The Cycle of Abandonment and the Refusal to Wait in Monika Kim's The Eyes Are the Best Part

The Thematic Claim: From Passive Waiting to Violent Rupture

In The Eyes Are the Best Part, Monika Kim builds a multigenerational portrait of women who wait for men to return—fathers, husbands, lovers—while the men leave, often without explanation. The novel’s central thematic claim is that this cycle of abandonment is not merely a personal misfortune but a learned inheritance, passed from mother to daughter through silence, superstition, and self-erasure. The protagonist, Ji-won, eventually refuses to wait. Her refusal is not a quiet rebellion but a violent rupture: she kills the men who threaten to abandon her family, and she plans to punish her father for the suffering he caused. Yet Kim complicates this break by showing that Ji-won’s violence is itself a form of abandonment—of her own humanity, of her sister’s innocence, and of any possibility of reconciliation. The cycle is not broken; it is transformed into a different kind of destruction.

Tracing the Cycle: Three Moments of Waiting and Refusal

1. Umma’s Childhood: Waiting as Survival

The earliest instance of the cycle appears in Umma’s account of her childhood in 1970s Korea. When her parents leave in the night to find work, they abandon their seven children. The eldest brother, Ha-joon, eventually decides to follow them, but Umma refuses to go. She stays alone in the tin house, eating snow and bark, waiting for her parents to return. When they finally do, she is frail and nearly dead. Her explanation for staying is telling: “They were my parents. I knew they were going to come back.” This is not a rational choice but a faith-based waiting, a belief that abandonment is temporary and that loyalty will be rewarded. The narrator, Ji-won, later reflects that this waiting defined her mother’s entire life: “Umma is someone who is used to waiting. In fact, she’s probably spent more of her life waiting than not.” This childhood episode establishes the pattern: women wait, men leave, and the waiting becomes a form of self-destruction.

2. Umma’s Marriage: Waiting for Appa and George

The cycle repeats in Umma’s adult relationships. After Appa leaves, Umma does not confront him or move on. Instead, she sets an extra place at dinner, cooks his favorite short ribs, and listens for his footsteps at the door. She even eats fish eyes, believing they bring luck that will make him return. The narrator observes her mother “hovering by the entrance of our apartment at all hours of the day, more ghost than human.” This waiting is not passive in the sense of doing nothing—Umma actively performs rituals—but it is passive in its refusal to accept reality. She waits for a man who has already left, and she waits for George, her next partner, in the same way. In chapter 52, she sits by the door making paper flowers, hoping they will bring George back, even as he drifts away. The narrator notes, “Funny how things never change. Here I am, wide awake. My mother is crying. And once again, she is powerless.” The cycle is so entrenched that Umma repeats it with each new man, never learning that waiting does not prevent abandonment.

3. Ji-won’s Refusal: Violence as a Break

Ji-won, the narrator, is the first to break the pattern, but not through patience or understanding. She watches her mother’s suffering and decides she will not wait. In chapter 32, she reflects on how to deal with men like George: “You have to pull the rug out from under him. Not all at once, of course; a small tug here, another one there.” She learns to manipulate, to lie, to make men feel foolish. This is a strategic refusal to wait—she takes action, but it is still reactive, still defined by the men she opposes. The true rupture comes when she kills George and Geoffrey. In chapter 72, after Geoffrey is arrested and George’s body is removed, Ji-won tells the police she was defending herself. But the reader knows she planned the violence. In chapter 73, she reflects that she is “neither” too weak like her mother nor too young like her sister, and she intends to visit Appa to punish him. She will not wait for justice; she will take it. This is the novel’s central rupture: Ji-won refuses to be a woman who waits, but her refusal is murderous.

Character and Symbol Connections

The theme is embodied in the contrast between Umma and Ji-won. Umma’s waiting is expressed through domestic rituals: setting a place at the table, folding paper flowers, eating fish eyes. These acts are attempts to control fate through superstition, but they only deepen her powerlessness. Ji-won, by contrast, uses a pocket knife as her tool of agency. The knife is a phallic symbol of violence, but Ji-won wields it to reject the passive femininity her mother embodies. The fish eyes that Umma eats for luck become a symbol of her futile waiting—she consumes the eyes of dead fish to bring back living men. Ji-won, however, sees the eyes as something else: in the opening chapter, she reflects that she once ate fish eagerly but now feels cruel about it. This shift signals her growing awareness of the violence inherent in consumption and waiting. The paper flowers that Umma makes for George are another symbol of waiting—delicate, handcrafted, and ultimately useless. Ji-won’s violence is the opposite: it is immediate, destructive, and irreversible.

The male characters—Appa, George, and Geoffrey—are all abandoners. Appa leaves for another woman; George drifts away and is killed; Geoffrey is a stalker who is arrested. None of them wait. They are the ones who leave, and they do so without remorse. Ji-won’s refusal to wait is a direct response to their behavior, but it also mirrors their callousness. She becomes the one who leaves—not physically, but morally—by killing them.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel does not present Ji-won’s violence as a simple liberation. Her refusal to wait is also a refusal to engage with grief, to process loss, or to allow for the possibility of change. She sabotages her friendships, as seen in chapter 19, where she hides behind a plant and then walks out on her friends who try to confront her. She is unable to wait for their forgiveness or to explain her actions. This suggests that her refusal to wait is not just about men but about all forms of patience, including the patience required for healing.

Moreover, Ji-won’s violence does not break the cycle; it repeats it in a different form. Umma waited for men who left; Ji-won kills men who leave. Both are responses to abandonment, but neither breaks the underlying pattern of women being defined by men’s actions. Ji-won’s plan to punish Appa in chapter 73 is still a reaction to him—she is still waiting, in a sense, for the moment when she can act. The cycle is not broken; it is inverted.

The novel also complicates the idea of waiting as purely passive. Umma’s waiting is active in its rituals, and it is a form of resistance to the reality of abandonment. She refuses to accept that her father, her husband, or George will not return. This refusal is tragic, but it is also a kind of stubborn hope. Ji-won’s violence, by contrast, is a rejection of hope altogether. She does not wait because she does not believe anything will improve. This is a darker form of despair, one that leads to murder.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Umma’s childhood experience of waiting shape her adult relationships?

Umma’s childhood taught her that waiting is a form of loyalty and that abandonment is temporary. She stayed alone in a tin house for months, believing her parents would return, and they did. This experience instilled in her a faith that men will come back if she waits long enough. In her marriage, she applies the same logic: she sets a place for Appa, eats fish eyes for luck, and hovers by the door. When he does not return, she transfers this waiting to George, making paper flowers to bring him back. Her childhood waiting is the template for her adult passivity.

2. What role do the fish eyes play in the theme of waiting?

The fish eyes are a symbol of Umma’s superstitious waiting. She eats them to bring good luck, specifically to make Appa return. In chapter 2, she rips an eye from a fish and eats it, despite her daughters’ horror, saying she needs all the luck she can get. The eyes are also a symbol of seeing—or refusing to see—the truth. Umma eats the eyes to avoid seeing that Appa is gone. Ji-won, by contrast, sees clearly: she knows her father will not return, and she refuses to eat the eyes. The fish eyes thus represent the difference between blind hope and clear-eyed violence.

3. How does Ji-won’s relationship with Geoffrey reflect her refusal to wait?

Geoffrey is a stalker who constantly calls and messages Ji-won. She does not wait for him to stop or for someone else to intervene. Instead, she manipulates him, leading him to believe she is interested, and then uses his obsession to her advantage. In chapter 72, she tells the police she called him to ask him to stop, but the reader knows she was setting a trap. Her refusal to wait is evident in her proactive manipulation—she does not passively endure his harassment; she turns it into a weapon. This is a direct contrast to Umma, who waits for George to come back rather than confronting him.

4. What is the significance of Ji-won’s plan to punish Appa in chapter 73?

Ji-won’s plan to visit Appa and punish him is the culmination of her refusal to wait. She will not wait for karma or justice; she will take it herself. This plan is also a rejection of her mother’s pattern—Umma waited for Appa to return, but Ji-won will go to him. However, the plan is also a continuation of the cycle: she is still defined by her father’s actions, and her violence is a reaction to his abandonment. The plan shows that Ji-won cannot escape the cycle; she can only invert it.

5. Does the novel suggest that breaking the cycle of abandonment is possible?

The novel is ambiguous. Ji-won’s violence breaks the pattern of passive waiting, but it does not lead to healing or resolution. She kills George and Geoffrey, and she plans to punish Appa, but she is left alone, having alienated her friends and possibly her sister. The cycle is broken in the sense that Ji-won no longer waits, but it is replaced by a cycle of violence and isolation. The novel suggests that breaking the cycle requires more than refusing to wait—it requires confronting the underlying pain and learning to live without the men who left. Ji-won does not achieve this; she only replaces waiting with killing.