We Do Not Part

By Han Kang

Translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris

(2021, translated 2025)

Hogarth Press


Han Kang’s We Do Not Part is, in many ways, a shamanistic resurrection of the suppressed history of the Jeju massacre and a visceral re-feeling and release of a national trauma. For many years, Korea used language to conceal what happened on Jeju from 1948 to 1950 by referring to it as the “Jeju Uprising” or the “Jeju April 3 Incident.” Korea was under Japanese colonial rule from 1910 through 1945. During that time, Jeju was a hot spot of resistance. The most active groups were communist and fighting for a free Korea. In 1945, the nation was divided at the 38th parallel, a pro tempore military decision based on the work of the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea. In 1948, it was announced there would be a public vote on whether to continue the North-South division or reunite the nation. In Jeju, the Workers Party of South Korea protested throughout 1948, and in April, they fought openly with the police and the Northwest Youth League, a paramilitary group made up of anti-communist refugees from the North and agents of Syngman Rhee, a rabid anti-communist. From 1948 to 1950, the Northwest Youth League engaged in an operation to wipe out all communists on the island. In their efforts, they committed atrocities, burning villages to the ground and massacring the inhabitants. Between 10,000 and 30,000 men, women, and children were killed. The violence only came to a stop with the start of the Korean War, and it was illegal to speak, report on, or write about the massacres for decades after. Han Kang’s two main characters are contemporary women. One is Kyungah, a writer, who is physically and emotionally exhausted after writing a novel about an incident of ultraviolence in Korean history. The other is Inseon, an old acquaintance, a documentary film-maker and a woodworker who creates three-dimensional art on Jeju. Kyungah is experiencing intense dreams and visions, and when she happens to run into her college friend, she shares this experience with Inseon and reveals that she is seeing a recurring image of a burned forest along a shoreline. Some of the burned trunks are partly underwater, others are on the beach, and all are vaguely human. They finish their coffees and go their separate ways. Kyungah returns home to her nightmares, and her connection to Inseon slips away until one night when Inseon calls her from a nearby hospital. The sculptress badly damaged her hand at her studio and has come to the mainland to work with the nation’s best hand surgeons. The two artists appear to be the most isolated individuals in the world, deeply committed to works that appear before them and cry out to be created. They discover they are the only ones who can understand their lonely dedication to opening themselves to spirits that cry out for witnesses, justice, and rest. While enduring treatment for her wound, Inseon reveals that she did not forget their conversation about the burned forest and has been working intensely on the project for many months. We Do Not Part is the story of the deep connection between these two female artists and their increasing interaction with the long-dead spirits of the victims of the Jeju massacre. Han Kang’s characters are like mudangs, female shamans. They are often not in control of what is happening to them, but it affects their bodies, rendering them cold, trembling, and wracked by pain. Visions come sporadically. As in dreams, what the characters witness is hazy, fragmented, and resists being “read” or “told” as a traditional story. Like the mudangs with their knives, each woman suffers innumerable cutting blows, wounds that are not only psychic but very real, lacerations that Han Kang renders with cold and unflinching realism. In a way, the cuts and abrasions these women endure in these episodes are the most concrete and knowable elements of their experience and who they are. The reader will be able to report the story of how they became injured and continue to suffer more injury, but the story the spirits are trying to tell through them resists comprehension. However, in the final movements of the novel, their story fully emerges. In We Do Not Part, Han Kang not only reveals a national crime and a trauma that cries for justice, but she also shares the incomprehensible toll endured by the writer who looks at what is forbidden to look at and dares to speak through the hearts and minds of the innocent dead.

“Was this a graveyard? I wondered. Are these gravestones? 

I walked past the torsos—treetops lopped off, exposed cross sections stippled with snowflakes that resembled salt crystals; I passed the prostrating barrows behind them. My feet stilled as I noticed the sensation of water underfoot. That’s strange, I thought. Within moments the water was up to my ankles. I looked back. What I saw astonished me: the far horizon turned out to be the shoreline. And the sea was crashing in. 

The words tumbled from my lips: Who would bury people in such a place? 

The current was strong. Had the tide surged in and out like this each day? Were the lower mounds hollowed out, the bones long since swept away? 

There was no time. The graves already underwater were out of reach, but the remains higher up the slope, I needed to move them to safety. Now, before the sea encroached further. But how? There was no one around. I had no shovel. How would I get to them all? At a loss, I ran through the thicket of black trees, knees cleaving the rising water.”