Vietnam War

The Vietnam War functions as a remembered military past that shapes family authority and its later scrutiny. The novel links a veteran’s boast of service to the violence he exercises at home, while Mr. Cheong’s recollection of that violence becomes a disturbing measure of his own response to Yeong-hye’s crisis.

The veteran’s public identity

Yeong-hye’s father repeatedly boasts that he received the Order of Military Merit for serving in the Vietnam War. Mr. Cheong, his son-in-law, recalls the loud, forceful opening of the man’s familiar monologues, which made his fixed ideas difficult to ignore. Against that established manner, the father’s rare apology is startling: Mr. Cheong says that in the five years he had known him, he had never heard him express shame or empathy.

The military record is not confined to a story of service. Mr. Cheong recalls that, according to Yeong-hye, her father whipped her calves until she was eighteen. In the family’s response to her vegetarianism, his status as a war hero sits beside his physical assault on his daughter, giving the service record a pointed domestic contrast rather than allowing it to stand as uncomplicated prestige.

Recalled violence and its aftermath

Two years before Mr. Cheong’s later recollection, Yeong-hye cut her wrist in his house during a family lunch. The family had gathered after hearing that she had become vegetarian, a change that especially angered her father. After he struck her in the face and forced a lump of meat into her mouth, Yeong-hye screamed, spat the meat out, seized a fruit knife, and stared at her family with the terror of a cornered animal.

When blood poured from her wrist, Mr. Cheong tore a strip from a quilt, bound the wound, lifted her, and ran down to the car park. He remembers being surprised by the speed and decisiveness of his own actions. The scene had seemed almost unreal to him, like a bizarre play, yet the scream and the practical urgency of the rescue remain vivid in his memory. In this recollection, the Vietnam War is not a battlefield setting; it is the background to the father’s self-image, set against the violence inflicted on his daughter and the emergency that follows.