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Name: WONG Kwan Ting

Student ID: 54780109
Instructor’s name: Airlie Maria Heung
Tutorial Section: T01

Female Entrapment from The Vegetarian and Leng Lui is for Pretty Lady

Alina and Yeong-hye, the protagonists of Leng Lui is for Pretty Lady and The

Vegetarian demonstrated their entrapments and suppressions in their societies respectively.

Yet, there were some slight differences in what they experienced. Female entrapments could

refer to how women are jailed inside their stereotypical nature: to be obedient, quiet and

blindly accept what higher authority offers them. In the Asian patriarchal setting, women

were forced to go against their wills; hence their own ways to revolt were demonstrated in the

texts.

By comparing based on how the texts illustrated the vulnerability of women, the most

significant conflict between the male and female protagonists and the epiphanies of the

female characters, Elaine Chiew and Han Kang showed similarities in their perspectives of

women’s status. In short, the two texts shared more similarities than differences, but the

differences exist mainly due to the variance in the status and the psychology of the characters.

Chiew and Han depicted male-suppression-related themes in the texts: how Alina

developed her love-hate relationship towards the Kong family and the gradual development

of events leading to Yeong-hye’s ultimate disruption. Despite of the hostile relationship

between Alina and Mrs Kong, she came to realize that Mr Kong fantasized about her. On the

other hand, Han introduced the Yeong-hye’s dream scenes to commence the beginning of her

vegetarian nightmare, from the sexual assault of her husband to the force-feeding of her
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father. All these events contributed to why she lost her mind and committed suicide. As both

texts also looked into how female vulnerability give birth to growing power of hierarchy,

they shared many similarities in demonstrating the suppression of womanhood.

Although the two stories portrayed different styles of abusive suppression under

higher-power dominance: husband-wife and father-daughter in The Vegetarian and

employer-employee in Leng Lui is for Pretty Lady, there were more similarities shown in

how womanhood was demonstrated respectively.

In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye have been under her husband’s control, especially

since

he “needed this evening to go well” (Chiew 20) and avoid others’ humiliation. When Mr

Cheong and Yeong-hye went to a dinner with his superiors, he excused his wife’s vegetarian

behavior by blaming on a fake stomach flu. Besides, he treated his wife as an artifact - a tool

to be used in a special occasion. Yeong-hye’s father was shown to have the supreme

domination in the family hierarchy when Yeong-hye refused to eat meat during dinner. Her

mother showed her obedience when she asked Yeong-hye to “listen to what your father’s

telling you and eat” (Han 38). Her sister In-hye questioned her rhetorically if it was necessary

to “make such a thing about it in front of Father” (Han 39) and asked her sister to “behave”,

depicting the typical Asian family criteria of misbehaving - going against the father’s will.

Similarly, Alina was used as a substitute for Mrs Kong such that Mr Kong had

someone to accept his nowhere-to-go love. Mr Kong confessed his love to Alina and

manipulated the possibility of Alina not going against him for the fear of being fired. Alina

was forced to make “the choice between mute submission or getting fired” (Chiew 17). Both
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Mr Cheong and Mr Kong took advantage over the vulnerability of women to achieve and

fulfill men’s wants and desires. Allowing male to commit selfish acts plus reflecting the

patriarchy in societies of the two texts were the greatest similarity, yet the difference was

built-in relationship of the male character and the female protagonist. Due to such difference,

the emphasis on hierarchy society or family style was illustrated with a slight difference in

cause-and-effect. For example, if Yeong-hye were the employee of Mr Cheong, it was

doubted whether she would dare to throw away all the meat products in the refrigerator.

Therefore, both texts showed clearly the vulnerability of women through the experiences of

the protagonists with different identities.

The female protagonists of The Vegetarian and Leng Lui is for Pretty Lady both

reacted with self-defense when they faced their paradoxes. Yeong-hye in The Vegetarian

faced her climax when her father force-fed the piece of meat into her mouth. And soon after

she spat it out, she threatened the family with her death wish. As for Alina, she chose to go

against Mr Kong who wanted to start an affair with her. By physically attacking Mr Kong,

Alina gained the opportunity to escape from the “Stuckey” situation. The options chosen by

the protagonists may be different, however, Yeong-hye and Alina chose their most revolting

move, to protest against the wrong-doing that others laid on them.

Surprisingly, when the stories came to their resolutions, the protagonists

reached their different epiphanies, which was the greatest difference between both texts.

While Alina discovered that she was the “jigsaw piece holding her family together” (Chiew

18), Yeong-hye committed suicide in the hospital garden. For Yeong-hye, her suicidal act

was anti-heroic since she liberated herself via death. This oxymoronic ending portrayed

Yeong-hye’s melancholic victory. One of the possible reasons could be that she was not able
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to find a way to make others understand with sanity. The bird which Yeong-hye had “crushed

in her grip” (Han 52) with “predator’s bite” could be a metaphor of Yeong-hye herself: with a

higher power in the hierarchy, one could kill a woman with less power or a say in anything.

In other words, the patriarchal society killed Yeong-hye, as easy as killing a bird in such a

minor size. Compared to the paradoxical ending in The Vegetarian, Alina did not set herself

free from the Kong’s family. Yet she attained a kind of self-discovery of her importance in

her employer’s family. Alina felt “bitterness, sudden, piercing” (Chiew 18) after leaving the

cell, without any sense of gratefulness to towards Mrs Kong; she discovered that “Mrs

Kong’s so lost without her”. Seemingly as a happy ending it was, the irony was having an

outsider to become a vital member in the family. Undoubtedly, their epiphanies were very

different between having a pessimistic or a rather reflective ending.

Female entrapment was common in a patriarchal society, which was clearly expressed

in both stories. Few differences were found between the description of Chiew and Han, but

the theme of suppression is outlined and highlighted in both texts. Hence this contributed to

why both texts had shown similarities in illustrating the vulnerability of women and the

explosion of the protagonists’ acts of protest. With different endings, the protagonists were

able to have their individualistic decisions. Whether their “battle” has won, it would be a

rather subjective view when one discussed about female entrapment. (1094 words)

Works Cited
Chiew, Elaine. One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories "Leng Lui is for Pretty
Lady". N.p.: New Internationalist, 2009. Print.
Han, Kang. The Vegetarian. London: Portobello , 2015. Print.