keep her sister alive, while Yeong-hye heard the demand as another instance of people forcing her to comply. She told In-hye that her sister was just like the others.

In-hye’s response was an anguished admission that she was acting out of fear that Yeong-hye would die. Yeong-hye looked at her as if she were a stranger, then asked whether dying was such a bad thing. The exchange exposes the limit of In-hye’s protective role: love gives her a reason to intervene, but cannot make Yeong-hye share her understanding of survival or accept the interventions that In-hye believes necessary.

Resentment, identification, and guilt

In-hye’s devotion coexists with feelings she finds difficult to admit. She recognizes that her stated concern about relapse is not the whole reason she opposes Yeong-hye’s discharge. She can no longer cope with what her sister represents: Yeong-hye has crossed boundaries and cast off social constraints, while In-hye remains inside the life she has continued to sustain. In-hye resents what she sees as Yeong-hye’s ability to leave those constraints behind, and understands that the boundaries had been present only after her sister broke through them.

That recognition unsettles the image of In-hye as simply the stronger sister. During months of insomnia and pain, she wonders whether Yeong-hye had passed through a similar phase before her, and whether Yeong-hye’s present state might be a progression from what In-hye herself is experiencing. She imagines that Yeong-hye let go of the slender thread connecting her to everyday life. In-hye believes that responsibility for Ji-woo may be what has kept her holding on to that thread. Her identification with Yeong-hye does not erase their differences, but it makes the distance between the ill sister and the capable caregiver feel less secure.

At Yeong-hye’s admission to another hospital, In-hye’s sense of duty is accompanied by a sudden burden of guilt. She tells herself that she must not be weak and that she has done well to make it this far; at the same time, she cannot look directly at her sister. Yeong-hye speaks to her in a calm, almost consoling voice, saying that all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters. The moment offers a fragile connection, but not an explanation In-hye can use to reach her sister or reverse her condition.

An unresolved bond

When Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat leads to renewed medical danger, In-hye remains involved in decisions about her care. A doctor recommends transfer to the main hospital in Seoul for an intervention intended to stop gastric bleeding and asks In-hye to take the admission letter. The practical task falls to her once again, even as her sister’s condition confronts her with the limits of what she can control. In-hye continues to act, but care does not become mastery over Yeong-hye’s choices or body.

On the ambulance journey, In-hye tries to speak to Yeong-hye about dreams and the need to wake from them. She acknowledges that she, too, has dreams and could let herself be taken over by them, but insists that dream cannot be all there is. The thought is both an appeal to her sister and an uncertain statement about herself: In-hye has been sustained by duty, but now recognizes how near she too might have come to losing her hold on ordinary life. She cannot explain the decision she once made to leave her child, and fears that the act would be unforgivable. She imagines that, had Yeong-hye and her husband not broken through the boundaries around her, she might have been the one to break down.

The ending leaves the sisters together in the ambulance, moving toward further treatment without resolving their opposing understandings of life, illness, or freedom. In-hye’s care persists, but so does the possibility that she has mistaken responsibility for the power to save. Their sisterhood is defined neither by complete understanding nor by separation: it remains a bond of childhood protection, adult labor, resentment, identification, and an appeal that Yeong-hye may or may not be able to answer.