The Woman Nobody Asked Why
What Han Kang’s The Vegetarian made me think about long after I closed the book.
I recently picked up Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and I honestly don’t know if I loved it because I understood it, or because I didn’t.
It is a very strange book.
I finished it feeling confused, unsettled, and somehow full of thoughts. Even after I closed it, I kept going back to certain scenes in my head – the trees, the white bird, the dreams, the idea of becoming something other than human. I kept revisiting the metaphors, trying to understand what Han Kang was trying to say and whether I was even interpreting them correctly.
Maybe that was the point.
What stayed with me most was not really the question of why Yeong-hye turned vegetarian. It was the question of why almost nobody around her stopped to ask why she was changing at all.
We are still not very comfortable with mental health – not with our own, and certainly not always with other people’s. In the first part of the novel, Yeong-hye is clearly in profound distress, but the people around her seem more disturbed by how she is behaving than by what might be happening inside her. Her husband is embarrassed by her. Her family is angry with her. Her behaviour becomes something that needs to be corrected. It takes her hurting herself for medical intervention to become unavoidable.
And it made me think about how quickly we label anything that doesn’t fit what society considers normal.
Someone changes. Someone withdraws. Someone behaves differently. And instead of asking, Are you okay? What’s happening? Do you need help? we often ask, Why are you behaving like this?
There is a difference.
One comes from concern. The other comes from discomfort.
And I think The Vegetarian captures that discomfort painfully well.
The second part was probably the hardest for me to read as a woman. At first, I almost felt relieved that someone was finally interested in Yeong-hye – someone who noticed her, spoke to her, and seemed fascinated by something everyone else had dismissed. But that relief quickly turned into discomfort when I realised he wasn’t really trying to understand her either. He was fascinated by her for his own fantasy, his own artistic obsession, his own desire.
That left me with such a strange dilemma. Something can look like freedom to one person and exploitation to another. And when someone is already vulnerable, how easily can another person take advantage of that vulnerability?
I wasn’t even sure what I felt while reading that part. Frustrated, uncomfortable, sad, maybe a little angry.
Then came In-hye.
The third part changed something for me because suddenly the story wasn’t only about what was happening to Yeong-hye. It was also about what happens to the person who stays behind, watching someone they love fall apart.
In-hye has her own life falling apart. She struggles to sleep. She becomes exhausted. At one point, she seems almost ready to give up the responsibilities she has carried for so long and simply leave. And yet she keeps returning to her sister.
What struck me was that Yeong-hye’s suffering slowly becomes part of In-hye’s environment too.
One person’s pain doesn’t always remain theirs alone.
It enters homes. It changes relationships. It affects how other people sleep, think, function and live.
And yet, In-hye keeps going.
Her son seems to be one of the few things that keeps her connected to ordinary life. There is something so innocent about the way his presence can bring a little light into a life that otherwise feels exhausted and overwhelmed. In a way, he becomes a reason to continue acting normal when everything inside her is anything but.
That made me think about how complicated people are.
Three siblings can grow up in the same family and still experience completely different lives. Age, birth order, personality, the way parents treat you, the responsibilities you take on – all of it changes how you experience the same home.
And perhaps In-hye is the person who comes closest to understanding Yeong-hye, not because Yeong-hye ever explains herself to her, but because In-hye slowly stops demanding an explanation.
Maybe that is what touched me most about her.
Sometimes being there for someone doesn’t mean knowing how to fix them.
Sometimes it just means staying.
The symbolism in the book is another thing I kept thinking about long after I finished it.
Yeong-hye doesn’t simply stop eating meat. Gradually, she seems to want to escape the human world altogether. She imagines herself becoming a tree – something that doesn’t eat animals, doesn’t participate in human violence, and doesn’t have to live by all the rules humans have created.
At one point she says:
“I’m not an animal anymore.”
Get SimplySim’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
And later comes the question:
“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”
That line really stayed with me.
I don’t even know exactly why. It made me think about life and death in a way I hadn’t expected from this book.
Why do we automatically assume that staying alive is always the only acceptable answer?
What does living actually mean?
And then there was the white bird.
I kept trying to figure it out. Was it innocence? Escape? Vulnerability? Transformation? Something else entirely?
I still don’t know.
And maybe I’m not supposed to.
Because the biggest thing I realised only after finishing the book was that Yeong-hye’s own point of view is almost always missing.
All through the book, I wanted to know what happened.
Why the dreams?
Why the trees?
Why did she want to become one?
What was actually happening inside her?
But we never really get that explanation.
Instead, everyone else interprets her.
Her husband interprets her. Her family interprets her. Her brother-in-law interprets her. The doctors interpret her.
And even I, as a reader, kept trying to interpret her.
I wanted the book to tell me why.
And then I realised – maybe that was exactly what Han Kang wanted me to notice.
Nobody really asks Yeong-hye why.
They ask what is wrong with her.
They ask how to change her.
They ask how to make her fit back into the world.
And perhaps the book deliberately doesn’t give us the answer because we are placed in the same position as everyone else around her: looking at her from the outside, trying to make sense of her without ever being able to fully enter her mind.
Even In-hye doesn’t suddenly discover the answer.
She simply begins to see her sister differently.
Slowly.
And maybe I did too.
I started the book wanting to understand Yeong-hye.
I finished it wondering why I had been so desperate to understand her at all.
Perhaps before asking what is wrong with someone, we should learn to ask the simpler question:
Why?
