On days of heavy snowfall, I used to extend my coat sleeve to watch the flakes settle on the fluff on its dark fabric and dissolve. It make me dizzy to consider the innumerable combinations of coruscating hexagonal crystals like the ones I'd seen in the book that made up each grain of snow. For days after, I had woken from sleep and, while my eyes remained closed, imagined it was still snowing outside. I had seen snow drift down around me indoors while I lay sprawled on the floor, working on some tedious holiday assignment. Flakes landing on my hand, from which I'd just removed a hangnail. Flakes landing on the loose hairs and eraser dust strewn across the floor.The strangest thing, snow, I recall Inseon saying. Had she been picturing scenes similar to the ones I'd imagined? How does something like that fall from the sky? she's said, eyes directed not at me but at the window, as though she were quietly disputing someone outside, someone invisible. As though she found it difficult to accept its beauty.
We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, is a haunting novel, lyrical, dreamlike. Lulled by its beauty, I was blindsided by its grimness. Nightmare-like.
The novel centres on events concerning the inhabitants of Jeju Island and the massacres beginning in April 1948 and continuing through 1949. the military hunted and killed residents, including children and infants. The ruling government body at the time? The United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), and then Syngman Rhee elected as the first president of the Republic of Korea (having previously served as president of the Korean Provisional Government, until he was impeached; see Ed Park's Same Bed, Different Dreams), who escalated the eradication of "rebel forces."
On days when American reconnaissance planes dropped a blizzard of propaganda leaflets, leaflets that said anyone who turned themself in wouldn't be punished, my aunt would whisper to my mom that he might give himself up after reading the message. That since he was slight and looked younger than his age, he probably wouldn't be shot on his way down from the woods.
This story is another chapter in the seemingly eternal battle between the hero Americans and the godless commie Russians (as the story has been framed for us westerners). I am stunned that the reviews are not directly addressing the subject matter of this novel and recognizing it as an indictment of American hegemony and interventionist politics.
She would recount what my father had told her about the torture he's endured at thte alcohol factory. How a man in a miltary uniform with no insignia who spoke the northern dialect had treated him. What the man said each time he stripped my father and tied him upside down to a chair.
We'll slaughter every last one of you commie sons of bitches, wipe you clean off the face of the earth. We'll stamp the life out of you rats if there's even a drop of red in you.
Some estimates of the dead on Jeju number as high as 80,000.
It's no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer. The governing U.S. military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that's what it took to stop their communization.
It wasn't until 2003 that the South Korean government issued an apology, and 2019 that the police forces and defense ministry acknowledged their role. The United States government has been called to apologize for its role in the incident, but has yet to do so.
In the four years between the first time I had the dream and that early summer morning, I had parted ways with several people in my life. Some of these partings had been by choice, while others had caught me entirely unawares; I'd fought the latter with everything I had. If, as various ancient faiths say, there exists in a celestial realm or a netherworld an immense mirror that observes and logs everyone's movements, I'm sure the last three to four years of my life as recorded there must resemble a snail coming out of its shell to push along a knife's edge. A body desiring to live. A body pricked and nicked. A body spurning, embracing, clinging. A body kneeling. A body entreating. A body seeping blood or pus or tears.
I take the title to mean the dead never leave us, history haunts us, our family haunts us. Even the pet bird leaves traces. We are mired in the lives of the dead.
There's a great deal of ambiguity regarding the present day circumstances of the novel. Is the narrator's journey to Jeju real? Does she die in the snow? Is all of it a dream? How does her friend materialize here, she is in a hospital in Seoul, has she crossed to another realm? Is the bird resurrected?
Kang's descriptions of snow are otherworldly. I wish I'd read this a couple of months ago when we were still blanketed in white instead of during the spring rains. The snow here also serves many literary purposes: it hides and protects, it numbs, it purifies, it preserves.
Yes, this is a powerful book, with cinematic prose and highly metaphorical imagery. But honestly, can we just express some outrage about the fucking atrocity, and how the fucking United States persists in interfering: Haiti, Vietnam, Cuba, Panama, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and literally dozens of other countries to varying degrees. Could they just fucking stop?!
Each time I am lured into sleep like I'm being pulled toward a warm light, I force my eyes open with my hands. I can't tell if it's drowsiness or the thin layer of ice over my lashes that is keeping them sealed.
Faces appear to me in my fading consciousness. Not the faces of dead strangers but of people who are living, albeit far away on the mainland. They are exhilaratingly clear. Vivid memories play out before me. In no particular order, and without context. Like a thousand dancers spilling onto the stage at once to each perform a different movement. Their bodies, suspended in their poses, shimmer like crystals.
I don't know if this is what happens right before you die. Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline. Nothing hurts anymore. Hundreds upon thousands of moments glitter in unison, like snowflakes whose elaborate shapes are in full view. How this is possible, I can't say. My every pain and joy, all my deep-rooted sorrows and loves, shine, not as an amalgam but as a whole comprised of distinct singularities, glowing together as one giant nebula.
Excerpt: Crystals