Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat

Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat is the pivotal food practice through which her family first encounters her changed behavior and the psychiatric ward later confronts a life-threatening crisis. It begins with her decision to become vegetarian, but develops beyond a dietary choice: family members try to reverse it through food and force, while hospital staff must contend with her rejection of meals, medication, and feeding procedures. The distinction between refusing meat and refusing nourishment eventually collapses, making the act both a persistent personal boundary and an urgent medical problem.

Beginning and Family Response

Yeong-hye’s increasingly unusual behavior became apparent about three years earlier, when she suddenly decided to turn vegetarian. She lost a great deal of weight, slept very little, and spoke so sparsely that meaningful communication with her became difficult. The family was alarmed, especially her parents, but their response did not respect the refusal: at a family gathering, her father forced meat into her mouth. The episode culminated in Yeong-hye injuring herself, a consequence that In-hye later revisits through persistent questions about whether she could have intervened.

The refusal also disrupts ordinary domestic routines. Mr. Cheong finds Yeong-hye in the kitchen sorting meat from the refrigerator into rubbish bags: beef, pork, chicken, eel, and other stored food. The discarded meat is not a single meal she can decline but a stock of provisions, including food sent by her mother-in-law and worth at least 200,000 won. Her action turns the refrigerator and kitchen floor into a visible record of the boundary she is drawing. She continues sorting the packages despite her husband’s angry demand for an explanation.

At a formal meal, the refusal becomes public. When a waiter is about to serve her mung-bean jelly garnished with green-pea jelly, mushrooms, and beef, Yeong-hye quietly says she will not eat it. The other guests stop and stare at her emaciated body. The scene makes the difference between private preference and social disruption plain: a dish presented as part of a shared meal becomes the point at which her refusal interrupts the gathering.

Family Pressure and Concealment

At a later family meal, relatives frame Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism as a threat to her health and appearance. In-hye rebukes her and argues that a vegetarian diet requires a properly balanced meal plan. Yeong-ho’s wife says she had not expected vegetarianism to damage Yeong-hye’s body so visibly. Their concern gives way to direct pressure when Yeong-hye’s mother places stir-fried beef, sweet-and-sour pork, steamed chicken, and octopus noodles in front of her and orders her to eat. Her father joins the demand. The food is offered not as a choice but as a means of ending the refusal.

The same conflict follows Yeong-hye into hospital. Her mother secretly brings black goat meat for her and tells In-hye to present it as herbal medicine, disguising its smell with medicinal ingredients. She explains that she prepared it before travelling to Seoul and fears In-hye and her husband would prevent her from bringing it if they knew. Her attempted care therefore repeats the family’s insistence that Yeong-hye must consume meat, this time through concealment rather than an open command.

From Meat Refusal to Refusal of Food

In the psychiatric ward, Yeong-hye’s refusal remains consistent even as its scope changes. Staff take care to keep meat from her meals because seeing it disturbs her, and she screams and tries to escape if she sees a side dish containing it. Later, however, she stops coming to the lobby at mealtimes and will not eat even when a tray is brought to the ward. After four days without food, she becomes dehydrated; attempts to give her fluids by drip meet with violence, and staff are unsure whether she is taking medication. A nurse discovers that she has kept tablets in her mouth rather than swallowed them.

The shift matters: what began as a refusal of meat no longer leaves other foods available as a workable alternative. In-hye asks why Yeong-hye will not eat anything else, while Yeong-hye asks for water. In a later attempt to reach her through remembered preferences, In-hye opens containers of tinned Hwangdo peach and watermelon and recalls how Yeong-hye used to enjoy their smell as a child. Yeong-hye remains motionless. Familiar food and memories cannot restore the earlier conditions of eating.

Medical Crisis and Persistent Resistance

The treating doctor explains that Yeong-hye’s case is not readily accounted for by fear of poisoning or by anorexia nervosa alone. He identifies her as a patient who refuses food while suffering from schizophrenia, says the cause remains unclear, and notes that medication has not worked. He warns In-hye that fifteen to twenty percent of anorexia nervosa patients starve to death and says the medical team’s primary duty is to preserve life. Because they cannot be sure of keeping Yeong-hye alive in the ward, they consider transferring her to a critical-care unit.

As her condition worsens, the hospital tries to feed her through a tube. Staff explain that Yeong-hye appears unconscious but is intensely focused elsewhere; forcing her out of that state can reveal that she has been awake. When the doctor attempts to insert the tube, Yeong-hye resists with unexpected strength and manages to block its passage. The first attempt fails, and the doctor prepares to try again. The procedure marks the sharpest institutional response to her refusal: medical care seeks to sustain her life, but is enacted against the resistance through which she continues to reject food.

Significance

Yeong-hye’s refusal links food to the authority of family, social custom, and medical care. At home and at the family table, eating meat is treated as an obligation that relatives may enforce; in the hospital, nutrition becomes a clinical necessity managed through observation, medication, and attempted tube feeding. The contexts differ, but each turns her body into the site where others seek to determine what she must consume.

The refusal also changes rather than simply repeats itself. Yeong-hye first rejects meat while meals and other foods remain possible; later she rejects nourishment more broadly, and the consequences become potentially fatal. The progression prevents the act from being reduced either to an ordinary dietary preference or to a simple, comprehensible protest. Its persistence remains legible in specific actions—from discarding the refrigerator’s meat to resisting food in the ward—even as the reasons for it remain uncertain to those trying to treat her.