The Seollal family gathering is a holiday meal at which food becomes both a demonstration of the mother’s expertise and a means of policing the narrator’s body and future. Set around Fugu sashimi and Tteokguk, the gathering exposes the gap between the mother’s defense of her daughter and the aunt’s intrusive scrutiny; its aftermath leaves the narrator walking alone, physically distressed and wishing that Yan Kerrand had not seen her in that state.

Preparation and the holiday

The gathering is preceded by a week of attention to the meal. While eating with her mother at a port-side stall, the narrator hears that the family needs Fugu for Seollal, but that only Octopus is available at the market. Her mother is the only fishmonger in Sokcho licensed to prepare blowfish: its organs contain lethal toxins, but skilled handling can turn its translucent flesh into an elaborate dish with which she dazzles guests. The meal is therefore anticipated not just as a family obligation but as a display of specialized knowledge and culinary authority.

When Seollal arrives, the narrator makes Tteokguk for the guest house and walks over to tell Yan Kerrand that it is a holiday and everything will be closed. He already knows from Old Park and has stocked up on instant noodles. The exchange sets the holiday meal against a nearby refusal of shared food: the narrator is smarting because Yan Kerrand has repeatedly declined her cooking, and he explains that he dislikes spicy food. The family gathering will offer another, more fraught setting in which cooking and eating determine who can care for whom, and who gets to judge.

A meal arranged around skill and status

The narrator and her mother wear traditional outfits, which the aunt mocks on seeing them, laughing at the idea of dressing that way in the present day. Chastened, the mother forces a laugh. They arrange the table in the kitchen, carefully placing cushions on the tiled floor. These small preparations make the gathering feel formal, but the aunt’s appearance and manner also establish a contest over taste and social standing: she arrives heavily made-up and in a smart tailored suit, then surveys the kitchen walls with disapproval.

The aunt praises the Fugu sashimi, saying she does not eat it in Seoul because she distrusts the Japanese chefs who claim to have licenses there. She invokes the danger of the dish, asserting that twenty grams of toxic flesh could asphyxiate a man, and frames her suspicion in national terms. Her admiration for the sashimi is thus inseparable from her distrust of those who prepare it elsewhere. The mother’s mastery gives the meal its centerpiece, while the aunt’s approval quickly shifts to inspection: she notices the greyish color of the Octopus dish and asks what caused it.

The mother answers that the narrator pierced the ink sac and cannot be trusted with a knife. The accusation has a concrete basis in the dish’s appearance, but it also marks a boundary between the mother’s confidence with dangerous ingredients and her refusal to entrust her daughter with the same work. Earlier, while preparing Fugu, the mother removed the poison-laden intestines, ovaries, and liver without piercing them; the narrator watched but was never permitted to handle the fish. At the table, the imperfect color of the Octopus makes the narrator’s small mistake visible beside the mother’s exacting skill.

Scrutiny at the table

The aunt calls the narrator sickly-looking and blames the air in Sokcho, sweeping her eyes across the dirty kitchen walls. The narrator concentrates on the Tteokguk and studies her face reflected in its surface. As her spoon makes ripples, her nose smudges, forehead undulates, and cheeks seem to run into her chin. The shifting reflection offers no stable image to counter the aunt’s judgment. The aunt calls the soup bland; the narrator is so intent on ladling it into her mouth that she cannot taste it.

The mother adds soy sauce to the soup, splashing her sister. The aunt protests that the soju-stained spill has landed on expensive silk, and the mother turns away from the argument by asking the narrator to speak to her aunt. In response, the mother announces that the narrator will soon marry Jun-oh. The announcement makes marriage part of the meal’s family business, but the aunt immediately treats the narrator’s body and appearance as matters she can manage. She squeezes the narrator’s buttocks and thighs, and the narrator moves away before the aunt can reach her breasts. The aunt says she will take charge of the wedding outfit and makeup, criticizes the narrator’s glasses, and offers to pay for eye surgery in Gangnam.

The mother resists that proposed alteration. She says her daughter is lovely as she is, glasses included, and does not need changing. But her defense does not stop the aunt from asking why the narrator is stuffing herself. The mother protests that the remark should not be made when, for once, her daughter is eating. The narrator’s fingers tighten around her spoon. When the aunt chews kimchi with her mouth open and scraps of cabbage spurt among the dishes, the narrator watches her pick them up with chopsticks. The meal’s intimacy has curdled into exposure: bodies, appetites, clothing, and manners are all being inspected in public.

Departure and aftermath

The narrator stands, puts on her coat, and says she is returning to the guest house. The aunt raises an eyebrow at the mother, asking whether the narrator is not going to the cemetery. The mother gives her daughter a pleading look, then shrugs in resignation and watches her leave. The exchange makes the departure a break not only from the table but from an expected family observance; the narrator does not stay to comply.

There are no more buses, so she walks with her arms wrapped around her abdomen. She has eaten until her stomach hurts, repeating the loss of control she had experienced earlier with her mother: at the stall, she weighed each mouthful before eating faster and faster, drinking long draughts of makgeolli until she could no longer stop. After the gathering, bodily discomfort is no longer an abstract fear of how she looks; it is the immediate consequence of what she has eaten and cannot undo.

Back at the guest house, she catches sight of her wind-tangled hair and her skirt spattered with sand and mud. She imagines her body misshapen, her stomach swollen from the soup, and wants the image erased from Yan Kerrand’s mind. He has left his door half open and appears as she passes, but she does not stop. The episode sharpens the difference between the mother’s spoken defense of her daughter and the narrator’s own persistent distress about being seen. It also extends the book’s recurring link between cooking and care: later, the narrator asks Yan Kerrand to taste her cooking, and he agrees, though his attention seems elsewhere. The gathering offers no easy reconciliation through food; instead, it leaves the narrator carrying both the meal and the scrutiny away from the family table.