The Price of Filial Piety

After her year-end bonus arrives, a wife and her husband, Liam, celebrate with an omakase dinner. The meal is interrupted when Liam's mother calls, sobbing that his father needs a dental implant costing eighty thousand. It is a familiar routine: his mother cries, his father scolds, and Liam always compromises.

Married three years, the wife has weathered this pattern before. After his parents caught colds in the rain, Liam accused her of being cold-blooded, then proposed buying them a thirty-eight-thousand three-wheeler; for six months afterward he paid nothing toward the mortgage or daily expenses. When his project paid out three hundred thousand, his father fell from the roof and broke his leg, and relatives blamed the couple for being unfilial. Liam knelt and vowed to move his parents into the city.

Now the in-laws occupy separate rooms in the three-bedroom apartment, and the wife's objections go unspoken. The dinner grows cold as the next demand begins.