Ch'ukseong Psychiatric Hospital is the institution where Yeong-hye is treated after her crisis at a family gathering and later becomes dangerously unwilling to eat. The hospital is both a place of attempted care and a site where others manage her body; its routines frame In-hye’s search for her missing sister and her struggle over whether medical intervention can preserve a life without deepening the coercion Yeong-hye has resisted.

Setting and Access

The hospital stands on Ch'ukseong Mountain, reached by a bus that turns from the main road onto a narrower, winding route through the woods. In-hye travels there in heavy rain, while other passengers watch her with curiosity and suspicion, uncertain whether she is a patient or a nurse. Her journey makes the hospital a place set apart from ordinary life, yet connected to it by the bus route and by the family members who visit.

The institution permits brief, unaccompanied walks for non-serious patients on fixed days, during a designated hour between two and three in the afternoon, and only when staff judge the weather likely to hold. Those conditions establish a carefully bounded freedom: Yeong-hye can leave the ward for a walk, but the time, eligibility, and circumstances are controlled. When she fails to return, staff initiate an emergency search and set up a roadblock at a corner used by buses and taxis.

Yeong-hye’s Hospitalization and Disappearance

Yeong-hye’s hospitalization follows a family confrontation over her vegetarianism. At a housewarming, her father forces meat on her; she spits it out and injures herself with a fruit knife. Her admission brings the family crisis into a medical setting, but does not end the conflict over who has authority to decide what she should eat or how she should be treated.

About three years after Yeong-hye abruptly became vegetarian, hospital staff report that she has gone missing during one of the authorized walking periods. The search spreads across the neighboring mountain as staff consider whether she has descended toward Maseok or gone farther into the woods. A nurse eventually finds her deep on the mountainside, standing motionless in the rain. The account describes her as seeming like one of the wet trees around her, joining the hospital’s procedures for locating a patient to the novel’s recurring imagery of vegetal transformation.

The hospital contacts In-hye by mobile phone for the first time since Yeong-hye’s admission. In-hye is at a medical appointment with her six-year-old son, Ji-woo, when the nurse tells her that Yeong-hye is missing and asks her to call if her sister appears at home. The call makes the hospital’s emergency a demand on In-hye’s already divided caregiving responsibilities.

Treatment and Institutional Limits

After Yeong-hye is found, In-hye visits her in the ward. Yeong-hye lies with an intravenous needle in the back of her hand, exhausted and unkempt. She asks for water, then asks whether In-hye has spoken with the doctor. The scene places a small request and a fragile exchange of words beside the clinical measures being taken around her.

The doctor tells In-hye that Yeong-hye’s condition has not improved. He proposes feeding her intravenously and warns that she may need transfer to a general hospital’s critical-care ward if her condition continues to worsen. He distinguishes her case from anorexia nervosa, explaining that Yeong-hye refuses food while suffering from schizophrenia and that the cause of her refusal remains unclear. The medicines have not worked, and the staff cannot be sure of keeping her alive at the psychiatric hospital. He describes preserving life as the doctors’ primary duty, while the conversation also exposes how little the staff understand about Yeong-hye’s reasons for refusing food.

The ward’s management becomes increasingly difficult. Staff take care to keep meat off the side dishes because seeing it disturbs Yeong-hye, but she stops coming to the lobby at mealtimes and will not eat when a tray is brought to her. After four days, she is dehydrated. Attempts to give her fluids provoke resistance, and staff are no longer sure they can administer her medication. A nurse discovers that Yeong-hye has kept tablets in her mouth rather than swallowing them. The episode reveals both the close surveillance of her treatment and the limits of that surveillance: staff can inspect and intervene, but cannot thereby secure her cooperation or understand her refusal.

In-hye and the Meaning of Care

For In-hye, the hospital is inseparable from her recurring questions about what she might have prevented. She revisits the family gathering, her father’s actions, and the crisis that led to Yeong-hye’s admission; she also recalls that her husband, Mr. Cheong, later abandoned Yeong-hye and acted toward her in a way In-hye regards as unforgivable. Her doubts accumulate into a broader recognition that the events around her sister cannot be reduced to a single medical episode or a single moment of intervention.

The novel sets the hospital’s duty to preserve life against Yeong-hye’s persistent refusal and In-hye’s awareness of the force applied in the name of care. Near the end, when staff attempt to feed Yeong-hye through a tube, In-hye rushes back into the room and demands that they stop. Her intervention does not resolve the hospital’s crisis, but it makes the conflict visible: the institution acts to sustain Yeong-hye’s life, while her sister reacts to the procedure as another violation of her agency. Ch'ukseong Psychiatric Hospital thus becomes a setting where care, clinical authority, family responsibility, and bodily autonomy meet without an easy reconciliation.