Yeong-hye and her father’s abusive relationship

Yeong-hye and her father’s abusive relationship is marked by a long-standing imbalance of power that the novel makes newly visible through the family’s attempts to control Yeong-hye’s refusal of meat. The father’s violence is not an isolated outburst: it recalls years of punishment in her childhood and culminates in an assault at a family gathering, after which Yeong-hye injures herself. Later, In-hye’s memories connect that crisis to the unequal ways their father treated his children and to her own compromised role as the dutiful eldest daughter.

Identity and Background

Yeong-hye’s father is a patriarchal, hot-tempered man whose authority in the family rests partly on discipline and command. Her husband recalls that, during the five years he had known him, the father had never apologized before. He was also given to loud accounts of his military service in Vietnam, and his daughter had said that he whipped her calves until she was eighteen. The brief apology he offers after the family crisis therefore stands out against a history in which he had not openly acknowledged wrongdoing.

The siblings did not experience their father’s temper in the same way. In-hye later understands that Yeong-hye alone was the direct target of his beatings. Their brother Yeong-ho, himself rough with village children, was less affected by their father’s violence; In-hye, as the eldest daughter, helped their exhausted mother and prepared broth for her father to drink with liquor, and he treated her with more care. Yeong-hye, by contrast, was docile and naive, unable to deflect his anger or resist it. In-hye comes to see her own self-sacrificing diligence not simply as maturity but as a way of surviving within the family.

The Family Meal and Its Escalation

The decisive confrontation occurs at a family gathering after Yeong-hye has stopped eating meat. Her father has prepared for the meal and speaks as though his effort and parental authority should secure her compliance. When she will not eat, In-hye rebukes her about nutrition, and other relatives voice concern about her weight and health. Her mother sets out beef, pork, chicken, and octopus noodles and orders her to eat. In this setting, food becomes more than a shared meal: the family treats eating as an obligation Yeong-hye must obey.

Yeong-hye answers clearly that she does not eat meat. Her father insists that she must listen because he is her father and claims that his instructions are for her own good. When she turns away, he attempts to put pork into her mouth. Yeong-ho holds her while In-hye tries to stop their father; despite their conflicting actions, neither sibling manages to protect Yeong-hye from the assault. Yeong-hye spits the meat out and cries out in distress. She then picks up a fruit knife and slits her wrist. The scene makes the consequences of the father’s command unmistakable: his claim to act for her welfare overrides her stated refusal, and the family’s intervention fails to prevent her from hurting herself.

Childhood Violence and the Meaning of the Crisis

The later account of the gathering links this confrontation to an earlier episode of animal cruelty remembered from Yeong-hye’s childhood. At nine, she had been bitten by a dog called Whitey. Her father punished the animal by making it run behind his motorcycle until it died; afterward, the family served the dog as food, and Yeong-hye ate a bowl of it. This memory places the father’s authority over food beside his capacity for violence toward an animal, while the adult Yeong-hye’s refusal of meat marks a stark reversal of that childhood meal. The connection is not presented as a simple explanation for her later choices, but it gives her refusal a history in a household where eating and punishment had already been joined.

In-hye later recalls an earlier moment when she and Yeong-hye became lost on a mountain. Nine-year-old Yeong-hye said they should not go back, though In-hye then understood only that they needed to find the path before dark. Looking back, In-hye connects her sister’s wish to remain away with the fact that Yeong-hye was the sibling exposed to their father’s beatings. They eventually returned by a different route, riding a power tiller back to town as darkness fell. Yeong-hye said nothing on the way and watched the poplars lit by the evening light. In-hye’s adult understanding transforms the childhood remark from a passing wish into an expression of the safety and escape Yeong-hye could not find at home.

Aftermath and In-hye’s Recognition

After the gathering, Yeong-hye is taken to hospital and later admitted to a psychiatric hospital. In-hye repeatedly wonders whether she could have stopped her father, removed the knife, or prevented her husband from carrying Yeong-hye to the hospital. Her questions extend beyond the assault to the subsequent harm done to Yeong-hye, including her husband’s treatment of her. In-hye cannot undo what happened; her recollection instead exposes how many people around her sister made decisions about her while her own wishes went unheard.

The family’s estrangement deepens after the later scandal. Their parents cease visiting Yeong-hye and cut contact with In-hye, who reminds them of how they treated their younger daughter; Yeong-ho and his wife also withdraw. In-hye continues to care for Yeong-hye and take responsibility for her hospital fees. The father’s violence thus has consequences beyond the confrontation itself: it helps fracture the family, while leaving In-hye to carry much of the practical work of care.

Significance of the Relationship

The relationship is defined by the conflict between Yeong-hye’s expressed refusal and her father’s belief that paternal authority entitles him to enforce obedience. His invocation of concern for her health does not change the coercive character of his actions. The scene also complicates any account of the family’s response as straightforward care: relatives express worry, but their efforts to make Yeong-hye eat deny her stated choice and culminate in violence.

In-hye’s retrospective perspective supplies the relationship’s most consequential interpretation. She recognizes that Yeong-hye bore a burden her siblings did not, while her own apparent competence had partly depended on adapting to the same family order rather than resisting it. Her belated questions cannot repair her sister’s childhood or prevent the later crisis, but they reveal the violence as a history embedded in family roles, meals, and unequal expectations—not merely as one father’s sudden loss of temper.