Yeong-hye’s schizophrenia

Yeong-hye’s schizophrenia is the diagnosis her doctor gives to a condition marked by refusal to eat, limited response to medication, and episodes in which she appears absorbed beyond her immediate surroundings. The novel does not present the diagnosis as a complete explanation: the doctor acknowledges uncertainty about why she will not eat, while the family history and hospital scenes place her illness amid repeated attempts by others to control her body.

Diagnosis and uncertainty

When Yeong-hye’s condition has not improved, her doctor explains to In-hye that the hospital had not expected the illness to develop as it did. He distinguishes Yeong-hye’s case from anorexia nervosa in which a patient believes she has gained weight, and from cases where fear of poisoning can sometimes be addressed by reasoning or by a doctor eating the food first. Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat is instead described as occurring while she is suffering from schizophrenia. The doctor says that the staff still do not know exactly why she refuses food and that none of the medicines they have given her has had an effect.

The diagnosis therefore carries both clinical weight and an acknowledged limit. The doctor calls preserving life the medical team’s primary duty, but says they cannot be sure of keeping Yeong-hye alive in the psychiatric hospital; intravenous feeding is proposed, with transfer to a general hospital’s critical ward as the alternative if her condition does not improve. His account frames treatment as an urgent response to physical danger, without resolving the meaning of her refusal.

Symptoms and treatment

The hospital’s efforts to manage Yeong-hye’s condition include observation of her meals and medication. After she stops coming to the lobby at mealtimes and refuses trays brought to the ward, she becomes dehydrated. Staff also report difficulty administering a drip because she becomes violent when they try. A nurse is instructed to check whether she takes her tablets; when Yeong-hye does not follow the request to show her tongue, the nurse checks and finds the medication still there.

Her hospital admission is governed by close supervision and safety procedures. On arrival at the six-person ward, a nurse checks the contents of her bag and removes a thick wool belt, apparently to ensure that it contains no strings or pins. Later, when Yeong-hye seems unconscious to In-hye, the doctor explains that her muscles are tense and that her awareness may be concentrated so completely on something beyond her immediate surroundings that she does not respond to the people around her. He warns that forcing her out of this state can be difficult for family members to witness.

As her condition worsens, staff attempt to feed her through a tube. Yeong-hye resists the procedure, and the first attempt fails; the doctor decides to try again more quickly. After the tube is inserted, blood appears, and In-hye intervenes, demanding that the staff remove it. The episode makes visible the tension between the hospital’s stated duty to preserve life and Yeong-hye’s resistance to an intervention she has not chosen.

Family history and coercion

The diagnosis is set against a history in which Yeong-hye’s choices about food have repeatedly been met with force. Her father had beaten her during childhood, while In-hye, as the eldest daughter, took on domestic work and tried to avoid provoking him. Only later does In-hye recognize her own self-sacrificing role as a survival strategy rather than simple maturity, and understand how little protection Yeong-hye had against their father’s temper.

At a family gathering, Yeong-hye’s father forces meat on her after she has refused it. She spits it out and injures herself with a fruit knife. In-hye later revisits the incident through questions about whether she could have stopped her father or prevented Yeong-hye from hurting herself. The novel thus places the family’s coercive response to Yeong-hye’s refusal alongside the later clinical efforts to make her eat, without equating the two situations or suggesting that the diagnosis alone accounts for her history.

Earlier episodes also show how refusal disrupts ordinary family and social settings. Yeong-hye discards the meat stored in the household refrigerator, including beef, pork, chicken, eel, and other foods. At a meal with guests, she quietly declines a dish containing beef, and the room falls silent as attention turns to her emaciated appearance. At a subsequent family gathering, relatives place meat dishes before her and urge her to eat. These scenes establish the pressure surrounding her eating before the hospital’s life-preserving interventions become the central concern.

In-hye’s role and the diagnosis’s significance

In-hye becomes both Yeong-hye’s visitor and an interlocutor between her sister and the medical staff. When the doctor says Yeong-hye’s condition has not improved, In-hye asks for time to speak to her before the proposed next steps. At the hospital, she encourages Yeong-hye to eat and gain weight, but also asks questions about her sister’s experience rather than simply accepting the staff’s account. The doctor, in turn, notices that In-hye herself does not look well and asks whether she is sleeping, a brief recognition of the strain carried by the family carer.

Yeong-hye’s schizophrenia is consequently presented through several kinds of knowledge that do not fully converge: a doctor’s diagnosis and treatment decisions, In-hye’s memories of family violence and guilt, and Yeong-hye’s observable refusal and withdrawal. The clinical label names an aspect of her condition, but the account preserves uncertainty about its causes and shows how the drive to keep her alive can become entangled with procedures that override her resistance.