Content Warning: This section features discussion of gender discrimination, abortion, child loss, and death by suicide.

Chung’s collection exposes the intolerable pressure women face due to unreasonable, patriarchal expectations. As Chung’s stories show, these expectations aim to reduce women to objects whose only purpose is to produce and raise children, freeing men to increase their wealth and secure their individual legacies. The fact that the pressure to fulfill these expectations begins at home makes it increasingly difficult for women to exercise agency around their lives and, in particular, their bodies.

“The Head” announces this theme by highlighting the disparity between its central character’s reaction to the head and the reactions of those around her. The head continuously refers to the woman as its “mother,” forcing all the responsibility that comes with motherhood upon her. The woman struggles to disentangle herself from the head—and consequently, the role of motherhood—which was not something she consciously chose to create in her life. The head is composed of the woman’s toilet waste, suggesting that her basic bodily functions are something shameful for which she must answer. None of the people in her life understand the difficulty of this situation. The head does not bother them personally, so they encourage her simply to ignore it.