Posted by 
We Do Not Part is the latest book by Korean writer Han Kang, who won the Nobel prize in literature in 2024. The book begins in fragments that ebb between dark dream, waking nightmare and memories of how the book’s protagonist Kyungha got to this terrible way of living.
Even for those who do not know much about Korean history, it is fairly clear that something awful has changed Kyungha. When she closes her eyes images of women clutching children, black tree trunks jutting like limbs from the earth and so much snow flood into her mind.
This experience has sapped all life from Kyungha and she is, when we meet her, simply waiting for death. That is, until her friend Inseon injures herself and asks Kyungha to travel to her home on the island of Jeju, south of mainland Korea, to look after her beloved pet bird, Ama.
When she gets there, a violent snowstorm leaves her trapped in Inseon’s compound. Here, she stumbles upon the investigation into her friend’s family and its connection to the Jeju 4.3 massacre in the 1940s.
In the early morning of April 3 1948, 359 members of the South Korean Workers’ Party and partisans carried out attacks on 12 police facilities and the homes of conservative leaders. They killed 12 people, including family members, before fleeing to the Halla Mountains. The term “Jeju 4.3” came from the date the incident is considered by many to have begun, even though it officially lasted from March 1 1947 to September 21 1954.
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
What followed was a massive counterinsurgency operation by the South Korean government (with US backing) to exterminate communists and their sympathisers on the island. While officially numbers are still not known, it is believed that more than 30,000 Jeju people (10% of Jeju’s population at the time), including women and children, were killed.
In We Do Not Part, we find out that Inseon’s mother, who died several years earlier, was a survivor of Jeju 4.3. Han Kang’s impressive approach to presenting the memories of Jeju 4.3 is multi-layered, subtle, fragmentary and contains a high degree of sensitivity as she recounts the massacre from the perspective of Inseon and her mother.
Inseon is part of a what the Holocaust and cultural memory scholar Marianne Hirsch termed the “postmemory generation”. She is the child of a survivor who has inherited a “catastrophic [history] not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories”.
Inseon has absorbed the stories of her mother as her own. For instance, in one of the first extracts of Inseon’s memories she speaks of her mother and her sister finding their family dead in the snow.
I remember her. The girl roaming the schoolyard, searching well into the evening. A child of 13 clinging to her 17-year-old sister as if her sister wasn’t a child herself, hanging on by a sleeve, too scared to see but unable to look away.
However, Inseon doesn’t remember. She wasn’t there. But, as Hirsch writes of the postmemory generation, such distinct “memories” are mediated by “imaginative investments, projections and creations”.
Han Kang’s skilful use of Inseon’s postmemory carefully gives voice to the feelings of Inseon’s mother. Han Kang does this through presenting these in fragments that recount first Inseon’s investigative work, and then Inseon’s mother’s research into the family’s losses. These are inserted in passages of recounted conversations, writing and descriptions of photographs and films.
These pieces are scattered amid Kyungha’s time in the dreamlike and snow buried compound. The intermingling of past and present, dream and reality, art and life creates an almost hallucinatory quality where the edges blur as Kyungha inherits Inseon’s memories – which she inherited from her mother. In each transference, these stories become new.
This retelling and remembering is important. The 1947 to 1949 uprising is considered by some historians, particularly the American historian Bruce Cummings, as the precursor to the Korean civil war, which left the country divided into North and South. However, for almost 50 years, the very existence of the massacre was officially censored and repressed.
It was only in 2000s that the incident was recognised and the National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Incident was established. In 2003, then-president Roh Moo-hyun apologised for the deaths of the innocents and the state repression against the survivors, who had been severely stigmatised as enemies of the state and branded “red insurgents” (pokto).
Hang Kang’s novel makes it clear that Jeju 4.3 is not simply an issue of the past, but one of the present that persists and lives on in the lives of all who it has touched. Inseon was born the only daughter of a mother who witnessed the massacre and a father who survived, not only on Jeju, but also afterwards on the Korean mainland. This parentage means she cannot forget nor repress it, it constantly intrudes into her life.
Han Kang urges the public to bear witness, the reader does so through Kyungha. As she delves into the history through memory and official documents, we too do the same. In this act of reading we remember and name the tragedy.
Ultimately, this becomes an act of commemoration of the victims whose spirits still seem unable to leave this life as they remain on the island in the form of wind, birds, trees, snow and sea. We see, as Kyungha sees, Jeju 4.3 has left too much pain and too many scars on the souls for them to forget and leave.
We Do Not Part is captivating, moving and from sentence to sentence Han Kang’s sensitive approach to Jeju 4.3 makes us reflect on why we still need to remember and commemorate this tragedy and the many others that still go ignored.
Hyunseon Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
