My girl Han Kang does it again! When she won the Nobel Prize back in the fall, people from every stage of my life texted me. I realized how many people had heard about Han Kang’s writing from me. I felt so proud, almost as if a family member of mine had won! My students all read The Vegetarian last year, and many read Human Acts from my Great Reads list over the summer. In an American context, to my community, Han Kang seemed niche—yet, they had read her and therefore felt, too, like they were “in the know” by reading her before she became a household name. It’s interesting how being an “early fan” creates a special feeling, when we’ve rooted for someone, building them up, before others knew of and fell in love with them, too.
I knew about Han Kang from RM of BTS (credit where credit is due!), yet I—and each person who read her because of me—built a unique relationship to her writing. You feel like you’re getting to know her as you read her books, perhaps because they brush up against—and become fully, at times—nonfiction. Perhaps because she circles obsessively, poetically around tragedy and trauma, tapping into something universal and human about the ways that we grieve.
I texted my mother while reading this book, “Han Kang, I just feel such a profound connection to her, it feels like she is just speaking immense truth as she writes.” Han Kang’s articulation of the experiences of women, of oppression, of loss, of artistic inspiration, of deep emotional connection—all these elements she observes so closely, infusing each with her prose that is both achingly beautiful and unforgivingly sharp. It’s such a rewarding experience to get to know a writer and their artistic body by reading all of their writing (at this point, I’ve covered everything except The White Book). Each of these books is its own journey, a complex haunting, staying in my body for months and years after I’ve read them. You can’t read Han Kang back-to-back; you need to space these out a bit. We Do Not Part seemed to inhabit the space of Greek Lessons (softer, intimate, more hopeful than The Vegetarian (her bleakest novel) and Human Acts, which feels grander in scope, more argumentative). Yes, The Vegetarian plays out its central tensions on a personal, familial level, but—like Human Acts (the biggest, rangiest of the novels)—it has a strong polemic. Like Human Acts, We Do Not Part is a dissection of tragedy and violence’s legacy. Like Human Acts, this violence is enacted by the government, by deep distrust sown among humans, by cruelty carried out by individuals on behalf of the institution or the state. Like Greek Lessons, We Do Not Part places the relationship between two people at the heart of the book, spooling out the beautiful and painful complexities in a relationship (in this case, a deeply-knowing and lasting female friendship that survives time, life changes, shifts in mental and emotional health).
Unlike any of her other novels, We Do Not Part reads like a thriller: the events comprise one intensive sprint through the main plot arc (even the flashbacks are continued within this plot arc, rooted in its events), with the emotional and literal urgency of a life-or-death scenario growing from the deep roots of a traumatic history (the Jeju Massacre of 1948-49). The singular, first-person point of view fits this genre shift for Han Kang and enhances it. This book cuts narrow, yet deep, compared to other Han Kang books—and I loved that. It was so immersive. At one point, when I’d been reading for a few hours, something in my environment jolted me out of the book and I looked up from the page as if stepping out of the swirling snow, the oncoming blue-black darkness, Kyungha’s clenching fear and uncertainty about whether she would make it to Inseon’s house. Where was I? What year was it? I was surprised to see my familiar apartment around me. I was surprised by the warmth. This powerful immersive quality of Han Kang’s writing felt on maximum display in this novel, the product of a powerhouse writer who is doing one of her great strengths as a writer at its best.
In the first few pages of this book, I felt jolted by the new translator—compared to the previous Han Kang books I’d read, the prose felt shortened, more abrupt—but by the time Kyungha arrived on Jeju, I was fully inside the world of the novel. Perhaps this wasn’t the product of the translation, but a deliberate move as Han Kang moved us from Seoul, from Kyungha’s depressed monotonous routine, to Jeju, swirling with threat and possibility, the oncoming storm mirroring the oncoming danger of remembrance, of sinking deep into and potentially drowning in the past? Even more than the genius of BTS (and this is saying something!), Han Kang’s writing makes me want to learn Korean, so I could read her writing in the original language.
Unpacking my own notes written into the beginning pages of this book risks submersion, again. Just like this novel seems to warn us, traveling into the past is fraught with risk. We might sink too deep and never return; it takes a strong hand, a bright light, to lead us back out again. The sea is one of the key metaphors Han Kang uses for this immersion into the past. The sea first appears in Kyungha’s reoccurring dream, detailed in the first pages of the novel: the sea rises and sweeps away the contents of the graves, surrounds the trees, forces the dreamer up onto the highest hill in the vicinity to avoid getting washed away. Writer Kyungha and visual artist Inseon team up to try to capture the dream; Kyungha asks her friend if she will help her bring the dream to life. For Kyungha and Inseon, the dream/art piece seems to resonate with different tragedies. Kyungha has written a successful book about the Gwangju Massacre (I thought, early on, that this was nonfiction and Kyungha was Han Kang herself—we know from Human Acts that the fourth wall break is possible), and the experience of researching this book and articulating the tragedy has sent Kyungha into an emotional tailspin.
The dream resonates with Inseon because it connects to a different trauma: the emotional trauma she experienced raised by two people deeply scarred by the events on Jeju during WWII, immediately following, and the beginning of the Korean War. I needed to read the Wikipedia page to learn more about the Jeju Massacre of 1948, but details of Inseon’s parents lives piece together a narrative of this experience throughout the novel. Inseon, living alone on Jeju in the wake of her mother’s death, promptly begins work on the dream art piece. It’s chopping logs in her woodworking studio in the garage—for this very project, despite Kyungha later telling her she wants to call it off, that it wasn’t a broader dream, but simply a personal portrait of Kyungha’s dead-end life—that causes the instigating moment of this book. Inseon cuts off two of her fingers in the workshop and, hospitalized in Seoul, she calls Kyungha for help.
Yet, the help Inseon needs is specific and strange: Kyungha must journey to her house on Jeju to save her white bird Ama before it’s too late. In the face of an oncoming storm, Kyungha’s literal journey to Jeju is also a literal (and metaphorical) expedition into and excavation of the past. The journey is one that Inseon can only ask of Kyungha, and, in many ways, it's more than she bargained for—a revealing of Inseon’s trauma and a reckoning with Kyungha’s isolation. As Inseon later insists, Kyungha—who has retreated into herself—is not, in fact, alone. “You have me,” Inseon (or the spirit manifestation, spirit-walking Inseon) insists, in one of the most hopeful moments in any Han Kang novel. Inseon, broken and bruised like Kyungha, still reaches out—severed fingers and all—to her best friend. Inseon insists on connection; she says of her dead bird Ami, “we haven’t parted ways, not yet.” And, with and for Kyungha, she immediately begins to work on the piece they call “We Do Not Part.” For Inseon, the past is unburied, visible, confronted. She holds on hard, both to this past and to her present. And, in the final moments of the novel, I had hope that Kyungha will reach out and find Inseon not there, as, in being not there, we know she’s alive in Seoul. Kyungha is different now; she took the matches with her into the snow. She didn’t let the candle burn out. In this, I see that she no longer wants to die. She has back the spark that keeps us living.
The concrete and specific, in Han Kang’s hands, is simultaneously both real and symbolic. Inseon’s severed fingers reminded me, early on, of Han Kang’s capacity for this literary technique (have I ever seen this more masterfully done?), as Inseon must sit in the hospital, her fingers treated every three minutes by being stabbed with needles until blood flows. This brutal treatment, explained with Han Kang’s characteristic physical exactitude that leans to body horror, allows the fingers to survive. Without this, Inseon would lose the fingers, risking a phantom pain, a psychological haunting that—in the long term—would likely outweigh the short term suffering. What is this if not a metaphor for the ways we encounter and process grief? Do we have the strength to process? Or do we risk the long-term phantom pain, the residual haunting? The snowstorm (the haunting image of snow that doesn’t melt on the faces of the dead), the trees, the white birds, the sea—each of these take on metaphorical resonance while remaining real, physical, and immediate.
I was particularly taken with the metaphor of the deep ocean, the sinking into the sea, putting me in mind of the Adrienne Rich lines: “First the air is blue and then / it is bluer and then green and then / black I am blacking out…” In the book’s third section, Inseon (spirit-walking version) guides Kyungha deep into the past, revealing her research into the covered up events of the Jeju Massacre in which citizens protested elections held in U.S/-occupied Korea and later battled back against military police installed to suppress protests. This section of the book more directly catalogs the parents’ experiences during these years, describing how Inseon’s mother tried to nurse her little sister to life by feeding her her own blood and how Inseon’s father searched for his baby sibling, even questioning the wife of a soldier who committed the slaughter on the beach, and how her mother visited the mine where thousands of bodies of the massacred were concealed for years, still hoping to find, in some way, her brother. Kyungha continues to wonder as each new piece of this tragedy unfolds: “Is this it? The brink of a gaping trench opening up below the abyssal plain, the very bottom of the deep sea where nothing emits light?” Or is there more still to come? More pain and suffering, more than it seems possible to conceive of, more cruelty, more loss, still to come?
Like the ocean imagery, Inseon’s birds feel both literal and metaphorical. Like spirit-walking Inseon, they linger, casting their shadows on the walls, bridging the gap between life and death (why is life/death made out to be meaningful distinction, anyway? The dead remain with us). These birds, Inseon warns Kyungha, don’t show any sign of suffering until it’s too late. They seem fine until they keel over dead. They are sensitive to the world around them. They are another portrait of the way we might hold onto hardships, perhaps silent, perhaps invisible to others, until it’s too late. Yet, the birds are also real, individuals, lives that we grieve and cling to. As I read, I kept hoping that Kyungha would make it to the house in time to save Ama. But I should have known; it’s a Han Kang novel, after all. My retroactive reflection on the inevitability of this death still didn’t make it feel inevitable (inevitable only beyond the world of the book). In the book-world, couldn’t Kyungha have saved her? We do, from time to time, save others, including our pets. Until, eventually, inevitability, we don’t. Death happens.
I bawled my eyes out at this midway point of the novel. The loss of Ama, the close call—what if Kyungha had been a bit earlier, could she have saved her?—struck the core of several of my losses. I grieved anew for the pets whose deaths felt to me (even if they weren’t, I keep telling myself) like some failure of my own. What if I had done this or that differently? Couldn’t I have saved her? The way Kyungha buried Ama, struggling to deal with the logistics of death, with a body, making choices about where and how to memorialize her, hurt me deeply, dragged up my losses. The loss of Ama, a bird, is not made small in the face of the catalog of loss that follows; it is, instead, part of this. The loss of the innocent and free thing, the loss of the thing you felt responsible for, the loss of the thing you struggled so hard to protect. Like Inseon’s severed fingers, this is another portrait of loss: the loss that hits you, in spite of it all, the grief that bleeds afresh when the wound is reopened.
“We Do Not Part” is dissected as a title when Kyungha and Inseon name their joint art project this. Kyungha wonders whether about the meaning: “As in we refuse to part by refusing to say goodbye, or as in we actually don’t part ways?” “Is it somehow incomplete, the parting?” “Is it deferred? The goodbye—or the closure? Indefinitely?” In an additional reading of the title, I noticed throughout the book how often lips are described as parting or not parting. “We Do Not Part”…could this, too, refer to the lips that do not part, that remain tightly sealed, the possible speaker silent? Is the past too often silent, as well as those who recall it? What does it take to speak up and out? What does it take to part and, in parting, reveal the truth?
I read this book, strangely and fittingly, in the midsts of an interdisciplinary, collaborative unit on the Holocaust. As I taught my students about this genocide, as we talked about memoirs and memorials, as they read the words of Elie Wiesel, Pierre Seel, and Alfons Heck (three young boys all capturing the Holocaust from different angles, each speaking truth, each revealing the complexities of this tragedy, making our “knowing” of it the more multifaceted for reading more memories), I kept coming back to Han Kang. She understands the risks and realities of memoir, of speaking—there are always stakes both for speaking and silence—of revisiting, of living in the present which is inseparable (we do not part) from the past. When we took our students to the Jewish Heritage Museum, the grandson of the Holocaust survivors that we met with explained that his grandfather told the details of his experiences and his grandmother remained silent. These are both responses to tragedy, to the impossibility of these experiences, to confronting the reality of humans’ capacity for both cruelty and survival. How do we end up speaking or holding silence, the only options available to us? Pierre Seel said that, many times, he regretted speaking about his experiences during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel devoted his life to telling.
Inseon’s documentary process, which captures the stories of women who persisted through tragedies, who reveal these realities when they no longer hold their silences, mirrors something in Han Kang’s own creative process. Inseon had created a triptych: the first film about the Vietnam War, the second film about a woman in Manchuria fleeing Japanese soldiers and losing her toes to frostbite, and the third film Inseon’s own memoir. Unlike the hard-hitting realism of the first two, the third film is strange, abstract, dream-like. The tragedy is not confronted head on, but alluded to, cataloged through its impacts and not its particulars. The shadow of the tree on the wall of Inseon’s garage is the focus and not Inseon herself, not her memories of her father (suffering from PTSD) making his daughter hide for hours in the caves from a threat existing only in his own mind. The description of the first film, of the jungle rain, and the women rushing to rescue the chickens from drowning, is some of the most gorgeous writing I have ever read. The swirling water—the torrential rain, the snow, the rising sea tide—connects all these tragedies, brings them together into an amalgamation of loss.
I maintain hope at the end of this book because we have been set up to understand the logistics of Inseon’s spirit-walking. Through the earlier scene where Inseon spirt-walks to her home on Jeju—when she actually lay in unconscious in Seoul after she ran away from home as a teenager—we see Inseon’s mother sit with her spirit-walking form at their kitchen table at midnight. Inseon’s mother offers her food, hoping that, if she eats, it’ll prove she’s alive, but Inseon does not touch the juk. Yet, the spirit-walking does not indicate her death, as Inseon later awakens from her coma. She does not part from the world; this brush with death is not an ending. I want to believe in the connection between these two women, to insist on a literal reading of the title, to hold onto Inseon’s reminder that Kyungha is not alone, to stake my faith on the courage of both Inseon and Kyungha. I keep thinking of how Kyungha brought the matches with her—even if there’s nothing left to burn, Kyungha brought a light into the darkness (the image from BTS’s “Spring Day” music video of Jungkook striking the match in the darkness and the other members reappearing keeps flooding my mind). At the end, Kyungha wants to live; the spark and the ability to spark the light is always with her. This ending leaves the options up to us, leaves the surrender to the cold and dark or the work of going forward (of finding the house again, following the light from the workshop back) up to us. Whichever thing we choose, both need to be okay. Both are realities. Neither are partings.
