Have You Watched Me, Mother-in-Law, to Know Whether I Serve My Role as a Man?
"Kim, you've been pulled off the project task force."
It was a Monday morning. No sooner had I arrived at the office than Team Leader Park called me over and delivered the news without a flicker of expression.
"I'm sorry? You told me to submit a proposal, so I spent the whole weekend working on it."
"Ah, that. There's been a reshuffle from upstairs. My apologies."
He said he was sorry, but there wasn't a shred of regret on his face. He didn't even meet my eyes.
Then again, I supposed it wasn't really his fault.
I knew exactly where the reshuffle "from upstairs" had come down from.
It had happened countless times already. The moment it looked like I might actually produce results, a call would come in from somewhere, and within a day my name would vanish from the list.
Once, I had been invited to an inter-affiliate collaboration meeting—only because there was no one else available, and the opportunity had rolled, by sheer accident, to me.
I raised a point there about a facilities procurement contract. The unit price quoted by a particular supplier looked inflated, I said—why not put it out to competitive bidding?
It was common sense, and the reaction was quite favorable. A few executives even nodded along.
That evening, Team Leader Park summoned me.
"Kim. Don't attend any more meetings with the other affiliates."
"...May I ask why?"
"Orders from above. They said it's overstepping for someone at a manager rank to be speaking up."
A manager's opinion counted as overstepping? There had been assistant managers in that meeting who ranked below me.
There was no other conclusion to draw. I was being deliberately shut out.
I knew what they called a case like mine in the Group.
Desk-clearing.
When there's a full-time employee you want gone, you give them no work and erase their existence.
You make them endure it until they resign on their own. Firing someone outright creates legal headaches, after all.
The Chairman was doing exactly that to his own son-in-law.
The only problem was that what he wanted from me wasn't a resignation. It was a divorce.
And one thing more.
He couldn't exactly parade the Chairman's son-in-law out onto the open floor, so instead, he gave me a room.
The room at the end of the hall, next to the emergency stairs. Leftover space from an executive reception room that had been carved up in a remodeling years ago.
It had a window, technically—all it showed was the wall of the building behind us.
One desk. One chair. A leather sofa left behind by my predecessor.
On paper, it looked like this: a mere manager, granted his own private office. How magnanimous of them.
The people in the company called that room the Prince Consort's Room. The office where the princess's husband worked.
The Chairman and his wife despise their son-in-law.
That rumor had spread like wildfire through every corner of SG Group.
And how could it be otherwise? They kept their only son-in-law buried at the bottom rung of the Group as a manager? In a normal chaebol family, such a thing was unthinkable.
The Chairman and his wife didn't bother hiding their contempt for me even in public.
Once, I ran into my father-in-law in the headquarters lobby. Three or four affiliate executives were standing beside him.
I bowed politely.
"Good morning, Chairman."
My father-in-law gave me a sidelong glance, then spoke to the executives next to him.
"That young man there is Soo-bin's husband. Two years at manager now, with not the slightest sign of moving up. I suppose the manager rank suits him."
At the Chairman's booming laugh, the executives chuckled awkwardly along.
No one defended me. Naturally. Who would dare, in front of the Chairman?
Another time, it was the dinner banquet at a Group-wide workshop.
My mother-in-law was in attendance, and she said this to the table:
"I hear my son-in-law is doing big things at the company. What those things are, I couldn't tell you—he's so quiet. The man has no presence at all."
She said it with a smile.
But anyone seated at that table knew. It was no compliment.
The fact that Kim Hyun-tae, manager at SG Group, did nothing at all was an open secret throughout the company.
After that, no one even tried to hand me work anymore.
The moment I produced the smallest achievement, the Chairman himself would step in and find fault with it. Who in their right mind would assign anything to a son-in-law like that?
I became a man who commuted every day to the Prince Consort's Room, stared at a blank monitor, and went home.
And I couldn't quit. If I resigned, I'd walk straight into the divorce my father-in-law had planned for me.
Enduring at the company.
That was the only way I could stay by Soo-bin's side.
"Hyung. Take a look at this for me."
The moment lunch hour ended, the door to the Prince Consort's Room swung open. No knock.
Yoon Tae-joon, the Chairman's heir and my brother-in-law, dropped a thick stack of documents onto my desk.
Yoon Tae-joon, Department Head of the Strategic Planning Office at SG Group. Twenty-five years old. My wife's younger brother.
A twenty-five-year-old made Department Head in his first year. Absurd on its face—but possible if you were the Chairman's son.
US citizenship, an overseas degree, the full study-abroad package. He'd never served a day in the military.
While some of us had come in through open recruitment and spent two years rotting at the bottom as a manager. What a fair world it was.
"This came up from the Logistics Business Division, but the numbers don't add up. Have it cleaned up by tomorrow morning."
"Wouldn't it be faster to check directly with whoever's in charge of it?"
"You've got nothing but free time anyway, hyung."
Not free—denied work. But there was a difference.
My brother-in-law didn't know the difference. Or maybe he did, and simply didn't care.
"...Fine."
I took the documents.
Arguing with him here would get me nothing.
Tae-joon left without a word of thanks, the door hanging wide open behind him.
I spread the papers across my desk.
It wasn't that the numbers didn't add up—it was a complete mess.
The subsidiary schedules didn't reconcile with the total in the body of the report, the depreciation standards varied from table to table, and the delivery unit prices had no supporting documentation whatsoever.
And this came from the Logistics Business Division? What the hell is the Division Head even doing over there?
...But that wasn't my fight to pick.
I was just the brother-in-law doing his homework for him. That was all.
My one pillar in that house was my wife, Yoon Soo-bin.
I'll be honest.
I was never a particularly decent man to begin with.
Not handsome, but I had a silver tongue, and I had a knack for reading a room.
After joining the conglomerate, I stayed on friendly terms with all the women in the office, testing the waters whenever the chance arose. That was the kind of man I was. Not something to be proud of.
Yoon Soo-bin had been one of the women I'd cast my line at back then.
A new hire assigned to the Management Support Team as an incoming junior employee.
Bright. Innocent. Beautiful.
I bought her lunch, helped her with her work, took her out for the occasional drink between just the two of us.
One thing led to another down that road, and eventually we ended up in bed together.
And immediately afterward, I found out. Yoon Soo-bin was the daughter of Yoon Jae-hyun, Chairman of SG Group.
So the legend was real: the Chairman's daughter, hired as an entry-level employee under a hidden identity.
Naturally, I tried to end things with Soo-bin. If it got out that I'd touched the Chairman's daughter, I wouldn't just be fired—I might end up buried somewhere. Physically.
To me, Soo-bin had just been one woman among the many in the office. I felt no particular attachment.
The problem was Soo-bin.
She swore she would die before letting me go. To her, I was her first love and her last.
"I can't live without you, oppa. If you try to break up, I'll tell my dad everything. And if you still try to break up, I'll kill myself."
I'd dated plenty of women, but I'd never met one this obsessive. What happens when a menhera gets money and power behind her? Yoon Soo-bin was the answer—
the final fate of a man who had carelessly toyed with this woman and that woman without ever thinking ahead.
So, swept along by Soo-bin's stubbornness, I went as far as the formal meeting between our families, and pushing through the furious opposition of the Chairman and his wife, we got married.
That was why they hated me. I was the street rat who dared lay a hand on the daughter they'd raised like a jewel in silk. Honestly, they weren't wrong.
Still, the early years of our marriage weren't bad. Even if it had been a half-forced marriage, the fact that a woman truly loved me—and the Chairman's daughter, no less—puffed up my shoulders with pride.
No matter how harshly my in-laws nagged me, as long as Soo-bin stood on my side, I could endure it.
Even despised at the office, I'd come home to Soo-bin's smile. The petty jealousies of the other employees weren't even worth a thought.
But then, at some point, Soo-bin changed.
She came home late every single day.
Pilates on Mondays. Her older friends' gathering on Tuesdays. The hospital on Wednesdays. Pilates again on Thursdays. Preparations for a charity gala on Fridays.
The excuses changed every time, but the result was always the same.
Ten o'clock. Eleven o'clock. Nine, if I was lucky. Past midnight, if I wasn't.
"Soo-bin. Let's have dinner together tonight."
"Oh, sorry. I've got plans with the girls. I'll be late, so just go to sleep first."
"...Sure."
Dinners without Soo-bin. Dinners shared with my father-in-law and mother-in-law were a bed of nails.
Little by little, I couldn't take it anymore.
I held on to my wife and asked her. What kind of hospital did she go to every single week?
A women's clinic, she said. When I asked what was wrong, she said it was a routine checkup.
I wanted to press her—who on earth gets a routine checkup every week?—but I held my tongue. A man interrogating a woman about her body was a pathetic sight.
The Pilates was strange too.
Soo-bin had never cared about exercise in her life. A woman who once wouldn't walk ten minutes, suddenly doing Pilates twice a week?
Our nights together dwindled, too.
Dwindled was the wrong word. They all but vanished.
Coming home late, Soo-bin would shower, wrap herself in the blanket, and turn her back to me the moment she hit the bed.
If I was still awake, still waiting, a single mumbled "I'm tired tonight" ended the conversation.
"I'm just really tired today."
"...Okay."
Nothing wounds a man's pride like clinging to a woman who doesn't want him.
And if that woman was his own wife, the heartbreak multiplied a hundredfold. I learned that only after I was married.
The first time, I figured that was just how it was.
The second time, I figured she wasn't feeling well.
The third. The fourth. The fifth.
When the rejections pile up, a man starts thinking certain thoughts.
Is something wrong with me?
Or—is there another man now, one who isn't me?
Before the wedding, she'd acted like she couldn't live without me.
It wasn't that Soo-bin had no appetite. Nobody knew that better than I did.
So her avoiding me like this meant something.
Doubt is poison. Once you take it in, everything starts to look like evidence.
Coming home late every night. Avoiding my bed. The sudden exercise. The weekly hospital visits.
Examined one by one, each had a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Health management, of course. Building stamina. Meeting friends.
But too many things had changed all at once for me to swallow those "reasonable explanations" whole.
An invisible man at the office.
An invisible man at home.
And now even the wife—my one pillar—was drifting away.
In a world that shrank around me by the day, I was slowly suffocating.
And then came the day it all began.
It was a Friday evening.
My father-in-law was away on a business trip to Busan.
"I'm sleeping over at Soo-hyun's place tonight."
Soo-bin said it while getting ready to go out.
Coming home late was routine, but actually staying out overnight was rare.
"Staying out? All of a sudden?"
"Unnie moved to a new place. She said it's a housewarming—I'll just crash there. Why?"
"No... it's nothing."
I didn't ask anything more.
If I showed suspicion, I'd be the petty, small-hearted husband. I had my flimsy pride too.
That night.
After seeing Soo-bin off.
My mother-in-law happened to be alone in the living room, nursing a glass of wine.
She often drank alone, but tonight the atmosphere was different.
The lights were dimmed low, the TV turned off. She was dressed in light sleepwear.
She looked like an actress straight out of a film. And in truth, she had been one.
Han Seo-young. Forty-six.
The teen actress who'd debuted in her teens and shaken all of South Korea.
Her prime had been devastatingly short. The moment she turned twenty, she'd married a chaebol heir in a shotgun wedding and retired.
It was impossible to believe she was forty-six.
Partly meticulous self-care—but mostly, that was simply the face she'd been born with.
"...Mother. Good night."
I tried to cross the living room and slip into my room.
Every encounter with my mother-in-law ended in a scolding, so I wanted to escape as fast as possible.
"Kim Seobang."
But she called out to me.
"Yes?"
"Have a chat with me. Sit down."
No good had ever come of my mother-in-law wanting to "have a chat."
"I'm a bit tired, so..."
"Sit when you're told to sit."
"Yes, ma'am."
I sat down on the sofa across from her.
My mother-in-law took out another empty wine glass and set it in front of me.
"Have a drink."
"I, um, I don't really..."
"A son-in-law can't share one glass of wine with his mother-in-law?"
There was no excuse for refusing.
I lifted the glass. The wine she poured carried a heavy, heady alcohol scent.
"Soo-bin's out again?"
"Yes. She said she's sleeping over at a friend's place..."
"Every other night these days, it seems. What on earth does that girl get up to out there?"
I had no answer to give.
So my mother-in-law had been watching Soo-bin's frequent absences too.
"Kim Seobang."
"Yes."
"Things aren't going well between you and Soo-bin lately, are they?"
I swallowed a mouthful of wine. I needed time to choose my answer.
"No... we're fine."
"Liar."
My mother-in-law cut straight through it.
"If things were fine, would she be running off like that? A married woman, every single day? She has a grievance against her husband, doesn't she? That's why she does it."
"That's..."
"I know because I'm a woman. A woman who's satisfied with her husband never leaves the house empty like that."
Every word out of my mother-in-law's mouth drove another nail into my chest.
It was a thought I'd had alone hundreds of times. Hearing it from her lips left me gasping for air.
"Could it be that you're... lacking in some way, as a man?"
"...I'm not sure I follow."
"I mean—seeing Soo-bin run around out there like that, I can't help wondering if there's a problem in that department. You two have been awfully quiet at night lately, too."
A problem in that department.
There was no pretending I didn't understand.
"......There is no such problem."
"Really?"
"Really."
My voice had gone stiff and hard.
Over the rim of her wine glass, my mother-in-law studied my reaction.
"Don't take it so personally. I'm asking as a parent—I'm worried. There's been no news of grandchildren, either. They say plenty of young men these days have that kind of trouble."
"I don't have that kind of trouble."
"Yes, yes. Of course."
My mother-in-law laughed lightly and refilled her glass.
But the conversation didn't end there.
"No problem, and yet your wife still empties the house? Isn't that worse? Husband's perfectly healthy, and the wife simply doesn't want him—that's what you're telling me, isn't it?"
"......"
"I don't mean it badly. Buuut—when a man can't earn money, and just cowers around the household watching everyone's faces, well. From a woman's standpoint, he's not exactly attractive. Honestly, Kim Seobang, you don't actually do anything at the company, do you? Two years stuck at manager. When a man has no ability, he starts to look unattractive too. It means you can't fulfill your role as a man."
My hand tightened around the wine glass.
"Your father-in-law was already running an entire affiliate at your age. Tae-joon has already started his lessons in succession. And you, Kim Seobang—two years, and you haven't moved an inch. So it's no wonder Soo-bin runs out and—"
"That's enough, Mother."
The hard voice burst out of me before I knew it.
My mother-in-law stopped mid-sentence.
"I will handle Soo-bin myself. So... stay out of matters between me and my wife."
My voice was low, but my fingertips were trembling.
My mother-in-law's expression changed.
A crack ran through that haughty face that had been so elegantly tipping its wine glass.
"Are you talking back to me? To the elder of this family?"
"Yes. Mother-in-law or not, there are things one may say, and things one may not."
"What did you say?"
Her eyes turned colder still.
"A man who can't even manage one woman dares to lecture me?"
SPLASH!
My mother-in-law flung the wine left in her glass into my face.
With the wine dripping down my skin, my emotions settled into an icy calm.
But the words that followed lit the fire all over again.
"Can't even do one thing right as a man."
Can't even do one thing right as a man.
I—Kim Hyun-tae—had gone my whole life without ever once being treated as a man who couldn't fulfill his role.
That single remark set off everything that had been piling up inside me.
"...Have you watched me, Mother, to know whether I serve my role as a man or not?"
"I don't need to watch to know. One look at Soo-bin running out the door is enough."
"And what about you, Mother? Does Father-in-law serve his role as a man well?"
"...What did you say?"
"I'm asking whether, for all the way you bark at me, your husband treats you right in bed every night."
Two years living under this roof had taught me things.
That my father-in-law and mother-in-law were not close. That my father-in-law almost never came home. That the couple slept in separate rooms. That in this enormous house, my mother-in-law spent every single night alone.
"Well? You can't answer, can you. Unlike Soo-bin, who only stays out once in a while, Father-in-law spends practically every night away from home."
"Y-you—how dare—"
"Isn't it the truth that you're the one failing at your role as a woman? That's why Father-in-law runs around outside every day, isn't it? It seems to me, Mother, that you ought to worry about yourself before you worry about me. Or is venting on me just a symptom of that, too?"
My mother-in-law's eyes flew wide open.