# Chapter 23: The Wound That Breathes
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing? I hope you're comfortable and ready, because today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 23 of "Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook." This is a chapter that will grip your heart and refuse to let go—a story of survival, sacrifice, and the impossible choices a mother must make. So settle in, take a deep breath, and let me guide you through this unforgettable chapter.
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Our story opens in the dusty villages of Manchuria, where desperation has become a way of life. Xiu Ying, a woman whose heart aches with love for her ailing parents, has done something extraordinary—she has brought Westerners into her village. Baoluo and Agenisi, two foreigners with strange customs and stranger beliefs, possess medicines that can subdue the terrible jaundice that has swollen her parents' joints. In return for their healing touch, the village has banded together, hiding these outsiders in their grain storage whenever Japanese soldiers come searching.
The Empire of Japan, at war with the West, seeks to imprison any white faces left in Manchuria—doctors, proselytizers, anyone who dared spread foreign creeds among the peasantry. But the villagers, bound by gratitude and something deeper, lie to the soldiers with practiced tongues. "They left weeks ago for Mukden," they claim. And the soldiers, believing no Westerner could survive long amid the manure piles of these minor villages, move on.
Since then, Baoluo and Agenisi have become shadows among the people. They wear wide-brimmed straw hats to conceal their light hair, slinking from village to village, removing parasites, resetting bones, and treating all manner of failing organs. They even seek to learn from the old village doctor, humbling themselves before traditional Chinese medicine. And Xiu Ying, in exchange for her parents' treatments, washes their clothing and teaches them to pronounce words properly—transforming their heavy, halting speech until even the adults can understand them.
But it is on an ordinary day, at her usual spot by the Liao River, that Xiu Ying's life intersects with fate. As she crouches to wash a pile of bedding, an unusually loud trill of sparrows makes her turn her head. There, sticking out of the marshy reeds along the shore, is a hand.
Her heart pounds. Body parts washing up on the riverbank are not unheard of in those days, but this hand does not seem terrifyingly decayed. She parts the reeds to discover a woman—black hair streaked across an ashen face, a wet, blood-stained dress clinging to her bony body. Xiu Ying reaches out, puts her finger to the corpse's nose, and feels it: a feathery exhale brushing her knuckles. Alive. Barely.
She pulls the woman from the reeds and calls for help as the sparrows scatter into the sky.
With Baoluo and Agenisi away tending the sick in another village, her neighbors help Xiu Ying bring the unknown woman to the traditional medicine doctor. He shoos everyone out except Xiu Ying before removing the patient's wet, filthy clothing. The doctor's jaw slacks at what he sees—a word butchered into her stomach, cuts so angry with infection they seem to pulse with their own heartbeat. Xiu Ying dries the woman off with a warm cloth as the doctor cleans the wounds.
When the woman comes to, she lets out an earth-shattering wail—a scream so terrible that nearby villages mistake it for ghosts and burn bamboo in hopes the explosive crackling will ward off evil spirits. The traditional medicine doctor tries to pacify her with a tonic. Her flailing topples the first cup, but the second is eventually drunk with Xiu Ying helping to hold her down. The stranger sleeps, fed small portions of the tonic each time she wakes, until she eases into consciousness a day later without erupting into panicked shrieks.
The strange woman will not speak, but she does seem to hear and understand, making it easier to direct her recovery. When Baoluo and Agenisi return to the village, they too take immediate pity on her, explaining that their god wanted them to tend to this mute despite the difficulty of having one more mouth to feed. They name the woman with the torn belly Jian and take her in.
But as Jian heals, she proves to be useful—assisting the farmers in the fields, helping Xiu Ying with the washing, even foraging medicinal plants for the village doctor. And when it becomes clear that Jian is pregnant, envy strikes Xiu Ying like a physical blow. She has always wanted a family of her own, but at nearly forty years of age, she is not an appealing bride to any man.
When Jian goes into labor, Agenisi has Xiu Ying assist in the delivery, noticing that Jian stiffens around Baoluo. The birth transpires as smoothly as any could, but Jian does not seem pleased with her newborn. It is only with great reluctance that she takes him into her arms, as if she has been handed a pile of heavy logs and ordered to carry it a long distance. She looks away from the squirming bundle, but Xiu Ying cannot stop staring: he is the most perfect child she has ever seen.
And while Jian's breasts produce little milk, Xiu Ying's swell at the sight of the child until the front of her tunic runs wet. With no other food source for the hungry infant, Xiu Ying takes him, eager to hold and nourish him.
Her body transforms. She radiates a warmth that eases her aches. Her skin softens to a comforting plush. She speaks to the baby with deep affection while he feeds on her, looking into her eyes with the unflinching smile of absolute innocence. Xiu Ying takes to calling him Jun—"handsome"—pleased by the symmetry of his tiny face. Jian seems unconcerned as everyone adopts the name for the lack of an alternative.
But the first night Xiu Ying hears the woman speak to Jun in Korean, she knows that he is not meant to stay there with her, that he is meant to tread on lands far from China.
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Now the narrative shifts, and we plunge into the inner world of this mysterious woman—Young-Ja—whose story is the true heart of this chapter. As she opens her eyes, she wonders why. Why, when so many others before her could succumb to an enduring darkness, is she cursed to wake into a light she had so toiled to snuff out?
Young-Ja is sluggish with disappointment, her vision coming into focus in a small, enclosed room. The skin on her stomach burns and her legs ache. When she takes a reluctant breath, a pressure within distends her organs. This tension expands across her every fiber until she releases its force in a scream. When strangers run into the room, Young-Ja flings herself into a corner, unable to stop the sound pouring through her dry, taut throat. She cries, not knowing what else to do, chest heaving into her bellow. The strangers force a bitter liquid into the mouth she cannot close, and she sees black once more.
When Young-Ja wakes again, she cannot find her voice. It has fled with the scream she sent rippling across the surrounding villages. She does not care enough to discover whether she can lure it back. When the strangers probe who she is, where she has come from, how she has sustained her injuries, Young-Ja wills her voice to stay hidden. She will never utter what she has borne to a single living soul. By burying the comfort station in her mind, she can erase its shameful truth. That which was not known—that which was not spoken—could not have happened.
If fate is forcing Young-Ja to live, she will at least kill the knowledge that makes her want to seek death.
She does not understand why the villagers show her kindness. Xiu Ying gives her clothing and sets her up to work with the two white foreigners from a faraway country. The foreigners speak Chinese with a halting, heavy accent that takes some time to understand, but they mostly mean well. They like to speak of their god a little longer than is polite, but they have helped many people in the village, including by dulling the pain of her torn stomach. Young-Ja gives in to her persistent life, doing as she is told, working where she is asked to work. Her daily labors can at least help her tamp down the cascade of comfort station memories that jail her anew in the confines of her mind.
Whenever Young-Ja can peel away from her work, she goes to see the old village doctor. He has not only noticed she is with child before anyone else, but he seems to be the only person to recognize her true desire. He prepares for her a bitter tonic made of the yuánhuā lilac she foraged by the river. Many times over, Young-Ja swallows the medicine hoping it will render her womb inhospitable. But her belly continues to grow. She cannot tell whether the tonic the doctor brewed was ineffective or whether he deceived her from the start. With every failed attempt, she distances herself from the doctor, eventually keeping away from him as she does all other men in the village.
As Young-Ja's stomach rounds into an undeniable announcement of her condition, she questions whether her motherhood would be an atrocity. Was she at fault for forcing life into a world that held such grief, such evil? She has tried to save this child numerous times, but its tenacity prevails over her efforts to spare it the curse of existence. Young-Ja then finds herself hoping that it would stop growing of its own accord and die within her, that it might be a stillbirth like so many buried beneath the comfort station. It would then never have to know pain outside the womb.
She weeps, haunted by the monstrous thoughts she cannot accept are her own—ones a mother should not have.
Young-Ja fears the impending birth, dreading what poisonous thoughts of harm might grip her should traces of the father be glimpsed in its newborn face. Agenisi and Xiu Ying help deliver the baby, keeping Baoluo and any other man away from the room. Young-Ja ruptures into sobs when she sees that the infant takes a breath, that it screams with the air it consumes from outside of her. It is alive. She cannot bear to look at his little eyes, nose, mouth. He will be faceless, nameless for days.
The doctors urge her to breastfeed, but Young-Ja stares into the distance, tears streaming from her eyes until her body dries up, leaving little moisture for her or for the child. The baby wails every time he is forced to her teat, her breast milk sparse and bitter with lost hope. Young-Ja does not resist when Xiu Ying welcomes the child into her arms and begins calling him Joon.
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The war ends. Young-Ja learns from Baoluo and Agenisi one morning that Japan has been made to bow its head to a power that eclipsed the sun and extinguished cities. She does not understand what terrible force could defeat an empire that had so choked life from Joseon and China, but she accepts this new state of the world with little fanfare.
What little conviction is left in her numbed body is not enough to inquire after further detail, though she wonders how many of the soldiers she encountered perished in battle. She wonders if she will see one, or live in fear of one, ever again. Should fate so insist on stripping her of her loves, she implores it to strip her, too, of her tormentors. To mete out her sentence of solitude in its truest form.
Young-Ja's voice returns to her on Joon's dol—his first birthday. When he will not stop crying, an exasperated Young-Ja finds herself starting to scold him.
"Be quiet, be strong. Big boys don't cry."
When Agenisi hears her speak to the infant in Korean, she asks if Young-Ja has interest in accompanying the siblings on a mission for their god in Joseon. The Allies have seized control of Joseon as Japan retreated. They could continue their charity work in the capital under the protection of Western soldiers. If she comes with them to translate, they could help the poor of Joseon together.
Young-Ja has long stopped dreaming of her motherland. She has been so far for so long. There is nothing left there for her. No family, no home. No one to recognize her with a kind word on the street. But it makes no difference to her whether she stays in China or goes to Joseon under its new Western occupation. Baoluo and Agenisi have been kind enough to shelter her and provide a livelihood she does not think she has the resolve to seek elsewhere. So she agrees.
Joon cries when peeled from Xiu Ying's warmth. Young-Ja wonders if he might fare better left behind here, loved by Xiu Ying. Did he not deserve to be cradled by arms that had never once thought to stifle his breath? To be fed on the milk of an untainted body? But she cannot abandon what she has brought into this world. She cannot bring herself to curse this child with the same loss that shattered her since her family fell breathless to the earth. Since Seiko Obaa-san retreated from her wails. Since Meiyu dove out into the sky. Since Bok-Hee slipped from her grasp.
If being left behind is to be Young-Ja's fate, she will accept her duty to stay for this child.
Young-Ja boards a train with her crying son to Dalian, a port city where they will find a ship bound for her native country. Facing the unbounded horizon of the open sea for the first time in her life, Young-Ja does not look back on the land that had buried her last remaining loves. All she has left to her in the world is asleep in her arms. She cannot describe what she feels for him, but she knows she will have to protect him in her own way, no matter how corroded a husk she has become.
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The chapter's final section brings us to 1974, nearly three decades later. Of all the things that could have followed Young-Ja across the sea, it is the vicious specter of war that tailed her to her native land. Not long after she taught a growing Joon to write his name in Hangul, a Soviet-backed army from the north crossed the line Westerners had cleaved across the peninsula. Millions of lives were extinguished. Every city was leveled to rubble. The glaring absence of trees, burned or cut to stumps, laid bare the nation's war-torn horizon.
Young-Ja floated through the all-too-familiar turmoil of bloodshed. It was her duty to shield her son from the world she had failed to keep him out of. So long as he was not hurt, she did not pay mind to the students laying down their lives against an American-educated authoritarian. So long as he did not know of his origin, she did not balk at the country's descent into military dictatorship. With her ambitions focused so narrowly, decades passed without fate awarding Young-Ja much more than what she asked: Joon lived without knowledge of his mother's sordid past.
One autumn morning in 1974, Young-Ja slips out from the church basement where she resides, treading lightly on her creaky joints, hoping not to attract notice. She rose early that day to grind rice grains into flour and pound the resulting dough into rice cakes. She kneads out her frustrations and welcomes the slight ache of her muscles. Although she has run low on funds, she cannot bear to ask her grown son for money, nor can she allow herself to go to the kindly pastor for help. So she makes rice cakes to sell despite knowing they will attract few buyers.
When Young-Ja does manage a sale, customers return only to complain of her food's bitterness.
"Look here, Ahjumma, these are rotten! You can't sell this—give me my money back or I'm reporting you to the city!"
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And there the chapter leaves us, with Young-Ja's small attempt at independence crumbling before her, and the weight of her secrets pressing down upon her aging shoulders.
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## Reader's Impressions & Star Rating
What a devastating, beautiful chapter this is. The way this narrative weaves together two women's stories—Xiu Ying's desperate compassion and Young-Ja's shattered survival—creates something profoundly moving. The chapter doesn't shy away from the darkest corners of human experience: the comfort stations, the impossible choices of motherhood born from violence, the slow erosion of a soul trying to protect itself from its own memories. Young-Ja's journey from wanting death to accepting the duty of staying for her child is heartbreaking precisely because it isn't triumphant—it's survival in its rawest form. The parallel between Xiu Ying's aching desire for motherhood and Young-Ja's terrified rejection of it adds layers of complexity that linger long after reading. And that final scene in 1974, with the bitter rice cakes and the threat of exposure, reminds us that the past never truly stays buried.
**Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars** ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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## Next Chapter Prediction
Based on the cliffhanger with the disgruntled customer threatening to report Young-Ja, I predict the next chapter will bring a confrontation that forces Young-Ja to reckon with her past in ways she has desperately avoided. Perhaps Joon will learn something about his mother's history, or perhaps the authorities will become involved, threatening the fragile peace she has constructed. The theme of secrets and their inevitable surfacing seems poised to reach a critical point. I also suspect we may see more of Joon as an adult—how his mother's trauma has shaped him, and whether he carries the weight of wounds he doesn't even know he bears. The question of what it truly means to protect someone from the world that made you may finally find its answer.
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