Yeong-hye’s prohibition on eating meat

Yeong-hye’s prohibition on eating meat is the rule at the center of her refusal: she removes meat from the household, declines it in public and family settings, and continues not to eat as her condition worsens. It is more than a change of diet in the story. Across the refrigerator, the shared meal, the family table, and the hospital ward, the question of what Yeong-hye will eat becomes a test of who can decide what happens to her body. Her calm insistence meets a succession of attempts to override it, while its stated origin remains a dream she believes others cannot understand.

Establishment in the Household

Yeong-hye’s refusal becomes visible first as an action in the kitchen. Her husband finds her crouched among plastic bags and containers, transferring the household’s meat into rubbish bags. The discarded food ranges from shabu-shabu beef and pork to squid, eel, dried croaker, chicken, and frozen dumplings; he estimates that the eel alone is worth at least 200,000 won. The scale and variety of what she removes make clear that this is not the rejection of one ingredient but a deliberate clearing of meat from the home.

The boundary extends beyond meat. When her husband asks her to make fried eggs, she tells him that she threw the eggs out too, and adds that she has given up milk. She says she could not let the meat remain in the refrigerator because it would not be right. Her husband initially frames the decision as an imposition on him, asking whether the household is to have no meat and whether Yeong-hye herself intends to stop eating it altogether. She answers that she supposes she will do so forever. His exasperation contrasts with her measured explanation: to him, the new household rule is unreasonable; to her, keeping the food would be wrong.

Refusal in Shared Meals

The rule travels with Yeong-hye beyond the home. At a meal with her husband’s colleagues, a waiter is about to serve her mung-bean jelly dressed with green-pea jelly, mushrooms, and beef when she quietly says she will not eat it. The guests stop and look toward her. She repeats more distinctly that she does not eat meat, turning a private practice into a declaration before a group whose meal assumes that she will participate in the same way as everyone else.

Several months later, her husband describes the refusal to a colleague as extending to every kind of meat, including fish, and says that she lives on vegetables. He also complains that the rule has affected what he can eat at home. His account presents the prohibition as defiance and domestic inconvenience, rather than explaining it on Yeong-hye’s terms. The contrast between the two accounts is important: he emphasizes its effects on the household, while the refusal itself remains consistent across the settings in which he reports it.

Family Pressure and the Dream

At a family gathering, relatives interpret Yeong-hye’s vegetarian diet through concern about her health and expectations about proper eating. In-hye rebukes her for not arranging a balanced diet; Yeong-ho’s wife says she had not expected vegetarianism to affect her body so badly. Their mother places stir-fried beef, sweet-and-sour pork, steamed chicken, and octopus noodles in front of Yeong-hye and orders her to eat. Her father joins the demand. The abundance of dishes does not soften the conflict: the meal becomes the means through which the family attempts to restore a shared rule of eating.

Yeong-hye stands and repeats that she will not eat it. The narration marks this as the first time in a long while that her speech is clear and distinct. Her refusal does not persuade the family, but it makes her position unmistakable at the table where others are speaking for her health and against her decision. A later conversation gives the refusal its one stated explanation. Asked why she does not eat meat, Yeong-hye says calmly that it is because of a dream she had, adding that she does not think her questioner would understand. The evidence supplies no fuller account of that dream here; it does establish that, for Yeong-hye, the prohibition has an origin beyond the arguments about diet offered by her relatives and husband.

From Food Prepared for Her to Clinical Intervention

Even after Yeong-hye has been hospitalized, family efforts to reverse the prohibition continue through food. Her mother brings black goat prepared with medicinal ingredients to mask its smell, intending that Yeong-hye be told it is herbal medicine. She says she feared In-hye and her husband might prevent her from visiting if they knew what she was bringing. The gesture combines maternal concern about Yeong-hye’s deteriorating condition with deception: the food is meant to reach her under a false description.

The hospital’s approach is different in purpose but also centers on getting food into Yeong-hye’s body. A doctor tells In-hye that Yeong-hye’s condition has not improved and that the plan is to try intravenous feeding; if it fails, she may have to be transferred to a critical ward. He describes Yeong-hye as refusing food while suffering from schizophrenia and says that the staff do not know exactly why she refuses or why the medicines have had no effect. He cites the physician’s primary duty to preserve life as the reason that the hospital cannot be sure of keeping her alive there. His explanation frames the refusal as a clinical crisis, while its cause remains unresolved from the medical perspective.

The transfer brings new rules and restrictions. A nurse checks Yeong-hye’s hospital bag, including her clothes, slippers, and toiletries, and removes the long woolen belt from In-hye’s packed coat. Yeong-hye enters a six-person ward and stands by a barred window beside her sister; her attention goes to the trees outside. The setting changes from family tables and a home refrigerator to a ward organized around patient safety and clinical management, but the underlying dispute over eating has not been settled.

Resistance and the Limits of Explanation

In-hye tries to reach Yeong-hye through remembered food rather than commands. By the bedside, she opens small sealed containers and offers her sister a tinned Hwangdo peach, recalling that Yeong-hye used to insist on buying them even when fresh peaches were in season. She also brings up watermelon and remembers Yeong-hye smelling it as a child. Yeong-hye remains motionless. These recollections place the present refusal beside an earlier relationship to food, but they do not restore a response or establish that the prohibition has lifted.

The doctor later warns In-hye that Yeong-hye may appear unconscious while remaining intensely tense and focused elsewhere; he says that forcing her out of this state can show that she has been awake throughout. When staff attempt to pass a tube through her nose, Yeong-hye breaks free of a carer’s hold. The doctor reports that the tube is blocked because she has opened her mouth and closed her gullet around the uvula, pushing the tube back out. He removes it and says they will try again. The episode makes the prohibition consequential beyond the choice of meals: the effort to feed her has become an institutional procedure, and Yeong-hye resists it through her body even when she does not answer those around her. Within the evidence here, her refusal persists, its dream-related origin remains only partly disclosed, and the people seeking to feed her do not find a way to persuade her to eat.