50 pages • 1-hour read
We Do Not Part
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Part 1, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Bird”
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Birds”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal death and death.
When Kyungha exits the bus, the snow is still coming down heavily, and the winds are howling. She is in a small, deserted village: All the shop windows are shuttered, and no one is out on the street. She makes her way to a bus stop where she is surprised to see an elderly woman. The woman gives her a cold, dispassionate look and does not greet her.
Kyungha reflects that elderly women always had a prominent place in Inseon’s films, and she wonders how much Inseon’s mother had to do with elderly women as a focal point in her work. She thinks back to the times that she visited Inseon on Jeju and how interested she was to learn about her friend’s family and the island’s history. After Inseon adopted her budgies, she taught Kyungha about birds. Kyungha learned that birds have hollow bones and tiny stomachs, that they will often pretend not to be sick even when they are gravely ill, and that several species can learn to mimic human language.
The snowstorm worsens, and Kyungha is unsure if she will be able to make it to Secheon-ri, Inseon’s village. She decides to call her friend to explain that the storm has rendered travel impossible and that she will not be able to check on Ama. The first call does not go through, and the second cuts out very quickly after a woman’s voice tells her to call back later. Her phone is nearly out of battery, but just then, the bus arrives. She explains to the driver where she is going, and he does his best to help her figure out which of Secheon-ri’s four stops she will need.
The elderly woman exits the bus before Kyungha does, and as she watches the woman’s stooped figure disappear into the snow, she feels a distinct sense of loss. She is confused; this woman is neither friend nor family member, so why does she feel the pain of losing someone she does not even know? As she nears her own stop, Kyungha develops a migraine and momentarily forgets about the old woman. Getting off the bus, she sees a dark forest with skeletal trees that remind her of the trees in her dream.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Remaining Light”
The storm continues to intensify, and Kyungha is freezing. The path to Inseon’s is winding and unlit, difficult to travel even in the best of conditions. Kyungha accidentally drops her phone and does not realize that it is gone until she is far past the spot where it fell. She tries to spot landmarks through the snow and thinks that she might be near one of the Jeju massacre sites. If she is right, then she is close to Inseon’s home.
Still, she is beginning to wish that she had not gotten off the bus. She thinks about Inseon’s planned but unmade triptych of films. One featured a woman who walked through a snowy part of Dongbei on her own. As a part of the film, Inseon walked the same path. Had her experience been as difficult as Kyungha’s journey today? She thinks about women throughout history, especially those who struggle during wartime, and about what Korean women endured at the hands of Japanese soldiers.
The snow continues to fall. Kyungha’s migraine is gone, but it has been replaced with a sharp pain in her jaw. She grows colder and wants to sleep. Kyungha presses on, telling herself that she must make it to Inseon’s to care for the bird. She thinks more about Inseon’s films and her discussion of the tens of thousands of people killed in various massacres. Inseon included images of herself in some of her films, and Kyungha found those inclusions compelling, even if most people didn’t.
Finally, she arrives at Inseon’s. The workshop is well lit, and the doors are wide open despite its emptiness. At first, Kyungha is filled with a sense of foreboding, but then she realizes that when emergency services were summoned, they must not have turned off the lights or shut the door.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Trees”
Kyungha steps inside Inseon’s workshop and is amazed to see dozens of felled trees piled everywhere. She wanders through the workshop, thinking about how carefully her friend works. She is amazed that she can complete her projects alone, despite the size of some of her materials.
Kyungha makes her way outside, where she sees more felled trees. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a large human form waving its arms and takes a step back, startled. It is only a tree swaying in the wind, and Kyungha recovers her composure.
She makes her way into Inseon’s house, hoping to find Ama alive and well. She sees a massive pile of boxes and folders full of files marked with sticky tabs. Inseon’s winter clothing is hung in the closet, and there is a small mattress on the floor. She approaches Ama’s cage. The water dish is empty, and there is no food in the small container that is usually filled with seeds and dried fruit. Ama is lying still on the cage’s floor, unmoving.
Kyungha finds a piece of cloth and a sewing kit. She makes the bird a small shroud and then places it into a biscuit tin, using her scarf to pack its small body in so that it will not rattle around. She then ties the tin shut to keep vermin out, finds a suitable spot in the yard, and begins to dig. At first, she struggles to break through the frozen ground, but eventually, she reaches soft earth. She finishes burying Ama and feels a sense of calm that she was able to give the creature a proper burial.
Kyungha goes back inside and watches the film that Inseon made, the unpopular one in which Inseon herself appeared, talking about the Jeju massacre. She explains that Jeju is full of caves that have small entrances and are easily hidden. People hid in these caves during the massacre. The film includes footage of soldiers executing civilians and US Army maps of the island. It features interviews with survivors in which they both mourn those killed and tell stories about how haunted the massacre’s survivors were.
Kyungha feels worse and worse and vomits into the sink. Her head is pounding, and she feels feverish. She drifts in and out of consciousness, and each time she passes out, she is troubled by nightmarish visions of mass killings and mass graves. She wonders if she has come to Jeju to die. The wind howls, and it sounds as though someone is at the door, but she cannot tell if it is just the storm. The power cuts out, and Kyungha fills several pots with water in case the water also stops running. She lays back down and is once again in the throes of a nightmare. She dreams that she tries to dig up Ama’s lifeless body and breaks her fingernails off on the frozen earth.
Part 1, Chapters 4-6 Analysis
This set of chapters employs surrealistic imagery and is symbolically rich. On her way to Inseon’s home on Jeju, Kyungha encounters an elderly woman, causing her to reflect on the role of women in society and, in particular, their importance to Inseon’s documentaries. She does not know this woman but feels an acute, distressing sense of loss when the woman exits the bus and disappears into the snowstorm. The woman represents not only Korean women, broadly speaking, but also how cultural, familial, and historical knowledge is passed down from one generation of women to the next. The fact that the woman disappears into the snow signifies the way that cultural knowledge is lost when women are either murdered during state-sponsored massacres or silenced in the wake of those killings—as in Kyungha’s dream, the snow represents that silencing, enveloping the woman and causing her to disappear. Kyungha finds this woman’s disappearance into the snow so distressing because she is deeply impacted by Korea’s violent history and is engaged professionally in trying to uncover and publicize it.
Kyungha’s entire journey to Jeju in these chapters is symbolic. Its difficulty parallels the difficulty that Kyungha and Inseon experience in their search for information about mass killings in G——, Jeju, and Gyeongbuk (the site of the Bodo League massacre). Kyungha encounters various obstacles, struggles to remain on the path, and still has ample time to reflect and ruminate on Inseon’s family history, her own research, and Jeju as the site of a large massacre. The author engages symbolically with Kyungha and Inseon’s search for knowledge in these chapters: Their searches become catalysts for both self-reflection and broader reflection on the role of the Korean state in the slaughter of so many of its people. The snow again plays a pivotal role in that symbolism—its overwhelming persistence represents governmental efforts to suppress the stories of victims, conceal official records, and silence survivors.
This section of the novel begins to explore the Jeju massacre in greater depth and detail, revealing more about the killings and developing Historical Memory and Collective Trauma as a key theme. Kyungha reflects that more than “thirty thousand people” were killed on Jeju and struggles, even after her research into G——, to comprehend this figure (103). She thinks back to everything she learned about Inseon’s family and realizes that Inseon’s third film, the poorly reviewed one, included shots of Inseon herself to illustrate her part (as the child of survivors) in the bloody history of the Jeju massacre: It personalized the killings while also showing its audiences how the event continues to resonate in the present, affecting the generations that follow the survivors.
In another dream-like sequence, Kyungha buries Inseon’s pet bird only to see it rise from the dead. The burial scene is important because it reflects animist traditions and the importance of proper burial within Korean culture. Desecrating bodies is deeply taboo, as disturbing the body is believed to also disturb the body’s soul. Proper burial is highly important to Koreans, and it figures so prominently within this text because of the novel’s focus on mass killings and mass graves: Mass graves amount to somatic desecration, and individuals with family members suspected of being buried in mass graves were especially distraught. Many, like Inseon’s mother, spent decades trying to ascertain the location of their loved ones’ bodies. That Kyungha buries the bird speaks to her desire to honor her friend and her friend’s bird. That the bird does not remain buried speaks to the way that the dead return, albeit metaphorically, to haunt the living. This event reveals another layer of the narrative, in which the entire novel can be read as a meditation on these kinds of hauntings: Korean individuals and families are metaphorically haunted by their murdered relatives, and Korean society as a whole is haunted by its unresolved collective grief.
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