# Chapter 17: The Girl Who Cut Through Silence
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 17 of *Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook*. This is a chapter that begins in whispers, tightens like a wire around the heart, and then cuts deep—literally. It is a chapter about humiliation, desperation, sacrifice, and the dangerous moment when a girl stops waiting to be seen and decides to make the world see her. So pour yourself something warm, settle in, and let’s walk through it together.
Young-Ja had not lost her purpose. Even as she moved through Feng-huang like a shadow in silk, serving tea and smiling at men whose hands were stained with the suffering of her people, she remembered everything. She watched. She listened. She stored every detail away like a coin meant for a future debt. Her mistress, Feng-nüshi, would know what could be used. Feng-nüshi always knew. And Young-Ja was eager to learn that same cold, patient discernment—the ability to see what men hid behind their laughter, their appetites, their careless words. Beneath it all, her grief had hardened into something more dangerous than sorrow. If death ever came to reunite her with her family, she would not go quietly. She would not join them without dragging a few soldiers down beside her.
That night, after her shift ended, Young-Ja climbed the stairs toward Feng-nüshi’s office. But before she reached the closed door, she found a huddle of servers whispering conspiratorially outside. Their faces were bright with gossip and unease.
“What’s going on?” Young-Ja asked.
“Bailong is here.”
Young-Ja straightened her back and slid past the older sisters to reach the door. She put her ear to the wood. “That can’t be him. There’s shouting.”
“It’s him. We saw him walk in not long ago,” said one of the servers.
“He didn’t even say hello to any of us,” said another, crossing her arms.
Whispers swelled in the corridor as the women speculated on the nature of the quarrel. Had anyone ever shouted at Feng-nüshi before? Wasn’t Bailong frightened of what she would do? Young-Ja waved her hand at the others to be quiet and pressed her ear harder against the office door. She closed her eyes to decipher the wood-dampened sounds on the other side.
“No, Bailong. You’ve lost men three times in the last month. We have to wait.”
“We’re wasting time! You cannot deny me these leads. We’re barely making a dent as it is.”
“It’s too risky now. One wrong move and you’ll bring this house down with you. Know your place.”
“You think the Imperial Army won’t bring you down just as well? We have to go bigger—nothing we’ve done has been enough!”
“No. You’ll continue to get nothing from me if you keep showing poor judgment. And don’t think I don’t know about your new little habit.”
The thumping of footsteps drew nearer, and Young-Ja backed away from the door. Bailong barged out of the office. The gathered servers yelped and cleared a path for his angry strides. Young-Ja chased after him to the staircase.
“Mr. Baek, a moment, please.”
Yong-Woo did not turn, continuing down the steps.
“Mr. Baek!”
“What do you want?” He whipped around and stared up at her.
Young-Ja startled at his sharp tone, at the dark circles under his eyes. She grabbed the banister for support. “I want to help you.”
“Help me with what?” He glared, unblinking.
“Your… well, I—” Young-Ja stammered. She had not presumed to know exactly how Yong-Woo would react, but hostility was surprising—he had never taken such ire with her before. “I’m a server now. I can help you get information on the Kantō-gun.”
“What information could you possibly have for me?”
“I thought… you see, I—”
Yong-Woo narrowed his eyes. “We are at war. You are just a girl who pours tea for men. Nothing you do will make a difference. Know your place.”
A chill displaced the color from Young-Ja’s face.
“But… you brought me here for a reason. To do something,” she said, her voice small.
Yong-Woo let out an exasperated sigh. “Your mistress would think you a fool for looking to me like this. If you can’t find your own reasons for being here, then you really are nothing but a silly teahouse girl.”
When he saw that she had no reply, he disappeared down the stairs.
Young-Ja stood numb for some time, clutching the banister so hard her knuckles blanched. The darkness that marred Baek Yong-Woo’s face made him a stranger to her, no longer the man she had always looked to as a beacon of protection. She told herself that the stresses of his missions must have come to a head—he could not have meant what he said. When other girls walked by with concern on their brows, Young-Ja assured them she was fine and hurried downstairs, away from Feng-nüshi’s office. All the observations she had been so eager to report now seemed immaterial. Not worth her mistress’s time. She ran out into the night and toward the alley by the teahouse. Halting at a dark corner of the building free from prying eyes, Young-Ja crouched down and set her forehead on her knees, Yong-Woo’s words echoing in her head.
Did he still see her as the frightened little girl he’d brought to the teahouse five years ago? A naïve child who had lost everything and knew nothing of the world? Tears welled in Young-Ja’s eyes. She did not like thinking back to those miserable early days trapped in the storage room with all that rotted cheong. Perhaps Yong-Woo was right. She was just a silly teahouse girl. It had taken her so long to gain her footing at Feng-huang, to learn Chinese, to win the favor of the other women. It had taken her even longer to grasp what he and Feng-nüshi strove to do. And while she now toiled hard every day in that same pursuit, driven by thoughts of her lost family, she had accomplished nothing.
Tear drops darkened the fabric of her qipao. Yong-Woo may think she had little to show for her time in the teahouse. But Young-Ja pictured the men sitting inside, laughing with shoulders unweighted by fear, lounging without remorse. Determination still burned inside her and she would not give up on finding their weaknesses. Yong-Woo underestimated her. She knew in her absolute core that she could help, if only he knew how she felt.
If only.
Young-Ja raised her head from her knees.
She knew exactly how to show him what she felt.
How to show him her usefulness.
How had she not thought of it before?
“Joseon kkachi, is that you?”
Tayiji approached her, arm hooked around a tall woman with gray streaks in her bun. Young-Ja recognized her as the beautiful yanhua who had greeted her the day she delivered Feng-nüshi’s message to Tayiji. They appeared to be heading home from their evening in the teahouse pavilion.
“What are you doing out here in the dark?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
Young-Ja swiped her palms across her eyes and stood up to straighten out her qipao. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“What’s upset you? Anything we can do?”
“No, no, I’ll be all right. Please don’t trouble yourselves on my account.” Young-Ja tried to force a polite smile but could not suppress a sniffle to keep her nose from running.
“Hmm.” Tayiji cocked his head and grinned. “What is it they say in Joseon again? ‘If you laugh while you’re crying, you’ll grow hair on your ass’?”
Young-Ja laughed and wiped away the tears pooled at her chin. “Who taught you that?”
“Someone with a hairy ass, probably,” he said, winking. He leaned closer. “Just say the word and you can come with me. Leave here whenever you want. I certainly would never wish to make you cry.”
Young-Ja met Tayiji’s warm gaze. He had always been kind to her. She briefly wondered what it would be like to enjoy the finery of the blue-roofed mansion and hide away in its hazy rooms. To walk into Feng-huang on Tayiji’s arm as a customer to be served. But she did not entertain the thought for long.
“Thank you, but my place is here. There’s work for me to do.”
“As you wish. Cheer up, little kkachi—it pains me to see you so.”
The yanhua by Tayiji’s side leaned in and kissed Young-Ja’s cheek. The scent of jasmine enveloped her as if with a gentle caress. “Good night, little one,” the woman said.
The color returned to Young-Ja’s face and she watched the two guests depart, laughing softly with each other as they strolled down the street. She dusted herself off, wiped her face with the skirt of her qipao, and walked back into the teahouse. There was work to do.
Young-Ja resumed her duties the following day as usual. She was no less diligent in monitoring her guests while still finding time to laugh with Meiyu and the other girls in passing. But she quietly slipped coins to the greeters and a few of the kitchen girls, requesting they alert her as soon as they next saw Bailong. Young-Ja did not expect he would come back to Feng-huang for a while yet, but privately steeled herself for his return every day. Her wait lasted one month.
When Young-Ja entered the kitchen to retrieve an order one spring evening, two girls in gray tunics scurried up to whisper that Bailong had arrived through the back kitchen entrance. Young-Ja smiled and promised to give the girls an extra tip later that evening. She flagged Meiyu to take over her tables—all questions to be answered later—and ran into the storage room, where she had set aside a large jar, a knife, salt, honey, and a pile of kumquats she had paid the cook to retrieve for her at the market.
Young-Ja laid out the materials on the low table. Countless times she had shed her lonely tears in this room, fearing the day someone might discover that her cheong was tainted and cast her out. As a child she could not see beyond her own woes and had not understood why Feng-nüshi tormented her so with honeyed fruits. Even now, Young-Ja could only imagine where her cheong would have been taken, who might have consumed those many hundreds of jars. But the manipulations of the past did not matter now. She was resolved only to see the current moment through.
Young-Ja made quick work of paring the kumquats in half. She raced against the urgency of her task, not knowing how long Baek Yong-Woo would linger at the teahouse this time. When the storage room filled with the scent of freshly cut citrus, she took a deep breath, laid her left hand on a linen on the table, and plunged her knife in between the tendons of her hand until its point lodged firmly into the wood below.
Young-Ja cried out at the fierce pain radiating through her left hand and up her arm. She gritted her teeth through the agony and scooped the kumquat halves into the jar with her free hand, taking care not to let her blood or tears touch the fruits. When the pain started to dull, she clawed at the salt in a bowl and packed it into the slit of cut flesh where the knife remained embedded. Searing heat burst through the left side of her body as she poured honey over the kumquat slices. Dizzy and panting, Young-Ja worked nimbly despite having use of only a single hand. By the time her blood slid down the table and splattered on the stone floor, Young-Ja had removed the knife, wrapped her hand in a fresh cloth, and exited the storage room with a jar of honeyed kumquats clutched at her side.
Young-Ja ignored the other servers’ concerned questions at her appearance as she hastened up the stairs to Feng-nüshi’s office. She strode past the usual line of women in red waiting for their audience with their mistress and pushed open the door to the smoky room. Feng-nüshi and Baek Yong-Woo snapped up at the intrusion as Young-Ja marched up to them and set the jar of kumquats on Feng-nüshi’s desk. The room stilled when she raised her arm to display her bleeding hand. Feng-nüshi recovered first.
“What is this—did you put her up to this?” she said, glaring at Yong-Woo.
“We agreed to stop with the cheong—”
“No one told me to make this,” said Young-Ja. “It was my idea. I want to help.”
Feng-nüshi’s eyes jumped from the bloody cloth around Young-Ja’s hand to the golden jar on her desk. She set down her long silver tobacco pipe and stood.
“What have you done, child?”
She dipped a pinky into the honey and dabbed the sticky residue on her tongue. The old woman crumpled onto her forearms against her desk and groaned. Yong-Woo rushed to her side and tried to catch her from collapsing on the floor. Feng-nüshi looked up at Young-Ja, shock twisted into her pained grimace.
“I want to help,” said Young-Ja.
“We stopped using your cheong years ago,” said Feng-nüshi, breath heavy. “It’s too troublesome to transport and not always quite so precise in its effects. Difficult to find access points to use it too.”
“I’m sure Bailong will find a way,” replied Young-Ja, locking eyes with the man. Blood trickled down her wrist from the saturated bandage.
Feng-nüshi exhaled sharply as she pushed up from the desk and steadied herself back on her feet. “Go see to your wound. What you’ve done is reckless—you won’t be able to work the tea room until you’ve recovered.”
Yong-Woo sealed the jar and pulled it to his side.
“Bailong,” said the old woman, voice stern, “we agreed no more cheong. It’s not sustainable.”
“But this batch shouldn’t be discarded, I’m sure you’ll agree,” he said. Yong-Woo and Feng-nüshi stared at each other in silence until she reached down for her silver pipe and put it to her lips.
“If you have ideas, I won’t stop you. But she is not to make any more. I forbid it.” She blew out a long plume of smoke.
Yong-Woo nodded and walked toward the exit with the jar in hand. He stopped by Young-Ja’s side and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Let it ferment for a month before you use it,” Young-Ja instructed in Korean. “It’ll be easier to slip into food, water, whatever is best.”
He replied, also in Korean, “Your contribution won’t go to waste.” Yong-Woo turned, offered a slight nod to Feng-nüshi, and hurried out the door.
Feng-nüshi ordered the women pretending not to eavesdrop outside her office to take Young-Ja down to the dorms. By the time Young-Ja was seated at her bed, word had spread among all the teahouse staff about what had transpired. It was not long before Meiyu came running up to her friend in panicked tears and shooed the others away.
“You idiot, are you crazy? Oh, it must hurt so much! What has gotten into you? You poor thing!”
Young-Ja reminded Meiyu to breathe. She watched with calm as her teary friend hurried to gather the necessary medical supplies from the cabinet in their dorm.
“Ooh, if I have to work shifts with that snooty Qizhen because you’re out, I’m going to kill you!” Meiyu plopped down by Young-Ja to clean the angry wound in her hand. Once seated, she seemed to pick up that Young-Ja was in no mood to talk and so held her tongue while she worked. But quiet was not Meiyu’s natural inclination; she began to hum softly as she layered the healing balm of honey on the gash and wrapped her friend’s hand tight with a clean cloth bandage. Young-Ja closed her eyes, letting her breath fall in time with the melody.
“My sister, Young-Sook, used to sing to me when I got hurt,” she said in Korean. “She’d fix me up just like this if our Uhmuhni wasn’t around to do it.”
Meiyu stopped humming and looked up from her task. Young-Ja had never mentioned a sister or mother before. She kept silent as Young-Ja continued to speak about her crooked-nosed father’s comforting hugs, the clever mother to whom she could never lie, the sister and brother for whom she loved to cook. When she had finished recounting their lives and what became of them, speaking aloud for the first time of that sunny morning in the yard, they wept. Meiyu moved her friend’s bandaged hand aside so that the tears they shed would not ruin its fresh cloth, hugging Young-Ja to her chest as they lay down to sleep.
Young-Ja lay awake in the dark, soothed by the gentle rhythm of Meiyu’s breathing. Even if she accomplished nothing at the teahouse, even if her family was now a collection of fading memories, she knew she could always find comfort in Meiyu’s arms.
From that night on, Meiyu asked greeters not to seat Japanese soldiers in her section. She ran upstairs every hour during her shifts to look after Young-Ja in the dorms, refreshing bandages as needed and checking that the stitches Feng-nüshi’s physician had eventually sewn in did not lead to infection. Young-Ja was not permitted on the Feng-huang floor again until the tendons in her hand had healed enough to carry a filled teapot unaided, though her left hand never regained the dexterity of the right. Feng-nüshi threatened to kick her out if she harmed herself again, claiming that the fantasy of server perfection would be ruined if she had visible blemishes. Young-Ja accepted whatever sliver of protective concern was veiled in the threat and took to wearing delicate silk gloves to hide her scar. Although it was not her intent, her gloves possessed such stylish flair that other servers also opted to don them to improve their allure.
The next time she saw Baek Yong-Woo heading up to clash with Feng-nüshi, he greeted Young-Ja with a slight bow of the head. Unease persisted in his increasingly sunken eyes, but never again did she see herself reflected there as a silly teahouse girl.
Xinjing, Manchukuo, Empire of Japan, 1941
“I’ve bedded him. I’m a woman now.”
Meiyu’s downturned eyes crinkled in excitement. The girl was often skirting the Feng-huang server rule of silence; she could not help but wink at guests who enjoyed her playful disposition. Even Feng-nüshi reserved tacit leniency for this behavior, as it drew in guests and opened their pockets, though no other server tried her luck in the same vein. Many guests favored the lively Meiyu, but one well-to-do Japanese merchant had taken particular notice. He had thick eyebrows and a strong jaw he would stroke as he watched Meiyu sway her hips around the main tearoom. At first he threw her long stares over appreciative smiles. Then came expensive gifts. A jade necklace. A pair of fine red slippers, bright-pink flowers embroidered across the silk. When she bent over to pour him chrysanthemum tea, he pushed her hair back behind her ears and promised her the world. He described his childhood home in the port city of Kobe, where he would take her to eat delicious fish. He spoke of his favorite street lined with magnolia trees, where they could observe the spring blossoms. Meiyu shivered with delight at each whisper, falling with abandon into the vision he wove with every word.
“He wants to take me to Japan. Me, in Japan… I’ve never even seen the ocean before!” Meiyu squealed as she examined the tight needlework on her new red slippers.
Young-Ja clutched her friend’s hand. “It wouldn’t hurt to be a little more cautious. Your trust should be harder won—you barely know him.”
Meiyu laughed her usual disarming laugh. “I’ll never find love if I keep shying away from men like you do. And he’s not just any man after my body. He actually listens and asks me questions. He cares what I think, I know it.”
## Reader’s Impressions & Star Rating
This chapter hit me harder than I expected. It is not just a turning point for Young-Ja; it is a wound that stays open on the page. The most powerful moment is not the stabbing itself, but the silence before it—the way Young-Ja realizes that she has been waiting for permission to matter. Yong-Woo’s cruelty cuts her, yes, but it also forces her to stop asking to be useful and start proving it. The imagery of honey, salt, blood, and kumquats is haunting: sweetness used as a weapon, pain transformed into purpose. And Meiyu’s tenderness afterward gives the chapter a heartbeat. It reminds us that even in a place built on performance and survival, love can still be real. The final scene with Meiyu and the Japanese merchant adds a quiet dread. It feels like a trap being set with silk and promises. My heart is already aching for what may come next.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars
## Next Chapter Prediction
I predict that the honeyed kumquats Young-Ja made will finally be used, and the consequences will be devastating—perhaps not immediately in the teahouse, but somewhere in the wider city, where Bailong and his network strike. Young-Ja will have to face the reality of what her sacrifice truly means: helping a resistance is not clean, and her hands are now marked in more ways than one. Meanwhile, Meiyu’s romance with the Japanese merchant will likely turn dangerous. He may be genuinely fond of her, but in a time of occupation and war, affection can be another kind of cage. Young-Ja’s warning may come too late, and Meiyu may be pulled into a world she cannot control. I also expect Feng-nüshi to watch Young-Ja more closely, seeing not just a reckless girl but a useful tool—and perhaps a threat. The next chapter may bring the first taste of vengeance, but it will likely be bitter.
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