Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way. To be frank, the first time I met her I wasn’t even attracted to her. Middling height; bobbed hair neither long nor short; jaundiced, sickly-looking skin; somewhat prominent cheekbones; her tied, sallow aspect told me all I needed to know. As she came up to the table where u was eating, I couldn’t help but notice her shoes — the plainest black shoes imaginable. And the walk of hers — neither fast nor slow, striding nor mincing.[…] The passive personality of this woman in whom I could detect neither freshness nor charm, or anything especially refined, suited me down to the ground. There was no need to affect intellectual learnings in order to win her over, or to worry that she might be comparing me to the preening men who pose in fashion catalogues, and she didn’t get worked up if I happen to be late for one of our meetings. The paunch that started appearing in my mid-twenties, my skinny legs and forearms that steadfastly refused to bulk up in spite of my best efforts, the inferiority complex I used to have about the size of my penis — I could rest assured that I wouldn’t have to fret about such things on her account.
This is the first page of this short novel — or rather a collection of three novellas telling the vegetarian’s story — and it already presents the main character’s husband as the utter piece of shit he is. Thankfully, we don’t have to reside inside his cranky little brain for all too long. Divided in three parts, The Vegetarian features three different narrators all focusing on a different part of Yeong-hye’s story: first her husband, then her brother-in-law, and at last her sister. The main protagonist Yeong-hye, the vegetarian herself, is only talked about. We hear certain things about her, but never from her.
FYI: Spoilers ahead
Part one: The abusive prick
The first time we meet our main protagonist, Yeong-hye, it is through the gaze of her husband, who complains about his growing irritations with her lifestyle changes. He is a charming little piece of shit, which gets pretty obvious in “his” — the first — part of the book. Let me underline just how much of an useless heap of molecules he is in another quote:
The only respect in which my wife was at all unusual was that she didn’t like wearing a bra. When I was a young man barely out of adolescence, and my wife and I were dating, I happened to put my hand on her back only to find that I couldn’t feel a bra strap under her sweater, and when I realized what this meant I became quite aroused. […] The outcome of my studies was that she wasn’t, in fact, trying to send any kind of signal. So if not, was it laziness, or just a sheer lack of concern? I couldn’t get my head around it. It wasn’t even as though she had shapely breasts which might suit the ‘no-bra look’. I would have preferred her to go around wearing one that was thickly padded, so that I could save face in front of my acquaintances.
Anticipating just how much this book focuses and discusses the female body, thereby illustrating that a woman can be a woman can be a woman but has a hard time being seen as a free and independent human being even today, let me take a short detour on the topic Mr. F*cktard just shared with us.
May I digress: brasseries
Let me tell you: bras are hell. Next to corsets and shoes that are three sizes too small, bras feel like shit and I’m positive that some nasty male designer prick created them out of a deep-seated hatred for all womankind. To illustrate the comfort of wearing a bra to any male readers: put on a chest strap, pull until it sits really tight, and off you goon with your day, doing what you’re usually doing all the while feeling the tight strap around your chest reminding you that you have to wear this stuff so other people (read: men) won’t go apeshit (or worse) on your body if they were to detect something as ‘sexually suggestive’ as a nipple. That’s for the smaller cups. I can’t even imagine (or tell you) what bras feel like for people with a large chest. In contrast, wearing no bra means feeling as light and free as you (=man) feel all the time — like, normal. No restrictions, free movement, deep breathing.
Of course, some people love bras, some (think they) need them, and some don’t care much about it, wearing a bra when they want/feel the need to and not wearing one when they don’t want to. In the end, it’s society’s idea of a female standard wardrobe, and one you can make a lot of money off by playing with body shaming and personal insecurities all the while suggesting that the perfect bra/panty/lingerie will save the day or date. Which is bullshit, but bullshit sells.
Let’s get back to Mr. Husband (isn’t he a delight to be with?). Seeing the world only in relation to how certain things and actions could reflect on him, his main concern is the behavior and appearance of his wife in public, especially when he is invited to join his boss and other managers to a fancy restaurant for the first time. His wife being the braless, introvert vegetarian she is, makes him nervous, and sure enough, over the course of the evening he feels embarrassed by her refusal to eat meat or talk to the other wives sitting around her. Feeling like he can’t take this anymore, he calls her older sister (after a call to her mother didn’t have the effect he hoped for), In-hye, the efficient one, the successful one, the one who always does what she is supposed to do. Together they stage a family invention, ending in Yeong-hye’s hospitalization for attempted suicide. We’re leaving Mr. Husband right here, thankfully.
Part two: The horny sucker
In the second part of the book, we start to see Yeong-hye through the eyes of her brother-in-law. Starting two years after Yeong-hye’s hospitalization, as she is now recovering from those past events, her stay in the hospital, and her divorce from Mr. Cheong. So, Mr. BIL is an artist, though not one who lives off his art — he lives off his wife. After seeing that Yeong-hye has a mongolian mark above her buttocks back when he carried her to the ER, he developed a deep infatuation for her, fantasizing about involving her in a semi-pornographic work of video art.
It was clearly inly after hearing about her Mongolian mark from his wife that he’d started to see his sister-in-law in a new light. Before that, he’d never had any kind of ulterior motive when it came to his dealings with her. When he recalled how she’d looked and acted during the time she’d spent living with them, the sexual desire that flooded through him was a product of his mental re-enactment of these past experiences, not something he’d actually felt at the time.
Trapped between his growing fascination with his sister-in-law and everyday-life with his wife and son, he uses Yeong-hye’s body to fantasize about how to turn it into art. Again, the male gaze depicts the female body, how it could serve his needs, and observes the changes it goes through. She has no voice of her own, the male gaze once again is the only perspective we have. Though she is adamant about her eating habits and fragile in a lot of aspects, especially regarding her mental state, apart from that, her story once again is the story of someone else, this time her brother-in-law.
Word of advice: If ANY guy ever tells you “I’d like you to model for me,” RUN. Especially when it’s your deadbeat brother-in-law…
Part three: The Savior
The third and final part is told from the perspective of Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye. She is the only narrator whose name we know from the start. Four years older than her vegetarian sister, she was always the responsible one, and she is the only one taking care of her sister when her mind and body deteriorate further once she refuses to eat at all. Finally, we hear about a childhood lived under the constant threat of a violent father, which helps connect some loose ends:
Yeong-hye had been the only victim of their father’s beatings. Such violence wouldn’t have bothered their brother Yeong-Ho so much, a boy who went out doling out his own rough justice to the village children. As the eldest daughter, In-hye had been the one who took over from their exhausted mother and made a broth for her father to wash the liquor down, and so he’d always had taken a certain care in his dealings with her. Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their father’s temperor put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones.
After the intense male gaze of the 2nd part, we now end up with an insight into a violent and dysfunctional family that seems to only work properly as long as every family member stays in their assigned roles. The moment one chooses a different route and ventures off the familiar path, the unit crumbles, with surprising (and sometimes violent) consequences.
One thing is clear: this novel has too many layers for me to comprehend and I will not pretend that I have. While the fact that Yeong-hye suffered physical abuse and beatings at the hand of her father may explain her increasing withdrawal into her own little world and her growing irritation regarding her physical needs and wants, this is only the peak of the iceberg, to put it mildly. I don’t know enough about Korean society to understand certain symbols and images, so fear I might have missed some more subtle messaging. I’ve read repeatedly that vegetarianism is not that much of an issue in (South) Korea, still I don’t understand why it becomes SUCH a scandal. Even if the author wants to use it as a symbol of just how male Korean society erupts at the sight of female bodily autonomy, I feel like I may have missed something (if you know more about it, let me know!). So I hope to discover new layers and insights every time I come back to this book. Let’s hope for the best — and some bright moments 🙂