We Do Not Part

Kyungha continues to struggle with nightmares and insomnia. She cannot cook or eat more than one meal per day, but she knows that what’s really upsetting her is the memory of having people to cook for and eat with. The seasons change, and Kyungha’s apartment is no longer hot. The leaves begin to turn various shades of blazing orange and crimson, and she is struck by nature’s beauty but also by the realization that autumn is a harbinger of death. 

One day in late December, Kyungha receives an email from her friend Inseon. The two met when Kyungha worked at a magazine. Inseon was a freelancer, and the two took on enough projects together that they’d become friends. Their friendship continued until Inseon moved back to care for her mother on Jeju Island and then remained there after her mother’s death. After that, they saw each other only infrequently. In her email, Inseon asks if Kyungha can come to see her at once. Kyungha asks if she is in Jeju, but Inseon clarifies: She is in a hospital in Seoul.

Inseon developed an interest in documentary filmmaking after finishing her photography degree, and in the years since Kyungha met her, she has produced two well-received films. The first to garner widespread attention was a series of interviews with Vietnamese women about abuses perpetrated by Korean soldiers during the war. Following the success of that film, she produced another about women who’d been in armed groups in Dongbei, fighting for Korean independence in the 1940s. Her third film was not as successful. Set in Jeju, it was dreamy and lacked a cohesive narrative. The subject was Inseon herself, but that was not clear to her viewers. Although she had another series of films planned, Inseon quit filmmaking entirely and became a carpenter. Kyungha assumes that she’s in the hospital as the result of some kind of work accident and hopes that her friend is not too severely injured.

Kyungha visits Inseon, who is suffering from a terrible injury. She accidentally cut off the tips of her fingers, and they had to be reattached. Because of the severe nature of the wounds, a nurse visits every three minutes, 24 hours a day, to prick her fingers with needles so that they do not rot. Inseon feels hopeless and would allow the fingers to be removed entirely, but she needs them for both filmmaking and woodworking. 

Kyungha thinks back to their proposed project, the idea she had to produce a film in which they’d plant trees on a beach, as in her dream, and document it. She had wanted the film to include snow, but Inseon pointed out that you can’t plant trees when it is snowing, and the project kept getting pushed aside. Each year for the last four years, when the winter snows began, Kyungha realized that it was once again too late to begin filming. 

Eventually, Kyungha called Inseon to tell her that she no longer wished to begin the project. Inseon, however, said that she’d gathered enough dead logs to plant into the ground and was planning to start when the mud was thawed enough. Now, she admits to having thought about Kyungha’s dreams and book: She was moved by the thought of so many human lives, cut short by the massacre. Kyungha wonders if Inseon wants to discuss the film today, but Inseon tells her that she asked her to visit for a different reason entirely: She would like Kyungha to travel to her home on Jeju Island to check on her pet bird.

Kyungha arrives on Jeju Island on the last available flight: It has begun to snow heavily, and all of the rest of the day’s flights have been canceled. No taxis will take her to Inseon’s small village. She decides to take the bus. She settles on a route that will allow her to travel most of the route on one of the island’s large buses and the last, most precarious leg on a smaller local bus. 

Inseon’s bird, a small budgie named Ama, is the sole survivor of a pair that Inseon adopted a while back, and she adores it. She has instructed Kyungha to see if Ama is still alive and, if so, to give her food and water. She would like for Kyungha to remain with Ama until she is out of the hospital. When she first asked, Kyungha was incredulous and wondered aloud if someone on the island might be able to help. Gently but firmly, Inseon told Kyungha that she wanted her to look after Ama personally.

Kyungha makes her way slowly toward Inseon’s on the bus, thinking about her friend. She was always interested in Inseon’s youth on Jeju and even asked Inseon to teach her the local dialect, which is markedly different from mainland Korean. Inseon was close to her mother, who was old enough that she was more of a grandmother, treating her with calm kindness rather than the constructively critical eye of a mother. 

At one point, however, Inseon grew tired of Jeju and of her mother and ran away to Seoul when she was a teenager. She got injured and was hospitalized; when she woke up, her mother was in the room. Her mother said that she knew, even before the hospital called, that Inseon was injured. Their connection, she explained, was that strong. 

That night in the hospital, Inseon’s mother told her the story of the Jeju massacre that happened when she was young. Police and soldiers had murdered thousands of people on Jeju. She described how the next morning, when people searched for their relatives among the dead, they struggled because overnight, the bodies had been blanketed in a thick layer of snow. Kyungha wonders if that story was the catalyst for her friend’s documentary film career and recalls how often Inseon pointed out snow to her during conversations: She was always attuned to the weather, particularly in winter.