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Han Kang (author), e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (translators), We do Not Part, Hogarth, 2025. 272 pgs.

Kyungha struggles to sleep or eat, suffers from persistent headaches, and is acutely sensitive to the oppressive heat of summer and the biting cold of winter. She endures a profound physical torment, the causes of which remain ambiguous. Her recurring dreams of “flooded graves and silent headstones” suggest she is nearing a breaking point, seemingly because “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?”

She receives an urgent call from her friend Inseon—a documentary filmmaker and woodworker—who has been hospitalised following a work-related accident. Inseon asks her to return to her home on Jeju Island to feed Ama, her pet bird. This task sends Kyungha on a treacherous journey through the island, beset by an unusually fierce snowstorm. There, racing against time to ensure the bird’s survival, she uncovers fragments of Inseon’s family history and the harrowing past of Jeju Island from decades prior.

This is a story about the persistence of memory—about the impossibility of forgetting, despite repeated attempts to suppress the weight of tragedy, which inevitably resurfaces as a story that demands to be told. It first emerges in dreams: “Sometimes, with some dreams, you awake and sense that the dream is ongoing elsewhere”, and then gradually takes form in reality. In many respects, the entire narrative possesses a dreamlike quality, particularly in the final section of the novel.

While visiting Inseon in hospital, Kyungha recalls a past conversation. She had once shared a dream with her friend and proposed realising it as an outdoor installation artwork: “What if you and I were to plant logs in a field, dress them in black ink, and film them under falling snow?” Though the project had been indefinitely postponed, unbeknownst to Kyungha, Inseon had quietly begun preparations—just before the accident occurred.

Inseon severs two fingers while woodworking and is admitted to a hospital that specialises in the reattachment of lost digits. The crucial detail we are given about such procedures is the necessity of ensuring the bleeding does not cease: “We have to make sure scabs don’t form on the wound”, she is told, “we have to let the blood flow, that I have to feel the pain. Otherwise, the nerves below the cut will die.” Inseon’s repeated pricking of her fingers to preserve nerve vitality resonates with the broader theme of never ceasing to mourn the lives lost in the Jeju massacre, as she recounts her mother’s story to Kyungha. The motif of the re-sutured fingers—and its connection to the preserved and painful memory of the past—reappears throughout the novel with quiet insistence.

Flesh wounds and snowfall are intimately entwined: “While the needles plunged into her wounds”, we are told, delicate ice crystals traced fine lines through the air outside the hospital. It is under these conditions that Kyungha embarks on her journey to Jeju Island.

The snowstorm she battles is imbued with an eerie, otherworldly atmosphere: “If not for the chill of the icy particles set on falling and settling on my forehead and on my cheeks, I might wonder if I’m dreaming. Are the streets empty because of the storm?” The journey feels interminable: “I’ve stopped running. I walk, feeling a strange compulsion to match my steps to the pace of the drifting snow, which itself seems synchronised to the passage of time.” It becomes clear that Kyungha is confronting her own inner turmoil along the way—that this temporal distortion is less meteorological than psychological, though the journey itself lasts only a few hours.

At one point, Kyungha encounters a solitary figure—an older woman with vacant eyes—and their brief separation leaves an unexpectedly deep emotional trace: “She is neither kin nor acquaintance. She’s only a stranger I happened to stand beside at a bus stop. Why then do I feel in turmoil, as if I have just bid someone farewell?”

Snow functions as a central character in the novel, described in multiple, nuanced ways. It is beautiful, increasingly menacing, and always elemental in its simplicity. Though phrases such as “light as snow” and “light as a bird” evoke delicacy, in this work both snow and birds carry a distinct heft, weighted by historical resonance. “If the distance between the clouds and the ground were infinite,” Han Kang writes, “the snowflakes too would grow to infinity, but in reality, the descent never takes longer than an hour”—things begin; circumstances come to an end.

Kyungha reflects on how the hollow spaces within snow crystals muffle and entrap sound, and how snow, by scattering light in myriad directions, “appears colourless, it appears white”. Han’s palette may seem dominated by pallor—white snow, white waves, white thread—but it is set against the crosshatched earth, marked by ink strokes and trees shaded in “gradations of black”. The night is rendered as “a sea of ink”; the light, a haze of blue-grey, pewter, and ash. This subdued spectrum is violently ruptured by flashes of red: the blood of Inseon’s relatives frozen into the ground; the glowing slits of a wood stove; crimson silk wrapped around boxes of documents; the soil of a looted village stained by the spillage of spicy sauce. When Kyungha finally asks what the soldiers had sought “to exterminate” in the story of Inseon’s mother, the reply arrives in political hue: “The reds” (communists).

Eventually, Kyungha reaches Inseon’s remote house. Soon after, Inseon appears to be physically present—yet is this encounter merely a fever dream, conjured after a night spent snowbound? Are these imagined conversations with a friend who, in reality, lies hospitalised far away? Kyungha notices there is no physical contact between them in the Jeju house. Inseon’s right hand has “fingers intact, unstitched, unbloodied”. She is seen rubbing her eyes with that same hand—“immaculate, entirely unscathed”. Yet nearby, blood is frozen into the snow: “by the workbench, under more snow, a pool of blood has hardened to ice.” “That must have been where Inseon lay unconscious after injuring her fingers,” Kyungha concludes.

Near the novel’s end, Inseon reveals the title of their once-imagined collaborative art project: We Do Not Part. She reflects, “As in we refuse to part by refusing to say goodbye, or as in we actually don’t part ways?” She adds, “Is it somehow incomplete, the parting? Is it deferred? The goodbye—or the closure?”

We are left without certainty. The novel contains such depth and quiet intricacy that multiple readings seem not only warranted but necessary.

How to cite: Eagleton, Jennifer. “The Persistance of Memory: Han Kang’s We Do Not Part.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 May 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/05/04/do-not-part.

Jennifer Eagleton, a Hong Kong resident since October 1997, is a close observer of Hong Kong society and politics. Jennifer has written for Hong Kong Free Press, Mekong Review, and Education about Asia. Her first book is Discursive Change in Hong Kong (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and she is currently writing another book on Hong Kong political discourse for Palgrave MacMillan. Her poetry has appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, People, Pandemic & ####### (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), and Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art (Cart Noodles Press, 2023). A past president of the Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society, Jennifer teaches and researches part-time at a number of universities in Hong Kong. [All contributions by Jennifer Eagleton.]

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