We Do Not Part by Han Kang

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2024, the first female Asian writer to do so. I previously read her book, The Vegetarian, back in 2020, and it became one of the favorite books of one of my kids. 

 

I had been meaning to read more of her books, and this one became available when I needed an audiobook for my commute for rehearsals and concert. 

 

We Do Not Part is definitely not quite as weird as The Vegetarian. It is also much more political, after a fashion. Like some of her previous books, it is partly about a traumatic violent episode in post-World War Two Korea, one that is fairly unknown to us in the United States, despite our complicity in it. 

 

For me, the book had some very good parts, and a lot of beautiful writing. However, it also suffered from a certain amount of inconsistency, and got bogged down in the historical accounts to an extent that it felt like she really wanted to write a non-fiction book just on the massacre, rather than a novel with episodes from the past. 

 

The massacre in question took place just before the Korean War broke out. For background, Korea was occupied and colonized by Japan for quite a long time before the war. You can read some of that history in Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which I thought did a good job of integrating the history with the modern day story. 

 

When the war ended, and Japan was defeated by the allies, Korea was “freed.” Which meant they got ruled by a US military regime, then a US-backed dictatorship. 

 

In the run-up to the Korean War, various rebel groups, many of them communist or leftist, vied for control of the country. Eventually, the hostilities escalated from a civil war to a proxy war between the US and China, with the Korean populace considered mostly expendable. 

 

One of the most sordid episodes before the war took place on Jeju Island, a large volcanic island off the south coast of Korea. I had never heard of it, but it is apparently a big tourist destination due to its milder weather. 

 

In retaliation against the rebels, the government murdered tens of thousands of civilians - men women, children, and infants. These ended up in mass graves, the existence of which was brutally suppressed by the Korean government until decades later, when the dictatorship was replaced by a democracy, and the survivors were able to put enough pressure on the government. 

 

For this book, Han Kang weaves elements of autobiography with fiction and with the historical events. 

 

Kyungha is a woman who seems to be a stand-in for the author. Like the author, she suffers from migraines, and has developed vivid nightmares after researching a massacre for her latest book. 

 

She reconnects with her long-time friend from college, Inseon, who is an artist, carpenter, and filmmaker. The two of them decide to do an artistic film about the massacre, one that utilizes Kyungha’s nightmare of trees shaped like humans with snow falling on them. 

 

Then, Kyungha receives a text asking her to come immediately to the hospital, and discovers that Inseon has severed some fingers while working on the carved trees. She also needs a favor: her bird has been left alone at her remote home and needs water and food immediately. This will require Kyungha to drop everything and fly to Jeju Island, find her way to the remote property, and see if the bird is living or dead. 

 

And all this occurs in an unusually strong storm that has dropped snow all over the island. 

 

Essentially, this, with some history of both Kyungha and Inseon, their families, and their relationship, which is kind of ambiguous, makes up the first half of the story. 

 

We get some hints of what is to come. Inseon’s mother was a child who, along with her older sister, survived the Jeju Massacre, losing the rest of their family in what turns out to be highly traumatic and horrible ways. 

 

For the second half, which is divided into two further parts, the line between reality, history, and hallucination becomes seriously blurred. The ending is ambiguous - what really happened? Was any of it real? And that actually works okay, although I do think that kind of ending is a bit trendy right now. 

 

The bigger problem is that so much of the second half becomes Inseon and Kyungha sorting through all the old newspaper clippings and other research that Inseon’s late mother did to research the massacre and try to find out what happened to her brother. 

 

And what I mean by that is that the plot goes so off track into the past, with laborious detail, statistics, anecdotes that are unconnected to the actual characters of the story - it really becomes more like a nonfiction account of the massacre as it occurred in multiple places - that the momentum of the book is lost. I also think that the author gets bogged down in her outrage at the inhumanity of the US-sponsored dictatorship and its thugs that she ceases to write in an effective or compelling way. It feels self-indulgent. 

 

Now, I do understand that some of this may be because I was never the intended reader for this book. It was written in Korean, for Korean readers, who I presume are more likely to see the incidents the way we Americans might see our own Civil War, and find the details more personal and thus compelling. 

 

For me, it was enough to get a taste of things. I can understand that our own understanding of the Korean War (like the Vietnam War) is deeply flawed on multiple levels. Both came from the end of a colonialist occupation. Both ended up as proxy wars between the great powers. And in both cases, the great powers either slaughtered civilians themselves, or encouraged the local governments and armies to do so. Although equally true is that things would probably have gone pretty FUBAR even if the US had stayed out of Korea entirely. Humans are just shitty, no matter our ethnicity. 

 

It is a shame that the book felt this way, because, had the historical stuff been edited better, and the book shortened by a good hour or two, it could have been a tight, effective story. Nothing important would have been lost by summarizing the historical details rather than creating a documentary within a novel. 

 

That leads me back to the main story, the one of two women who are bonded in a fascinating way. They each have their family trauma, and it helps to know the background. 

 

The atmosphere of the snowstorm is amazing, and the language of the descriptions is gorgeous. How much is original and how much is the translation by Emily Yae Won and Paige Aniyah Morris is not clear to me, but the combination makes for truly beautiful writing. 

 

At its best, the book is luminous and evocative, terrifying and sublime, deeply emotional yet restrained. For much of the first half, and for the final moments, I was completely sucked in and immersed in the storytelling. 

 

And then, an hour would go by at a time, and I struggled to listen, as it got bogged down in the details. 

 

I wonder if the curse of being an award-winning author is that editors are afraid to tell you to make cuts. Because I really think that had there been better editing, a better focus on the essentials rather than detail, and a little less of a preachy outraged tone, this could have been a truly amazing book. 

 

It’s still worth a read, I would say, because the good is so good, and you can, at least on the printed version, skim a bit when it starts to feel like a documentary. 

 

The audiobook, read by Greta Jung is good. Jung does a good job overall of portraying the characters. My only quibble is that at times it is a bit difficult to pick up the switch from the voice of Kyungha and Inseon, and since the stories being told shift often, this can make it a bit difficult at times to keep straight whose family story is whose. It’s a tough one to do, of course, because you have two women who are fairly similar - you can’t rely on dialect here at all. Overall, though, a good listening experience.