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MALE-FEMALE RELATIONSHIPS ACROSS CULTURES... always come first. My own life, last. In my imagination, a woman’s head, severed from the rest of her body — a result of excessive nodding — flew high into the air against a backdrop of blue sky, and landed in a tree, hidden from view.** It is the song Kap-doli, Kap-suni (about a boy and a girl who are secretly in love with each other) which induces Mary/Yu-Rhee to stand up and announce that she cannot marry Joon-Ho as she is in love with someone else? Then, she turns to her own mother: “You have lied to me. [...] This was a set-up. You’ve gone and planned a marriage without me”,” before she leaves the restaurant. Conflict management With regard to conflict management, both the interdependent flight approach and the independent confront/fight approach are observable in Mary/YuRhee’s behavior towards Mr. Allen/Will and Joon-Ho. When she finds her relationship with Mr. Allen/Will confining, she decides to exit it instead of fully exploring the problems with him which have led to the tension between them: “T couldn’t go without you,’ Will said from the kitchen. I sat on his sofa wishing he were going to France so that we’d be forced to say goodbye. I had planned to tell him he was better off without me, but the truth was I was better off without him. [...] This once had been my happy refuge. Now the place felt confining, a cell from which I needed to break free.”*° Yet, and quite paradoxically, her, “Did it ever dawn on you that I have problems of my own?”’ discussed in point 2 provides evidence that breaking free in this case is realized through open confrontation with Mr. Allen/Will. Similarly, Mary/Yu-Rhee wants to exit her relationship with Joon-Ho, when, motivated by his impending expulsion from university, he tries to force Mary/ Yu-Rhee into marrying him. After an incident of attempted rape, bruised and abused, she openly confronts him and threatens to share his secret with his and her family, the ultimate punishment in his culture. She also furnishes an explanation as to why she has not done so before: “I feared the dark side of him, but knew it came from being born Korean, an only child and a boy, raised to believe he was destined for greatness (and therefore allowed to exercise authority over women). 4 Ibid., 150. 15 Ibid., 156. 16 Ibid., 249. * Ibid., 251. 18 Ibid., 193. * 167 +
