Content Warning: This section features discussion of gender discrimination, incest, child abuse, abortion, and ableist attitudes toward blindness. 

Pregnancy recurs in several of Chung’s stories as a motif for Social Expectation as a Tool of Patriarchy. This motif is strongest in “The Embodiment,” where Young-lan’s pregnancy defines the boundaries of the story.

In “The Embodiment,” Young-lan’s pregnancy is unintended. This gives rise to expectations from medical professionals, family members, and even strangers, none of whom have Young-lan’s well-being in mind. The obstetrician, for instance, urges Young-lan to find a father for the child or else the fetus will fail to develop properly. This becomes the crux of the obstetrician’s advice, and she never suggests anything related to nutrition, a subject of fetal development that Young-lan realizes on her own. Young-lan’s family members support the quest for a father figure, which subtly undermines Young-lan’s ability to raise the child on her own as a working professional. They even go so far as to encourage her to take a leave of absence from her graduate studies to focus on dating. This is echoed in “The Head,” where the woman’s anxiety around the head is dismissed by everyone in her family from her parents to her husband.