translated by E. Yaewon and
Paige Aniyah Morris
Jeju is an island paradise with a dark secret. Every year, millions of holidaymakers touch down on this lush oval-shaped volcanic island about 80 kilometers from the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. But how many of them are aware that between 1949 and 1950 around 700 people were executed at the present site of Jeju International Airport and that many of these bodies remain buried beneath the main runway?
It is the sort of uncomfortable question that Han Kang, who last year became the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, poses in her latest novel, We Do Not Part. The 54-year-old writer, best known for her 2007 International Booker Prize–winning novel, The Vegetarian, about a woman whose decision to stop eating meat is met with consternation by her family, has noted that all of her books are “variations on the theme of human violence.”
We Do Not Part deepens that exploration by drilling down into the traumatic events of the so-called Jeju massacre, which occurred after martial law was imposed on the island in 1948. It is believed that as many as 30,000 Jeju inhabitants, including numerous women and children, were murdered for their supposedly Communist beliefs.
It is a brave book for Han to have written, having already been placed on a blacklist in 2014 by South Korea’s then conservative government for writing her novel Human Acts, which recounts the Chun Doo-hwan military dictatorship’s massacre of students in 1980 following pro-democracy protests in the city of Gwangju.
Kyungha, the narrator of We Do Not Part, is a writer who appears to be loosely based on Han herself. She too has written a book about the massacre in Gwangju that was published in 2014. Since its publication, Kyungha has been plagued by nightmares and developed increasingly paranoid feelings of being stalked by snipers. “Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively—brazenly—hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?”
Not unlike the self-starving protagonist in The Vegetarian, Kyungha feels increasingly suicidal and sees premonitions of death all around her. She finally snaps out of her malaise when she visits an old friend (Inseon) at a hospital in Seoul, who has sliced off the tips of the fingers of one hand in a carpentry accident. Inseon begs her friend to go to her home in Jeju so as to feed her pet bird before it dies.
Kyungha arrives in Jeju amid a snowstorm, the likes of which she has never seen on the mainland. “Snowflakes resembling a flock of tens of thousands of birds appear like a mirage and sweep over the sea, vanishing with the light.” Han’s narrative takes an increasingly surreal turn when Kyungha arrives at Inseon’s home after several snowbound misadventures. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, Kyungha believes that Inseon is with her in Jeju.
Han conjures up an astonishing dialogue between the two old friends, with Inseon recounting her mother’s confidences about what happened in Jeju after the Second World War. “She told me about how, when she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village.” It was only because Inseon’s mother and her aunt had been away visiting a distant cousin’s house that they avoided the same gruesome fate as the rest of their family.
Her father also survived the massacre, but only after years of imprisonment and torture. “Extermination was the goal,” Inseon says. “Exterminate what?” Kyungha asks. “The reds,” Insheon replies.
The Nobel Prize committee praised Han for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” In We Do Not Part she hints at the toll such a responsibility has taken on her health. Throughout the novel Kyungha suffers debilitating migraines similar to the ones that Han has described having to put up with in her own life.
But defeatism is not part of Han’s vocabulary. Instead, she has credited these migraines with “always making me humble, helping me realize I’m mortal and vulnerable.” It is a shame that such qualities have fallen so terribly out of fashion, as they make the world a far better place.
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books
