"Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way," I read as I flipped to the first page of Han Kang’s "The Vegetarian."
The novel, which I had picked up while cleaning our cluttered living room coffee table, was strewn among the many books that fed my mother’s voracious reading habits. Enthralled by the first line, I slowly sat down on the couch behind me where I was unable to move until I had finished the book.
Unremarkable as she was to her husband, protagonist Yeong-hye upturns her monotonous life as an ordinary sister and wife with one seemingly trivial decision: vegetarianism. This decision begins to raise eyebrows when she refuses to cook meat for her husband or eat it during social gatherings. In the meat-heavy dietary culture of South Korea, Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is remarkable.
But her vegetarianism escalates dramatically. The Kafka-esque novel – whose author, Han Kang, won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature – details Yeong-hye’s spiral fueled by her desire to turn into a plant with her growing withdrawal from the world around her and mental hospital visits, narrated by her family members.
As insane as her family and doctors deemed her, and as harshly received as "The Vegetarian" has been in South Korea, Yeong-hye became oddly relatable as I unraveled her story page by page. As a young girl who lived in South Korea for all of middle and high school, I felt a connection with Yeong-hye: her thoughts and actions made complete and utter sense. In fact, Yeong-hye’s form of protest was too familiar to me as someone who for years had worn intentionally baggy, androgynous clothing or presented myself as masculine – a protective mechanism, but also my way of protesting against South Korea’s social climate.
Though my subtle protest against South Korea's strict social standards seemed trivial at first, the more I familiarized myself with protests from women in South Korea, the more I began to realize my actions were an unintentional reaction to the society I lived in. The formal and informal ways South Korean women protest – in "The Vegetarian" and in the world around me – prompted me to explore women in Korea deeper, ultimately igniting a deeper understanding of myself and the world I come from.
The traditional attitudes toward women’s rights in South Korea has been a decades-long issue that has intensified within the past five years. The anti-feminist voter base pushing President Yoon Suk-yeol to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, the prevalence of sex crimes, involving some of the country’s biggest pop stars and rampant misogyny that seeps into women’s social lives and the workplace are some of the harsh realities women in South Korea face, according to NPR. Moreover, Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world, largely due to the exhausting social and economic structures in place for women, according to the BBC.
The extreme pressure put on women have prompted numerous protests, including the 4B movement where South Korean women have sworn off four things: heterosexual marriage, childbirth, dating and heterosexual sexual relations. Protests like these are opening international conversations about the treatment of women in South Korea.
Social welfare doctoral student Yeon Jae Hwang’s interest and involvement in women’s rights in South Korea peaked after conversations with friends she met online and through her college clubs. Her friends shared with Hwang that they had been verbally assaulted for having short hair.
"Are you one of those feminists?" the men would ask, sneering.
It’s common for women to be verbally and physically assaulted for having masculine hairstyles which give the impression of a feminist, she added.
"되게 무서워요," Hwang said. It’s so scary.
The standard for women to have feminine aesthetics, such as through their hairstyles, allows physical appearance to be a key way in which women can protest against the social norm. Much like Yeong-hye, whose vegetarianism in a society which heavily values meat consumption became her assertion of individuality, Hwang and her friends’ symbolic defiance was through hair.
But outer appearances like clothes and hair are only the tip of the iceberg.
Eunice Bae’s animated demeanor and roaring laughter put an immediate smile on my face. Bae, who serves as the marketing director of Korean Women’s International Network of Los Angeles, was eager to share the defining moments of her life: ranking poorly in the Korean grade school system, jumping between more than 30 jobs as opposed to one steady career progression and divorcing her husband. She knew these experiences made her a failure by South Korea’s standards, she said to me, still with a smile on her face.
Her optimism took me by surprise. Most older people I’ve met led traditionally successful lives, but appeared to be incredibly jaded and pessimistic. What was her secret?
"용기," she said. Courage.
In an environment of extreme social conformity and relentless, often unattainable standards, she’s learned to constantly rediscover courage – and the confidence to make mistakes or stand out. She said her courage has liberated her, allowed her to pursue all that her heart desires – from learning a new instrument to becoming an Instagram content creator in her 50s.
Bae’s willingness to live, not just survive, was something Yeong-Hye realized too late.
"The feeling that she (Yeong-hye) had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure," Kang writes. "Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her success had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely … she was nothing but a child who had never lived."
In an environment of extreme conformity, Yeong-hye had found herself making socially correct, acceptable decisions robotically. She never had the chance to discover herself, or find what she most wanted in life. In a culture where being different is synonymous to failure, she succeeded on society’s terms. But, only through a mental spiral was she able to see her life as it actually was and gather all the courage she had suppressed her entire life.
For many women in such a social climate, courage becomes critical.
Hwang said a notable protest she participated in was the one following the murder of a 28-year-old woman who was brutally stabbed to death in a subway station bathroom by a man who had been stalking her for years and had killed her in revenge for rejecting him. That murder haunted me as well – I’d often use that subway station to get around the city.
Hwang sat for hours a day on a sidewalk in Seoul, joined by hundreds of other women. She knew this murder was just one of many similar incidents which went unaddressed. Despite the public nature of these protests making Hwang and her fellow protestors susceptible to harassment, they were tenacious.
Their resolve – which helped Hwang, her friends and fellow protestors persevere in the face of harassment and other obstacles – has generated prolific protest literature in South Korea.
Asian American studies associate professor Jennifer Chun analyzes protest literature in Asia and across Asian-American diasporas. Her current research focuses specifically on the past two decades of women’s protests in South Korea, revealing their evolution into increasingly dramatic and ritualized acts over time – often involving elements of pain. 오체투지 (ochae-tooji), which is a Buddhist ritual of prostrating oneself on the ground in a slow ritual procession, is one example in South Korean protest literature.
Despite prevailing assumptions that painful protests are done out of desperation, Chun believes these protests maintain a deeper purpose.
"What we argue is that these types of protest acts, as part of a protest repertoire, actually create forms of solidarity that change the way people think about themselves, relate to each other and also relate to the history of other people who've experienced these kinds of injustices," Chun said.
South Korea’s history has empowered protests to become much more intense, and thus more effective. The colonization by Japan in 1910, the military dictatorship by the Democratic Justice Party until 1987 and the reactive protests from civilians fighting against such oppressive powers have riddled South Korea’s history.
"I think one could argue that it (South Korea) is a more permissive climate for protest because protests have been so instrumental to the democratization of Korea," Chun said. "There’s more of an acknowledgement historically that protests improve people’s rights and improve the quality of the political environment in ways that you can’t ignore."
Chun added that, unlike in the United States, South Korea lacks government and corporate support for protests that mobilize through donations and other backing. While seemingly negative, the lack of generous institutional mobilization has served South Korean protestors well, as protestors have only had to rely on each other to keep the movement going – ultimately creating a stronger sense of solidarity, Chun said.
Bae calls this solidarity 정. Jeong.
She noted how South Korea’s collectivist culture, which is very heavily centered around "jeong," or kinship, naturally creates a stronger sense of togetherness among Koreans, as opposed to the more individualistic nature of life she noticed in the U.S.
However, "jeong" can become toxic because it can create excessive homogeneity and competition within the community.
"You got to actually do what other people do, whether or not that's good," Bae said. "Sometimes a majority of people say, ‘This is right.’ It's not always right, but you feel very afraid if you do something different than others."
Large family gatherings for any and every occasion, the tradition of 회식 (hwaeshik) – getting drinks with coworkers – or simply sharing and helping take care of neighbors is all woven in the fabric of South Korea culture. As much as this sentiment helped to build a sense of kinship, safety and trust among my immediate and broader community, I also couldn’t help but notice an unspoken rule: what the group agreed upon became absolute truth, and disappointing them was the worst sin. Their praise and adoration felt like gold, while their cultural exclusion and shunning was akin to death.
At the end of "The Vegetarian," Yeong-hye’s older sister watches over Yeong-hye in the mental hospital and recalls their upbringing, "Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their father’s temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones." Yeong-hye’s lack of courage – her conformity – was what ultimately broke her, making readers reflect on what Yeong-hye could’ve done differently to prevent this spiral in the first place.
Being unremarkable was Yeong-hye’s means of survival in a ruthless environment of extreme social conformity and the overwhelming standards for women. As I reflect on the years I spent living in South Korea, I can’t help but also notice the ways I tried to make myself invisible and shield myself in any way possible from social or emotional hurt.
Needless to say, I am incredibly grateful and proud of my country and blood. The country, which was once a war-torn, poverty-stricken nation, has become an economic and cultural powerhouse in our world today in large part due to the nation’s tenacity and solidarity – or as Bae said, "jeong." Especially having spent my young childhood in a predominantly white neighborhood where I was conditioned to be ashamed of my lineage, the recent recognition South Korea has faced on the international stage – like Kang’s Nobel Prize for Literature – have made me feel an overwhelming sense of pride and happiness.
In fact, Kang’s Nobel Prize felt like a win for readers like myself who had resonated deeply with her work. But the international praise heavily contrasts the criticism and censorship that her work has experienced in South Korea. With that, I rip in half with pride for my country yet knowing how harrowing it can be to live there – not just survive.