“Why, is it such a bad thing to die”

“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?” is Yeong-hye’s stark reply to In-hye’s fear that she will die. The question unsettles the expected boundary between preserving life and accepting death, while opening onto In-hye’s retrospective understanding of the violence her sister endured and the family’s failure to protect her.

The question in the present

In-hye cries that she is acting as she is because she fears Yeong-hye will die. Yeong-hye looks at her as though she were a stranger, then asks, “Why, is it such a bad thing to die?” The exchange turns In-hye’s plea into a question about the value others assign to survival: the sisters are physically present to one another, but do not share the same sense of what remaining alive means.

The line is repeated immediately in In-hye’s thoughts, carrying the spoken question into reflection. That formal return makes it more than a momentary reply: it becomes the point from which In-hye revisits what she once could not understand about her sister.

A childhood memory revisited

In-hye recalls being lost with Yeong-hye on a mountain when Yeong-hye was nine. Yeong-hye had said, “Let’s just not go back.” In-hye had answered practically, urging her to find the path before dark. Only years later does In-hye connect that childhood wish to the conditions at home.

Their father beat Yeong-hye, while In-hye, the eldest daughter, took on the role of helping their exhausted mother by preparing broth for him. He treated In-hye with a degree of care, but Yeong-hye, described as docile and naive, could neither deflect his anger nor resist it. In-hye comes to see that her own identity as a hardworking, self-sacrificing daughter was not simply a sign of maturity: it was also a way to survive within the family.

The memory ends with the sisters returning by an unfamiliar route, riding a power tiller toward their town as darkness fell. In-hye felt relieved; Yeong-hye did not speak, but watched poplars lit by the evening light. That contrast gives the earlier wish not to go home a significance In-hye had missed at the time.

Violence and belated recognition

The question resonates with the family’s later attempt to force Yeong-hye to eat meat. Their father struck her and forced meat into her mouth; she spat it out and injured herself with a fruit knife. In-hye remembers standing rigidly by, and afterward repeatedly wonders whether she could have intervened—against her father, before Yeong-hye could hurt herself, or before Mr. Cheong carried her to hospital.

Her regrets extend to what followed Yeong-hye’s admission to a psychiatric hospital and to her husband’s actions toward her sister, which In-hye calls unforgivable. She recognizes that the family’s crisis did not begin with Yeong-hye’s refusal of meat alone: violence, silence, and missed chances to act had accumulated around her. The question about death therefore returns In-hye to an earlier question she cannot settle—whether she could have prevented what happened to Yeong-hye.

Meaning and consequence

The line’s force comes from the gap between the sisters’ positions. In-hye speaks from fear of losing Yeong-hye; Yeong-hye’s question refuses the assumption that death is self-evidently the worst outcome. The text does not resolve that difference. Instead, it makes the question a hinge between an immediate encounter and In-hye’s belated recognition of her sister’s childhood suffering, as well as of her own constrained role within the family.