Tree transformation and arboreal imagery

Tree transformation and arboreal imagery give form to Yeong-hye’s conviction that she is leaving human life behind. Roots, leaves, flowers, and sunlight describe not merely what she imagines becoming, but the bodily practices and refusals through which she tries to inhabit another way of being. As In-hye witnesses the consequences, the image of transformation remains suspended between visionary possibility and mortal danger.

Dream, body, and the inverted tree

The imagery takes vivid shape in Yeong-hye’s account of a dream: she is standing on her head, leaves growing from her body and roots extending from her hands into the earth. She says she spread her legs because she wanted flowers to bloom from her crotch. The vision joins bodily exposure to vegetal growth; the body does not disappear, but becomes the site from which a different form of life might emerge.

At the hospital, that dream is echoed by Yeong-hye’s actual handstand in the western corridor. In-hye initially fails to recognize her upside-down sister, whose long hair and flushed face make the sight startlingly unfamiliar. Yeong-hye’s posture makes the dream visible in the ward, while its setting also makes the transformation uncertain: she is balancing on a hospital floor, not in the earth she imagines reaching. Her inversion changes the ordinary view of trees as well. She tells In-hye that trees stand with their arms in the ground and declares that they are all standing on their heads. The familiar upright tree becomes, in her perception, an inverted body rooted below.

A different nourishment

The tree imagery is inseparable from Yeong-hye’s rejection of ordinary food. She tells In-hye, “I need to water my body. I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water.” The statement recasts nourishment as something plants receive: water rather than food. In this account, transformation is not only a dream or a posture but a reason to refuse the human body’s usual dependence on eating.

Later, Yeong-hye explains that her insides have atrophied and insists that she is no longer an animal. She says she can live without eating and needs only sunlight. Her words make a stark distinction between animal life, which requires food, and the plant-like existence she claims for herself. Yet the claim is spoken from a severely emaciated body and in a hospital bed. The difference between the life she imagines and the bodily consequences In-hye can see gives the arboreal vision its danger as well as its force.

From posture to imagined metamorphosis

Yeong-hye says that words and thoughts will soon disappear and that she needs only a little longer to wait. Her anticipated transformation therefore reaches beyond visible changes to the body: she imagines a state in which human language and thought will no longer be necessary. The handstand, roots, flowers, water, and sunlight form a connected sequence in which ordinary human orientation and nourishment are progressively refused.

In-hye later tries to picture the transformation from within Yeong-hye’s experience. She wonders whether her sister mistook the hospital’s concrete floor for the soft earth of the woods; whether her body had become a trunk, with white roots from her hands clutching black soil; and whether sunlight and water moved through her body until flowers bloomed from her crotch. These are In-hye’s questions, not confirmed events. Their elaboration shows how completely Yeong-hye’s posture and words have entered her sister’s imagination, while preserving the distance between a possible inner vision and the physical facts of illness.

In-hye’s resistance and the image’s final force

In-hye cannot let the imagined metamorphosis stand in for what is happening to Yeong-hye. She says aloud that her sister is dying, lying in bed and dying, and struggles with the desire to shake her and force her back down. Her words oppose the arboreal interpretation with the immediate fact of a failing body. The conflict is not simply between belief and disbelief: In-hye has herself imagined Yeong-hye as a rooted, sunlit form, but she cannot accept that image as an answer to the danger before her.

As the ambulance leaves Mount Ch’ukseong, In-hye looks at roadside trees blazing in what the narration calls “green fire.” The trees offer no resolution and no proof that Yeong-hye has become one of them. Instead, their fierce, animal-like motion keeps the image alive at the very moment In-hye is protesting against what she cannot change. Arboreal imagery thus holds together the sisters’ unequal positions: Yeong-hye’s insistence on a life beyond eating and human thought, and In-hye’s desperate attachment to the vulnerable person who may not survive.