[Book Review] We Do Not Part by Han Kang
/ 7 min read
Everyone makes an effort, of course, and so do writers. But Han Kang puts every ounce of her life into it, every single time.
— Shin Hyung-cheol
We each live our own lives. We give our time and our hearts to what matters to us. Some men move armies against their own people to protect themselves. One president, who once thought of his sister — a building cleaner who died alone in a public bathroom — went to meet sanitation workers as his very first act after winning the election. A losing candidate who took only 0.98 percent of the vote saw over a billion won in donations land in his account overnight. People who agreed with what he stood for but had voted strategically for someone else were quietly saying I’m sorry.
I, for the sake of my own quiet, study and swim. My life is too shallow, too still, to begin to imagine what kind of life one has to hold inside oneself in order to write Human Acts, or We Do Not Part.
Has the tide been coming in and going out like this every day? Have the lower graves had their bones swept away, leaving only mounds of earth behind? There was no time. The graves already underwater were beyond saving, but the bones higher up — those had to be moved. Before the sea came any further. Now. But how? There was no one. I didn’t even have a shovel. How could I possibly move all these graves.
Kyungha is enduring her days in a sealed apartment, the air conditioner broken, the heat pressing in like a wet sauna. She rinses herself through with cold showers. She dreams of graves. She cannot eat more than one meal a day. She cannot fall deeply asleep. Her breath comes shallow. And then she begins to write a will.
Anyone reading the novel knows that Kyungha — capital and river — is Han Kang herself. So this is the kind of daily life she is thrown into. And still, she writes about Gwangju in May 1980. And still, she returns now to write about Jeju in April 1948. If I had not read this book, I could not have begun to imagine what such a life requires. What matters to Han Kang is love. As Shin Hyung-cheol writes, she gives every ounce of her life — every single time — for love.
Inseon’s severed finger overlaps, in Kyungha’s dream, with logs eroded by the tides going in and out. To keep the nerves of a severed finger from dying, you must keep pricking the wound with a needle, drawing blood, feeling the pain. You have to keep hurting, keep looking, in order not to forget the dead.
Why do we have to go that far? Because, in the end, we are all connected.
Doesn’t water circulate forever, never disappearing? Then there’s no rule that the snowflake Inseon grew up under is not the same snowflake landing on my face right now. There’s no rule that it’s not the snowflake her mother once saw on the schoolyard. There’s no rule that the snow that gathered on their faces and the snow on my hand right now are not the same snow.
So Kyungha walks into a blizzard, in agony, toward Inseon’s house. She wants to give up, but she cannot. There is a bird she has to save. The bird is a fragile life; the bird is a memory that must be kept. When she learns the bird is already dead, she does not warm her own frozen body first. She gives the bird a proper funeral, as if a warm bowl of porridge, a place to lie down, could not come before the work of mourning was done.
Some people, Inseon says, can be in this place and another place at once. It is not strange. Like her father. Like Ama and Ami. Like the ones swept away by the sea around Jeju, and the ones buried in Gyeongsan. Death and life are not cleanly separable, and so we cannot simply part with the beings beside us. The pain does not lift easily.
Unlike Human Acts, this novel does not unfold a story set against April 3rd. Instead, it stares — patiently, doggedly — at the records of what happened. After writing the May 1980 book, Kyungha came to understand that something is always lost when an event becomes a narrative. For the same reason, Inseon refuses to turn her own story into a film. No one who did not live through it can fully enter the experience. So the writer chose, instead, to lay down their voices like testimony.
I know. I know why Inseon refused, immediately, when asked whether she would make her story into a film. The smell of blood-soaked clothes rotting together with flesh, the pale glow of bones decomposing for decades, would all be erased. The nightmares would slip out between her fingers. Violence beyond every limit would be removed. Like the flamethrowers I left out of the book I wrote four years ago — the ones soldiers turned on unarmed citizens standing in the street. Like the people brought into the emergency room with blistered faces and bodies, white paint poured over them.
You have to look, directly, at the voices they left behind.
I held my eyes against the urge to look away. I made myself look — properly — because otherwise I might remember it as worse than it was. But I was wrong. The more carefully I looked, the more painful the photograph became.
The thirty thousand killed on this island that winter, and the two hundred thousand killed on the mainland the following summer — that is not a chain of coincidences. There was an order from the U.S. military government to kill all three hundred thousand people on the island, if that’s what it took to stop communism. There were right-wing youth corps members from the North, loaded with the will and the resentment to carry it out, who finished two weeks of training, put on police and military uniforms, and came onto the island. The coast was sealed. The press was controlled. A madness that allowed soldiers to point their guns at the heads of newborns was permitted, even rewarded — fifteen hundred children under the age of ten died like that. Before the blood of that precedent had time to dry, the war broke out. Just as it had been done on the island, two hundred thousand people from every city and town were rounded up, loaded onto trucks, detained, shot, and buried in unmarked graves. No one was allowed to recover the remains. The war hadn’t ended; it had only paused. The enemy was still on the other side of the line. The bereaved, branded, were silent — and so was everyone else, anyone who would be branded as the enemy the moment they spoke. And so decades passed before piles of marbles and small skulls with holes in them were dug up beneath valleys, mines, and runways. The bones, mixed together, are still buried.
It’s all right. I have a flame.
May the writer’s spark pass into her readers. May more of us look, and remember — May 1980, April 1948.
Because only by looking, patiently, into a painful past, can we save the present.
I find Han Kang — this adult who takes another’s pain as her own and goes on recording it, all the way to the end — utterly admirable.
Can the past help the present? Can the dead save the living?