The White Book

The White Book is a lyrical, experimental novel divided into three parts. Its unnamed narrator, a Korean woman writer, weaves meditations on white objects and phenomena with the story of her mother's firstborn child, a girl who died less than two hours after birth. Structured as a series of short, titled sections each centered on a white thing, from swaddling bands to shrouds, snow to salt, the book is an act of grief, imagination, and communion with a sister the narrator never knew.

In spring, the narrator compiles a list of white things she intends to write about, sensing that the process will be healing, like ointment on a wound. She travels in August to a foreign city she has never visited and leases an apartment. Two months later, a severe migraine strikes, and she realizes that writing this book will not allow her to hide from the pain it probes. She has endured migraines since age twelve or thirteen, episodes that sharpen her awareness of time into something razor-edged, and she frames the writing as a reckless step into unlived time. After moving in, she paints over the apartment's rusted, scarred metal door with white paint, erasing its gouged numbers and stains, then watches snow begin to fall as the paint dries.

The narrator introduces the central event behind the book. Her mother's first child, a girl born two months premature, died less than two hours after birth. Her mother, only twenty-two, was alone in their isolated countryside house when her water broke. She boiled water to sterilize scissors, sewed a tiny white gown, and gave birth alone on the kitchen floor during the first frost of the year. She cut the umbilical cord, dressed the baby, and held her, repeating, "For God's sake don't die." After about an hour, the baby opened her eyes and looked toward her mother's face. An hour later, the baby died. The mother lay clutching the body as cold sank through its flesh. She later described the baby as "white as a moon-shaped rice cake," an image the narrator connects to the pristine, unsteamed rice dough she helped shape as a child during Chuseok, a Korean harvest festival: a beauty that seemed not of this world.

In the foreign city, the narrator watches archival footage showing that 95 percent of the city was obliterated beginning in October 1944, after its citizens rose up against the Nazis, provoking Hitler to order total destruction. From the air, the ruined city appears mantled in white: not snow but pulverized stone. The narrator realizes everything around her had once been dead. Nothing in this city has existed for more than seventy years; its buildings are painstaking reconstructions with the seams between old fragments and new construction exposed.

Walking through a park, the narrator first imagines a figure she calls "she": someone who had met the same fate as the city, destroyed and painstakingly rebuilt on fire-scoured ruins, becoming something new yet bearing a strange pattern where old meets new. She reads about a man born in this city who lived with the soul of his elder brother, killed at age six in the Jewish ghetto, and considers her own situation: If her mother's firstborn had visited her similarly, the narrator would have been oblivious, because the baby never learned language. There would have been only an unintelligible voice saying, "Don't die."

The narrator formally conjures the dead sister as having survived: drinking the breast milk, growing up, the words "Don't die. For God's sake don't die" knitted into her body like an amulet. She imagines the sister coming to this city, whose death and life resemble her own, and pledges to give "she" only white, pure things.

Part 2, titled "She," shifts into the imagined sister's consciousness as she experiences the city. She observes rime on a window and frost-covered ground, sensitive to cold because of the character for snow in her name. She sees a white butterfly with wings leached nearly transparent from repeated freezing. She watches snow's hexagonal crystals melt on a coat sleeve. She recalls a white mongrel chained in a neighbor's yard, consumed by terror, which she names Fog after a childhood riddle; when she returns that winter, the dog has died in the cold without ever making a sound. She and her younger brother place their mother's powdered bones in an ossuary near a coastal temple. She examines salt and its power to preserve and heal, finds comfort in freshly laundered white bedsheets, and watches white gulls on a winter shore.

Through these meditations, "she" confronts mortality and endurance. She tallies the hours of pain she has endured, her body repeatedly impeding her progress. She thinks of university classmates who died young, memorialized by yulan trees, and wonders whether white flowers have to do with life or death. Looking in the mirror, she never forgets that death hovers behind her face, like dark ink bleeding through thin paper. She addresses life directly: Learning to love it again is long and complicated, because at her weakest moment, it will turn its back on her.

In "Boundary," the narrative retells the birth story, but now the baby survives. Though the baby stops crying and closes her eyes, she is still breathing before dawn. When the first milk comes and the mother presses her nipple between the tiny lips, the baby swallows with growing strength, passing over some boundary without knowing what threshold she has crossed. In "Reedbed," the imagined "she" walks into a snow-covered marsh and asks herself whether she wants to go on living. There was a time she answered no. Now she walks, holding any answer in reserve. In "Spirit," she reflects on the city's unresolved grief and her own, resolving to stop lying, remove the veil, and light a candle for all the deaths she can remember, including her own.

Part 3, "All Whiteness," returns to the narrator's own voice. She discloses that the year after her mother lost the first child, another premature birth occurred: a boy who died without ever opening his eyes. Had either child survived, the narrator's own birth three years later would not have occurred. The narrator addresses the dead sister directly: Only one of them could have lived this life, and only in the gap between darkness and light do they make out each other's faces.

She recalls asking her father as a teenager what happened to the baby. He answered that he wrapped her in a white shroud, took her to the mountain, and buried her alone. The narrator imagines the older sister she never had, an onni (Korean for a woman's older sister) who would hand down sweaters, solve math problems, and offer a brief embrace in the dark. Returning to Seoul, she and her brother burn white cotton mourning robes at the temple where their mother's ashes are kept, as is the custom of offering clothes to the departed, and the narrator silently invites her dead sister to receive them.

In the final sections, the narrator mutters the words the dead sister heard upon opening her eyes: "Don't die. For God's sake don't die." She presses down on white paper, declaring no better words of parting exist. The book closes with her vow that through her sister's eyes, she will see the deepest place within a white cabbage's heart, a glacier's sacred ice, the silence of a white birch forest, and the shining grains of dust along shafts of light. Within all that whiteness, she will breathe in the final breath her sister released.