Yeong-hye’s psychiatric hospitalization

Yeong-hye’s psychiatric hospitalization is the institutional aftermath of her refusal to eat meat and the crisis that follows when she stops eating altogether. It brings her into a system tasked with preserving her life, while exposing the limits of treatment that cannot establish why she refuses food and the family’s history of responding to her resistance with force. In-hye’s visits and memories give the hospitalization a second meaning: it is not only a medical episode, but a return to violence that the sisters’ family has never adequately faced.

Admission and family context

Yeong-hye’s hospitalization follows a confrontation at a family gathering. Her father strikes her and forces meat into her mouth; she spits it out and injures herself with a fruit knife. In-hye watches, later revisiting the scene with a recurring sense that she should have intervened—against her father, before Yeong-hye could hurt herself, and when Mr. Cheong later cast her aside. The hospital therefore receives Yeong-hye after a crisis already shaped by coercion, not in isolation from it.

The family history reaches further back. In-hye remembers Yeong-hye as the only child subjected to their father’s beatings. Their brother Yeong-ho could retaliate against other children, and In-hye, as the eldest daughter, learned to keep their father in a better mood by making him broth. Looking back, she recognizes her dutiful role as a survival strategy rather than simple maturity. Yeong-hye’s hospitalization thus sits within a longer pattern in which the family’s accommodation of the father coexists with Yeong-hye’s exposure to his violence.

Institutional care and its limits

The hospital’s account of Yeong-hye’s condition is grave but uncertain. A doctor tells In-hye that treatment has not improved her condition and that the staff will try feeding her intravenously; if that fails, they may transfer her to a critical ward at a general hospital. He explains that Yeong-hye is refusing food while suffering from schizophrenia, but that the staff do not know exactly why she will not eat and have found that medication has had no effect. He presents preserving life as the medical team’s first duty, while acknowledging that they cannot be sure they can keep her alive there.

The staff attempt to accommodate her prohibition on meat: they avoid serving her meals with meat side dishes. But this precaution does not lead to eating. Yeong-hye stops coming to the lobby at mealtimes and refuses trays brought to the ward. After four days without food she is dehydrated, and attempts to give her an intravenous drip are complicated by her resistance. A nurse also reports that Yeong-hye had not taken her tablets: when asked to show that she had swallowed them, she did not comply, and the pills were still in her mouth when staff checked.

These details make the hospital’s care a conflict over both survival and bodily autonomy. Clinical staff observe, medicate, and try to provide nutrition; Yeong-hye’s actions frustrate those procedures. The narrative does not supply a definitive explanation that resolves this conflict. Instead, the doctor’s uncertainty and the repeated failure of treatment remain part of the account, alongside the institutional imperative to preserve life.

In-hye’s visits and memories

In-hye tries to reach her sister through conversation. On one visit, she finds Yeong-hye in bed with an intravenous needle in her hand and asks what happened in the woods where she was found, whether she was cold, and why she will no longer eat other food as well as meat. Yeong-hye answers that she is thirsty and asks for water. After drinking, she asks whether In-hye has spoken with the doctor. The exchange is small, but it shows that contact remains possible even as the larger effort to persuade Yeong-hye to eat has failed.

In-hye’s understanding of her sister changes through recollection. As children, the two once became lost on a mountain, and nine-year-old Yeong-hye said they should not go back. In-hye did not understand her then; in adulthood, she connects the remark to the violence Yeong-hye alone endured at home. The memory does not turn the present crisis into a simple explanation, but it changes how In-hye sees her sister’s history: Yeong-hye’s withdrawal cannot be separated from the conditions in which she grew up.

In-hye’s guilt also extends beyond the family gathering. She wonders whether she could have prevented the violence, stopped the injury, changed Mr. Cheong’s decision to abandon Yeong-hye, or prevented what her husband later did to her sister. Her thoughts show how the crisis has spread through the family, leaving In-hye to revisit moments when she watched events unfold without knowing how to stop them.

Disappearance and return

The hospitalization includes a disappearance that sends the staff and family searching. Yeong-hye goes missing during an hour set aside for brief, unaccompanied walks, a privilege reserved for patients considered less seriously ill and allowed only on fixed days. When staff discover that she has not returned, they organize an emergency search and set up a roadblock where buses and taxis pass. They consider whether she has gone down toward Maseok or deeper into the mountain woods.

A nurse eventually finds Yeong-hye deep in the woods on Ch’ukseong Mountain, standing motionless and soaked in the rain. The doctor later calls the discovery extraordinarily fortunate. The episode joins the hospital’s regulated routines—scheduled walks, checks, and a search protocol—to the woods beyond its control. When In-hye later travels to the hospital, the rain-soaked road and mountain prompt her to imagine the wooded place where her sister was found.

The hospital contacts In-hye on her mobile to report Yeong-hye missing, the first such call since her admission. In-hye is at work and has Ji-woo with her; after offering to contact their parents, she puts away the phone and embraces her son, whose body feels light and hot. The scene connects the immediate alarm over Yeong-hye with In-hye’s responsibilities as a mother, without making those responsibilities an answer to the crisis.

Escalation and significance

Later, the effort to feed Yeong-hye becomes an emergency. While the medical team attempts to administer gruel through a tube, In-hye sees blood coming from Yeong-hye’s mouth and tells the staff to move away. She pulls the doctor back and demands that the tube be removed. Yeong-hye struggles as the doctor tries to extract it, and the staff call for calm and a tranquilizer. The intervention meant to provide nourishment instead becomes another scene of bodily struggle, with In-hye intervening against a procedure intended to sustain her sister.

Across these episodes, hospitalization is neither a straightforward rescue nor simply a setting for diagnosis. It is a recurring confrontation among Yeong-hye’s refusal, the institution’s duty to preserve life, and a family history in which control has repeatedly been exercised over her body. In-hye’s perspective makes visible both the need for care and the costs of treating resistance only as a problem to be overcome. The narrative leaves the medical outcome unsettled in these scenes; what it makes clear is that the hospital cannot be understood apart from the violence and strained relationships that brought Yeong-hye there.