Meat-eating and animal suffering

Meat-eating and animal suffering form a recurring connection between Yeong-hye’s refusal of food and her remembered exposure to violence against animals. The novel first presents meat as an ordinary household provision, then as an object of family pressure, and finally as a source of persistent bodily and moral distress: Yeong-hye imagines that the lives of animals she has eaten remain inside her, even after their physical remains have left her body.

Food in the Household and at the Table

The conflict enters the domestic sphere through the refrigerator. Mr. Cheong finds Yeong-hye crouched among scattered packages and containers, putting meat into black rubbish bags. The discarded food includes beef for shabu-shabu, pork, beef shin, squid, eel, and other stored provisions. He estimates that the eel alone is worth at least 200,000 won. The scene turns the refrigerator’s contents into more than household supplies: for Yeong-hye they are things to remove, while for her husband they represent a costly disruption of ordinary domestic life.

The same refusal moves from the kitchen into a formal meal. At a gathering, a dish of mung-bean jelly arrives dressed with mushrooms and beef. Yeong-hye has been silent, but when a waiter is about to serve her, she quietly says that she will not eat it. The other guests stop and look toward her emaciated body. The interruption makes a private dietary refusal publicly visible, placing the meal’s social expectations beside the physical consequences others attribute to her decision.

At a later family gathering, food is used more openly as a means of persuasion and control. Yeong-hye’s mother brings stir-fried beef, sweet-and-sour pork, steamed chicken, and octopus noodles to the table, insists that her vegetarianism must stop, and urges her to eat. Her father joins in the demand. After striking Yeong-hye, he forces pork into her mouth while her brother holds her. Yeong-hye spits it out. Her response is not an acceptance of the family’s meal but a rejection that escalates the confrontation and precedes her attempt to harm herself. The scene makes the shared table an arena in which family authority is exercised through food.

The Childhood Memory Behind the Refusal

Yeong-hye’s remembered dream links eating to an earlier scene of violence. It moves from a dark wood and a blood-marked building to a springtime picnic where families eat and barbecue meat. Though the picnic appears communal and ordinary, Yeong-hye hides from the people there, imagining her clothes, hands, and mouth still marked by blood. She recalls eating raw flesh in the building and cannot make sense of the face she sees as both her own and unfamiliar. The dream places the pleasure and sociability surrounding meat beside fear, concealment, and an unresolved memory.

That memory has a specific childhood source. At nine, Yeong-hye watches her father punish a dog that had bitten her. Her father makes it run behind his motorcycle; after several laps the animal collapses and dies. The episode does not end with its death. That evening, the family hosts a feast, and Yeong-hye eats a bowl of the dog’s meat with rice. She remembers the dog’s eyes and later sees them in the soup, yet recalls that she did not care. The juxtaposition is central to the subject: the animal first appears as a living being subjected to punishment, then as food served at a gathering of adult men, while the child who witnessed its death participates in eating it.

The novel later returns to this episode through In-hye’s reflections. Looking back on the family’s history, she recognizes that Yeong-hye was the child most exposed to their father’s violence, while In-hye’s own role as a dutiful eldest daughter had been a strategy for surviving within the household. In-hye wonders whether she could have stopped the events that followed, including the family’s attempt to force meat on Yeong-hye. The childhood scene therefore informs both Yeong-hye’s personal history and her sister’s belated understanding of what family compliance and silence had cost.

Animal Lives as a Bodily Burden

Yeong-hye’s account gives the refusal a bodily and ethical meaning that goes beyond dislike of particular dishes. She says that the lives of animals she ate have lodged inside her: their blood and flesh remain as an enduring presence, even though their physical remains have been excreted. She associates this burden with a persistent sensation in her chest and with the accumulated cries and howls of animals. The novel presents this as Yeong-hye’s own explanation of her distress, not as a conclusion offered by the people around her.

Her account revises the childhood feast. The child who ate a bowl of the dog’s meat and remembered not caring becomes, in the later narration, someone who cannot treat animal bodies as an abstract ingredient. The memory of the dog’s suffering and the bodily image of animals remaining within her make eating inseparable from the lives that food required others to take. Her refusal thus carries a history that the family’s calls to eat do not address.

Family and Medical Responses

The family repeatedly answers Yeong-hye’s refusal by presenting meat as necessary nourishment and eating as a duty. Her mother prepares animal dishes and frames them as a remedy for her daughter’s wasting; her father reinforces that appeal with physical force. After Yeong-hye is hospitalized, her mother brings black goat meat concealed with medicinal ingredients, hoping it can be given to her as herbal medicine without her knowing what it is. The attempted concealment shows how the pressure continues beyond the family table and into the hospital, where care and coercion become difficult to separate.

The clinical response also frames food through the immediate need to preserve Yeong-hye’s life. A doctor tells In-hye that Yeong-hye’s condition has not improved and explains that she refuses food while suffering from schizophrenia; he says medication has not helped and raises transfer to a general hospital if her condition worsens. Later, staff attempt to feed Yeong-hye through a tube. In-hye hears an aide cry out and rushes back into the room, where blood is coming through the tube and from Yeong-hye’s mouth. She demands that it be removed. The treatment scene does not resolve the conflict between nourishment and refusal; it shows the urgent medical effort to sustain life meeting Yeong-hye’s continued resistance to being fed.

Significance

The novel makes meat a material link among domestic routine, family hierarchy, memory, and bodily distress. Its recurring appearances are specific: packages removed from a refrigerator, beef served to guests, dishes arranged before Yeong-hye, concealed goat meat brought into a ward, and food administered as treatment. Each setting assigns eating a different social meaning, but each also tests whether Yeong-hye’s refusal will be recognized or overridden.

Animal suffering complicates the human-centered language of nourishment. The dog’s death is part of a family ritual that turns violence into a meal, while Yeong-hye’s later account insists that the animal lives involved in eating cannot simply be dismissed once the meal is over. The tension is not offered as a simple argument against medical care or family concern: the doctor’s stated priority is to preserve Yeong-hye’s life. Rather, the narrative holds that urgent care and coercive feeding can occupy the same scene, making the question of how to sustain a person inseparable from the question of whether her refusal can be heard.