2007 novel by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith.
The Vegetarian tells the story of Yeong-hye, a Korean woman in her thirties, whose mental health deteriorates after she becomes a vegetarian. Despite the one-sentence summary, this is not a book about B12 deficiency, and not even that much about plant-based diet. To me, the most salient themes of the book are mental health and bodily autonomy. Being unfamiliar with Korean culture, I also found the description of Korean everyday life interesting.
It’s not exactly a happy read, featuring elements such as sexual assault, self-harm and abusive family. (There’s also plenty of material for a debate on mental illnessvs.unusual preferences, which might be triggering for our dear blog host.) However, it’s a beautiful book, sometimes disturbing, sometimes funny, often ironic. It’s thought-provoking and ambiguous, raising questions rather than passing judgments.
Mental health and bodily autonomy
Something is stuck in my solar plexus. [--] The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.
After a disturbing dream, Yeong-hye decides to become a vegetarian. She interprets somatic anxiety as a consequence of her previously omnivorous diet, and wants to purge her body of meat. The moral wrong of eating animals and the damage to her body are connected on a purely spiritual level. Despite maintaining a plant-based diet, she keeps having nightmares where she brutally slaughters animals. She suffers from insomnia, becomes socially withdrawn and loses weight rapidly.
Yeong-hye is met with serious backlash from refusing meat. First, she is perceived as rude and non-conformist. At a dinner with her husband’s colleagues, she draws attention due to her diet, and her husband accuses her of sabotaging his career. Her family gets involved after her weight loss and social isolation, but instead of showing compassion or trying to understand her point of view, they treat her like a disobedient child, coercing and manipulating her into eating meat. She becomes unstable enough for a medical intervention to be arranged—this changes the perspective of some of her family, but their goal is still to make her an omnivore. Meat is the medicine that will restore her malnourished body, and eating meat is the metric for being normal again.
Of course, one of the great ironies is that Yeong-hye’s flavor of vegetarianism only becomes a source of distress in an environment where eating meat is expected—a hair dryer solution would be to suggest she become a buddhist nun or something. Her behavior becomes more unusual as time passes, and there’s a point where most people would agree that she is not capable of taking care of herself. But in between, there’s a wide range of behaviors where people would disagree whether she’s mentally ill or just a person with unusual preferences. That social status in turn guides people’s opinions on things like, whether she’s allowed to live on her own or hospitalized, or whether she’s capable of giving sexual consent.
These are questions without easy answers, but I feel that approaching them through fiction is useful for generating empathy. It’s not an efficient way of listing the parameters of all possible human conditions, but that’s the point—it’s more effectful to take a deep dive into an individual situation. I’m always happy to find a book where the characters are very different from myself, but the author succeeds in making them relatable.
Family, work and everyday life
“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 timid, sallow aspect told me all I needed to know. As she came up to the table where I was waiting, I couldn’t help but notice her shoes – the plainest black shoes imaginable. And that walk of hers – neither fast nor slow, striding nor mincing.
However, if there wasn’t any special attraction, nor did any particular drawbacks present themselves, and therefore there was no reason for the two of us to not get married.”
The story opens with Yeong-hye’s husband chronicling their marriage and courtship. It’s hilarious and tragic, becoming more of both as the book goes on. Viewed from a culture that appreciates quirkiness, Yeong-hye is so ordinary that the whole thing flips over and her husband, a true connoisseur and himself a prime example in how to be basic, spends three pages marveling over such a rare specimen. Her only hobby is reading, and not only that, but the books she reads are extraordinarily boring! And then of course, she becomes vegetarian and disrupts the perfectly crafted idyll.
The author states in an interview that the novel “isn’t a singular indictment of the Korean patriarchy”—this fully matches my experience as a reader, it’s a backdrop for the novel rather than a central theme. The author wanted to tell a story, the story has to be situated somewhere, so why not the author’s native country. But since I’m unfamiliar with Korean culture, the backdrop is part of the appeal of the book for me. For example, I kept noticing how much these people spend time at work. Yeong-hye’s husband has dedicated his life to being unremarkable, yet his job as an indistinguishable office worker at a small company requires him to routinely stay at work until midnight. Another aspect is the level of conformity that is expected of the characters, and the things that break the expectations.
Vegetarianism
“Well, I must say, I’m glad I’ve still never sat down with a proper vegetarian. I’d hate to share a meal with someone who considers eating meat repulsive, just because that’s how they themselves personally feel… don’t you agree?”
“Imagine you were snatching up a wriggling baby octopus with your chopsticks and chomping it to death – and the woman across from you glared like you were some kind of animal. That must be how it feels to sit down and eat with a vegetarian!”
Another reason why I found this book interesting is because its protagonist is a non-consequentialist vegetarian.
I’m a vegetarian too. If Yeong-hye and I went to a dinner party like the one in the book, we would both eat just salad, kimchi and squash porridge. I’d do it to promote a concrete effect I want to see in the world: “Next time you entertain guests, I wish you offered more plants and less animals”. But Yeong-hye doesn’t communicate in any of these terms. The brief glimpses of her narration show an internal world that is magical and immediate. “Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts, nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe. But not my breasts. With my round breasts, I’m okay.” Losing weight makes her worried that she’s becoming more dangerous: “Why are my edges all sharpening – what I am going to gouge?” Is this an example of mental illness or vegetarianism—who cares? She should download HappyCow on her phone in any case.
The character in the quote defines a vegetarian as “someone who considers eating meat repulsive, just because that’s how they themselves personally feel”. My spontaneous reaction was that the framing feels dishonest: 1) vegetarianism isn’t just any arbitrary personal quirk, there’s an actual meat industry that causes actual harm and not buying meat has an economic impact; 2) it’s perfectly possible to refuse meat for ethical reasons without being repulsed by it; and 3) the only reasonable definition for a vegetarian is “someone who eats a plant-based diet”, rest is distraction. But unconditional revulsion really seems to be an accurate description of Yeong-hye, so I don’t even know if I should be annoyed on her behalf! Maybe she would be annoyed by my watered-down version, the need to quantify everything, while her point is much more compact. It’s wrong.
I’m not sure I can accurately communicate how alien and refreshing I find her character. I feel like I spend way too much time reassuring omnivores, when I could just glare at them instead. (Just this week, a new colleague brought snacks and I chose to skip the afternoon coffee break rather than having to introduce myself with a “sorry, I won’t eat it”.) But eh, I grew up in the corner of the internet that invented “for every animal you don’t eat, I eat three”, and I’m conflict-averse and like to overthink, so that’s the personality you get. Later on I found a corner that engages in thousands of words of discussion with titles such as “No true utilitarian would be vegan”. Maybe I have now found the seeds of the next stage of my evolution. I mean, not the part where she’s hospitalized, but the part where she’s not bending over backwards to avoid offending people with her preferences. She may be debilitatingly anxious about many things, but whether her diet is irrational is not one of them.
I don’t know—is it weird that Yeong-hye, of all possible characters in literature, is the one teaching me how to chill? I won’t promise that if you read this book, you’ll get these particular thoughts in your mind. But I believe that it will generate some thoughts, and they have a chance of being interesting, hence the recommendation.
If you disagree with me, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts. Send them to the universe, and who knows, maybe they will arrive to me in a dream.