Light and Thread

Light and Thread is a hybrid nonfiction collection by South Korean author Han Kang, comprising her Nobel Lecture, reflective essays, poems, and diary entries. The book traces the autobiographical arc of Han Kang's creative life, examining the questions that have driven each of her novels, the pain and love she has encountered through writing about historical violence, and the quiet transformation she experiences while tending a small garden that receives no direct sunlight.

The collection opens with "Light and Thread," Han Kang's Nobel Lecture. She begins by recounting how, while sorting through a storeroom ahead of a move, she discovered an old shoe box containing childhood diaries and a hand-stapled chapbook titled "A Book of Poems," dated 1979, when she was eight. One poem asks, "Where is love?" and answers that love is "the gold thread connecting between our hearts." She photographs the poem, sensing a continuity between her childhood words and her present self.

Han Kang traces her development as a writer, describing her process as one of enduring questions rather than finding answers: Each novel ends when she reaches the end of the questions, and each completed work transforms her, generating the next set of inquiries. The Vegetarian (written 2003–2005) explores whether a person can be completely innocent and how deeply one can reject violence; its protagonist, Yeong-hye, refuses all food in an attempt to become a plant, quickening toward death in a bid to save herself. The follow-up, Ink and Blood, asks how one can go on living if refusing the world to refuse violence is impossible. Greek Lessons pushes further, asking which moments make life possible, as a woman who has lost her speech and a man losing his sight share a tactile instant of vulnerability.

In the spring of 2012, Han Kang resolved to write a life-affirming novel but stopped after 20 pages. She explains this obstruction by recounting how her family left Gwangju, a city in South Korea, in January 1980, roughly four months before the military massacred civilians resisting a coup. At age 12, she found a secretly published photo book documenting the killings and was confronted by two irreconcilable questions: How could humans commit such violence, and how could other humans line up to donate blood for the wounded? She recognized that she had long lost a deep-rooted trust in humanity.

She spent much of 2012 sketching a novel about Gwangju, eventually deciding it must confront the massacre directly. She read over 900 testimonials and expanded her research to other instances of state violence. Two questions she had carried since her mid-twenties guided her: "Can the present help the past? / Can the living save the dead?" The research shattered what remained of her belief in humanity, and she nearly abandoned the novel. Then she read the diary of Park Yong-jun, a shy young educator who participated in the self-governing citizen community formed during the 10-day Gwangju uprising. He was shot and killed after choosing to remain in a building despite knowing soldiers would return. On his last night, he wrote, "Why, God, must I have a conscience that pricks and pains me so? I wish to live" (9). His words gave Han Kang clarity: her questions had to be reversed. While writing what became Human Acts, she sensed at certain moments that the dead were indeed saving the living.

She then describes how a dream from June 2014 became the seed of her next novel. After years of research into the 1948 civilian massacres on Jeju Island, she wrote We Do Not Part. The novel follows narrator Kyungha on a journey through heavy snow to save a friend's pet bird, descends into the history of the Jeju massacres, and closes with a symbolic scene in which two friends light a candle at the bottom of the sea. Its true protagonist is the survivor Jeongsim, who fights to recover her loved ones' bones and refuses to stop mourning. The questions driving the novel became: To what extent can we love, and to what degree must we love to remain human? Han Kang closes the lecture by returning to her childhood poem and the image of the gold thread, reflecting that love has been her most fundamental undertone from the very beginning.

The brief essay "Even in the Darkest Night" recounts a childhood memory of sheltering from a downpour and suddenly understanding that every person present was living as an "I." Han Kang argues that literature, which insists on imagining the first-person perspectives of others, inevitably holds body heat and stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life.

"After Publication" chronicles the aftermath of completing We Do Not Part. Han Kang catalogs the rituals the novel freed her from: waking at dawn to light candles, typing "massacre" into search bars, feeling closer to the dead than to the living. She describes feeling hollow and transformed, unable to begin new work. She recalls that in January 2019, having concluded her remaining life held no peace or hope, she wrote the numbers 1 to 1,000 on a calendar sheet, resolving to erase one per day. Paradoxically, the deeper she worked on the novel, the more she began to live. Upon finishing the first draft in fall 2020, she understood the novel was about love: "a flame melting broken glass back together again, into one whole mass." She describes periods of intense composition in which she danced, wept, and wrote, characterizing those weeks as being born again.

"Small Teacup" describes three daily routines Han Kang maintained while writing We Do Not Part: waking at five-thirty to write, walking along a nearby stream, and steeping tea in a small cup whose bluish interior became the quiet center of her days. Several poems follow. "The Coat and I" meditates on aging through the image of a 20-year-old black overcoat, asking whether the coat wears the speaker as she wears it. "North-Facing Room" describes adapting to a lightless room until the speaker becomes "a north-facing person / Whose light does not change." "(Meditation on Pain)" uses the image of covering a bird's cage with a dark cloth, ending with the whisper that the bird might have wanted to open its eyes. "Sound(s)," a three-part poem cycle, moves from awakening amid suffering to a dialogue on hope and concludes with a meditation on the Korean word annyeong, which serves as both greeting and farewell. "A Very Small Snowflake" addresses a single snowflake that spreads its wings toward the speaker's face before vanishing.

"North-Facing Garden" describes Han Kang's purchase, at age 48, of a small house, her first home fully owned in her own name. The north-facing flower bed receives no direct sunlight, so on a landscaper's advice she uses adjustable desk mirrors to reflect southerly light onto the plants, eventually accumulating eight. She must adjust the mirrors every 15 minutes, internalizing through this labor the earth's rotation and seasonal revolution. Over three years, the work of tending and reflecting light fundamentally transforms her.

"Garden Diary" tracks the garden across 2021, 2022, and 2023. Han Kang records the resurrection of plants after winter, battles with aphids and mites, and a clumsy first pesticide application that eliminated the garden's entire small ecosystem. On April 26, 2021, she records completing We Do Not Part after seven years of work. In December 2022, her mother visited for the first time and remarked that the house reminded her of the one where Han Kang was born, a house Han Kang has no memory of, leading Han Kang to wonder whether this recognition explains her love for the place. They lay under a blanket holding hands before leaving for the Nobel Prize ceremony. By spring 2023, the viburnum had grown taller than Han Kang, and the scent of lilac filled the courtyard.

The book closes with the poem "Having Managed to Live Some More," in which the speaker imagines thinking, in the moment before death, that she held life close through writing and managed to live enough. The final image is of sunlight, looked at for a long time. The last pages reproduce the April 1979 childhood poem in Han Kang's original Korean handwriting and in English translation: love as the gold thread connecting hearts.