Han Kang’s Latest Novel Mines Korea’s Bloody Past
Han Kang is a private person. When she won last year’s Nobel Prize for literature, it was widely reported in the South Korean press that she was married to the literary critic Hong Yong-hee. They have actually been divorced for years. She has written very little about herself, and while many characters and protagonists share aspects of her life story — the writer-narrator of 2017’s Human Acts learns about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which around 2,000 students and workers were massacred by the Korean army, from a hidden book of photographs, just as Han did — these details do not so much illuminate their author’s life as establish a novelistic consciousness to be invaded and deformed, again and again, by the surrounding world.
Han’s writing is distinguished by this contentious marriage of soul and body, an abstract corporeality that places as much emphasis on physical humiliations — headaches, stomach cramps, bullet wounds — as the realm of dreams, hallucinations, and wandering spirits. Human Acts narrates the Gwangju Uprising and the long tail of its suppression by fracturing the narrative perspective, telling the story from the point of view of a young boy, a torture victim, and a soul clinging to its slaughtered body. By locating the military’s crimes on both physical and spiritual levels, Han refuses to consign them to the safe distance of history, lending her novel, and the very real story she is telling, the visceral immediacy of a blow and the lingering agony of a wound.
We Do Not Part, originally published in 2021 and recently translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, takes her style in exciting new directions. Kyungha, the writer who narrates Han’s latest, suffers from unbearable nightmares: murderers, massacres, women fleeing violence down a well. She is particularly shaken by a recurring dream in which a rising sea slowly engulfs a valley of black tree trunks. Insomnia ruins her rest; migraines make it hard to think; abdominal spasms make most foods impossible to digest. She has moved, alone, into a stifling apartment just outside of Seoul, where she lies in bed, orders delivery, and vomits it up. “A desolate boundary,” she reflects, “had formed between the world and me.”
Han’s characters make a habit of coming apart. They lose the ability to speak, to see, to eat meat, to eat anything, to sleep, to remember; to live at all. Sometimes these breakdowns are the result of some shattering event, the invasion of the interior by an outside force: chaos, loss, torture. In We Do Not Part, this collapse is the outward manifestation of an opaque inner distress. Kyungha once led a more stable existence. She had a family, she wrote books, and even if she was not always happy, her existence was a steady one. Yet over the course of four years she “parted ways” with her old life, a process she vividly compares to “a snail coming out of its shell to push along a knife’s edge.” The cause of this change is mysterious, connected somehow with her dreams and a book she, like Han, wrote about the massacre in Gwangju. But try as she might, she cannot fit these meanings together, haunted by a lingering realization that “life was exceedingly vulnerable … The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease — so easily, and by a single decision.”
This is confirmed when her friend, a onetime co-worker and former documentarian named Inseon, severs two fingers in an accident. Eight years before, Inseon returned home to Jeju, a volcanic island off the southern coast, to take care of her mother, and even after her mother died, she stayed, choosing to live as a woodworker in the family’s mountain home with only two budgies for company. Yet her artistic impulse remains: When Kyungha wants to turn her tree dream into an art piece, Inseon suggests using a tract of land on Jeju that she inherited from her father and continues to work on it even when Kyungha asks her to stop.
In the midst of her despair, Kyungha receives a text message from her old friend. As it turns out, Inseon’s accident occurred while sawing logs for their project, and she is recuperating in a hospital in Seoul. She begs Kyungha to fly to Jeju and feed her surviving budgie, Ama, who has been without food and water for days. Bewildered by the news and weak from her own brush with death, the writer does not have the strength to refuse, so she sets off into a blizzard and straight into the heart of her country’s founding traumas.
Starting in late 1948, government and right-wing paramilitary forces violently suppressed a left-wing insurgency on Jeju Island. Authorities burned villages, looted farms, and drove peasants from the mountainous interior to camps on the coast. Though official estimates vary, the island’s governor told American allies that the military and police killed around 60,000 people, about one-fifth of the island’s population. Many of those detained were later executed in secret by the Korean government, a rolling series of extrajudicial killings intended to stamp out communism in the south.
How to make art about such an atrocity? Human Acts affectingly chronicled the legacies of Gwangju by providing us with multiple views on the event and its aftermath. Yet this approach no longer seems sufficient for Han. In We Do Not Part, her narrator describes omitting especially distressing details from her own book about Gwangju, the soldiers who torched unarmed protesters with flamethrowers, “the people rushed to emergency rooms on improvised stretchers, burn blisters on their faces, their bodies doused in white paint from head to toe to prevent identification.” When faced with the true horror of her subject, she feels that she turned away.
We Do Not Part seems like an attempt to look this past head-on. Han fills it with documents, memories, photographs, and facts, providing as full an accounting of the Jeju massacres as she can. Yet rather than dramatically resurrecting the victims in order to kill them again, Han keeps her focus tight on Kyungha, an approach at once bracingly concrete and thrillingly mysterious. Kyungha arrives at the house to find Ama dead in her cage, and she buries the bird in the yard before passing out. Yet when she awakes, the bird has come back to life, and Inseon is there too, asleep in the workshop. Are these ghosts, hallucinations, memories? Or is it Kyungha, dead in the blizzard or in a lonely apartment, whose spirit has wandered?
Han keeps the question open, the first of many unsettled boundaries that she keenly balances throughout the novel. Inseon acts like a human of flesh and blood; she lights candles, opens folders, instructs Kyungha on the history of her family and her island. Yet she is also maimed in a hospital bed on the other end of the country, lending all of their interactions, every memory related and fact revealed, a spectral quality, as if Kyungha is like Odysseus traveling to the underworld for knowledge.
The nature of this testimony makes up the greater part of the novel, a gradual intertwining of personal and national histories. Inseon’s mother survived this slaughter by chance; her father hid for days inside a cave before being arrested and held for years in various mainland prisons. Both returned to their old village, both rebuilt their lives, and both lived with the atrocity inside of them until death, retreating back into the caves and sleeping with a saw under their mattress, as if preparing for a resumption of hostilities at any moment. This is a violence that does not end but exists in irresolvable tension with the everyday, housed in the bodies and minds of those who survived but did not escape. Again and again, Han returns to images of imposition and projection, something distant and ghostly that sits right on top of the physical, likening the process, in a particularly bravura section, to trying to fix a shadow in place.
Though she gathered reams of documents related to her parents’ story, Inseon struggled to make their suffering into art. Art leaves too much out, removes the worst details and allows the intangible — dreams, memories, nightmares — to slip through your fingers. This leaves testimony and documentation, a haphazard process in a state that seeks only partial reconciliation with the past. This evidence includes newspaper photographs, survivor reports, family stories, memories, even Inseon’s own documentary work, a staggering record of a pervasively suppressed crime. That this information is being presented by a possibly supernatural being does not undermine its blunt reality, and Han relates this slow unraveling with a cold sobriety, refusing to allow poetic language to come between the reader and these images of mass graves, thousands upon thousands of carefully catalogued skulls. If Human Acts risked turning away into dramatics, We Do Not Part douses us in the clear reality of atrocity like a gradually engulfing flood tide.
In the face of such knowledge, Kyungha’s breakdown comes to seem almost reasonable. As in so many of Han’s novels, it is not the self that dissembles but the society, which can survive only by displacing its chaotic and violent facets into the realm of private life. No wonder Kyungha attempted to erect that boundary around herself. “I don’t want to open it,” she says of Inseon’s collection. “I’m not the least bit curious.”
Yet she looks, and Han makes us look too. We Do Not Part presents us with a series of superimpositions of fact and fiction, past and present, the living and the dead, suspending multiple states simultaneously and attempting only provisional conclusions. It’s the very best kind of storytelling, poetic and ambiguous without ever once shying away from the horrible historic truth. We Do Not Part is like one of those birds Han so often deploys as metaphor: majestically vulnerable and robustly weightless, a solid body that rises through air.