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Jeong-dae
Jeong-mi is Jeong-dae’s sister. She and her brother rent out the annex in Dong-ho’s hanok. Jeong-mi is remarkably stubborn, bossing her brother around and pushing herself to her limits in factory work to fund his education. She is also pretty—Dong-ho harbors a secret crush on her—and prone to jokes, often delighting in Jeong-dae’s goofiest pranks. Though Jeong-mi has had to sacrifice her own education in order to finance her brother’s schooling, she dreams of being a doctor, an impossibility that still haunts her old friend Seon-ju many years after Jeong-mi’s death. Jeong-mi disappears in the early weeks of the Gwangju uprising. Years later, Dong-ho’s mother finds conclusive evidence that Jeong-mi was killed in the first round of state violence.
Jeong-mi Quotes in Human Acts
The Human Acts quotes below are all either spoken by Jeong-mi or refer to Jeong-mi. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 2: The Boy’s Friend, 1980 Quotes
Burning my tongue on a steamed potato my sister gave me, blowing on it hastily and juggling it in my mouth.
Flesh of a watermelon grainy as sugar, the glistening black seeds I didn’t bother to pick out.
Racing back to the house where my sister was waiting, my jacket zipped up over a parcel of chrysanthemum bread, feet entirely numb with cold, the bread blazing hot against my heart.
Yearning to be taller.
To be able to do forty push-ups in a row.
For the time when I would hold a woman in my arms.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
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Explanation and Analysis:
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Jeong-mi Character Timeline in Human Acts
The timeline below shows where the character Jeong-mi appears in Human Acts. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: The Boy, 1980
...in the dirt. Like Dong-ho, Jeong-dae is unusually small, so much so that his sister Jeong-mi is always trying to sneak extra milk to him. Jeong-dae hates studying, preferring to goof...
(full context)
...to the annex of his hanok (a traditional style of Korean home), where Jeong-dae and Jeong-mi have been staying. He recalls the day before, when Jeong-dae was in a panic, trying...
(full context)
Jeong-mi had lived in Dong-ho’s house for a year, but the two had never had a...
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Dong-ho was skeptical that Jeong-mi could keep her studies a secret, but he lent her his book anyway. That night,...
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Privately, Dong-ho wonders if the young girl’s body in the corner could be Jeong-mi. He has no evidence for this, but he wants to be able to prove that...
(full context)
Chapter 2: The Boy’s Friend, 1980
...sense who is still alive and who is dead—Dong-ho, he knows, is still alive. But Jeong-mi is dead, and the pain of that knowledge is so great that Jeong-dae screams, even...
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...sense of himself and his identity. He begins to feel rage, wondering why he and Jeong-mi have been so brutally murdered. Jeong-dae is desperate to find his sister, but he does...
(full context)
...stole a blackboard eraser from school and then left it on the windowsill to please Jeong-mi. Then, Jeong-dae recalls falling asleep next to his sister: how she would laugh as she...
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...dilated, frightened pupils and young faces. Jeong-dae wonders where to go. He wants to visit Jeong-mi, but he has no idea where her soul might be—though he hopes she is still...
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Instead, Jeong-mi decides to go visit “you,” meaning Dong-ho—he is certain Dong-ho will still be asleep in...
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Chapter 5: The Factory Girl, 2002
...doctor to arrive, she thinks back to her youth in Gwangju, to a friend named Jeong-mi who had wanted to be a doctor. Seon-ju knew Jeong-mi would never realize this—the factory...
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...aged by their years of arrest and torture. When they reunited, Seong-hee told Seon-ju that Jeong-mi, after protesting and being blacklisted from the factory, had disappeared. Now, Seon-ju struggles to remember...
(full context)
Chapter 6: The Boy’s Mother, 2010
Dong-ho’s mother blames herself for inviting Jeong-mi and Jeong-dae to live with them all those years ago. She had initially loved the...
(full context)
...laughing or playing badminton, and she forgives herself. For a moment, Dong-ho’s mother thinks of Jeong-mi: how pretty she was, and the sight of her walking across the courtyard “like the...
(full context)
