Cursed Bunny: Stories

Content Warning: This section features discussion of gender discrimination, abortion, child loss, and death by suicide.

Chung’s collection exposes the intolerable pressure women face due to unreasonable, patriarchal expectations. As Chung’s stories show, these expectations aim to reduce women to objects whose only purpose is to produce and raise children, freeing men to increase their wealth and secure their individual legacies. The fact that the pressure to fulfill these expectations begins at home makes it increasingly difficult for women to exercise agency around their lives and, in particular, their bodies.

“The Head” announces this theme by highlighting the disparity between its central character’s reaction to the head and the reactions of those around her. The head continuously refers to the woman as its “mother,” forcing all the responsibility that comes with motherhood upon her. The woman struggles to disentangle herself from the head—and consequently, the role of motherhood—which was not something she consciously chose to create in her life. The head is composed of the woman’s toilet waste, suggesting that her basic bodily functions are something shameful for which she must answer. None of the people in her life understand the difficulty of this situation. The head does not bother them personally, so they encourage her simply to ignore it. In this way, the woman’s family members disregard and minimize her genuine distress, insisting that she go on meeting their needs as a wife and mother and refrain from bothering them with her complaints.

These ideas are reinforced in “The Embodiment,” where Young-lan’s imperative to find a father for her child prevents her from realizing what the fetus really needs to develop. When her obstetrician urges her to find a father, it reinforces the patriarchal expectation that women are incapable of accomplishing things on their own. Faced with the challenges of single parenthood, Young-lan is inclined to agree with the doctor’s reasoning until she realizes that no one actually wants to marry her with the sincere intention of sharing the responsibility for her child. Once her pregnancy becomes apparent to them, the men run away because none of them want to take up the responsibility of raising Young-lan’s child. Young-lan, on the other hand, has no choice because she is carrying the pregnancy. By the time she moves away from the patriarchal imperative to find a father and thinks instead about what her fetus needs to develop, it is already too late. Although she did not willingly choose to bear the pregnancy, she cannot help feeling the tragedy around losing her child.

In two other stories, patriarchal figures use social expectations to exert insidious forms of control over women. “The Frozen Finger” tells the story of a woman, Teacher Choi, whose husband has exploited her trust to commit infidelity, but the story’s framing treats the female affair partner as the villain. While the ghost of Teacher Choi exacts revenge against the woman who had an affair with her husband, the husband goes unpunished and almost unmentioned—as if male infidelity were simply a fact of nature for which only women can be held responsible. The voice chides Teacher Lee toward the end of the story for trusting her because she was kind—implying that Teacher Lee erred similarly in trusting the kindness of Teacher Choi’s husband. Similarly, “Snare” explores the dynamics of a family where the father enacts violence against his own daughter to increase his wealth. Despite the trader’s initial justification that fathers need to grow their wealth to support their family, the story reveals that this is all a front for the indulgence of his personal desires. The trader reduces his children into literal cash cows, ordering the abortion of their child to ensure his wealth source remains intact.

In Chung’s collection, tension arises from the antagonism the patriarchal forces within each story. The female characters are constantly told what they must do, even if those expectations are impossible to fulfill. These expectations only serve to undermine women and limit their agency in society.