50 pages • 1-hour read
We Do Not Part
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Part 2, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Night”
Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary: “We Do Not Part”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, animal death, and death.
In her dreams, Kyungha observes the receding tide. The islands that jut out of the water remind her of bodies. When she wakes up, she reflects that her dreams have changed shape and that the nightmares are mostly gone. Her migraine has also dissipated, and her muscles feel looser than they have in days. It is freezing in Inseon’s house, and Kyungha finds a pair of woolen socks and a large parka to put on.
Just then, she hears a chirping and finds Ama perched inside of her cage. Puzzled, Kyungha explains to the bird that she buried her yesterday. She wonders if she is dreaming. She hears Inseon’s voice in her head, instructing her to give Ama water, so she fills the creature’s small dish and watches her drink. Next, she fills a dish with seeds and dried fruit for Ama. The bird gratefully begins to eat, and Kyungha wonders if the bird is actually still dead. She decides that even if the bird is still dead, it is probably cold: She will build a fire in the woodstove.
Kyungha heads back into Inseon’s workshop in search of wood. There, to her extreme surprise, she finds Inseon. Again, she wonders if she is dreaming. Inseon looks ill but begins to gather wood for a fire anyway. Kyungha is stunned.
The two begin talking, and the conversation turns to their film project. Inseon asks Kyungha what her proposed title was, and Kyungha responds that it should be called “We Do Not Part” (148). When Inseon presses her about the title’s meaning, asking if she intends the title to mean that they do not say goodbye or that they refuse to part, Kyungha remains silent. Kyungha asks how Inseon managed alone in such a remote place, and Inseon tells her that she had her two birds. When the first died, she buried him but felt that they had not truly parted. Kyungha observes that the second bird, Ama, is still flying around. Inseon makes Kyungha broadleaf bamboo tea and offers to prepare juk (porridge).
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary: “Shadows”
Kyungha and Inseon return to the house quietly so as not to disturb the sleeping Ama. Inseon asks Kyungha to cover Ama’s cage with the blackout cloth, and Kyungha complies, even though the cage is empty. Inseon lights a candle, and Kyungha recalls how, as a girl, she enjoyed passing her finger through flames.
She is about to pass her hand through the flame of Inseon’s candle but is distracted by a large shadow: It is a bird, flapping its wings. Inseon tells her that it is only Ami, her bird. Kyungha knows that Ami is dead since they just discussed his death and is once again unsure whether she is dreaming or awake. Inseon says that she often has the feeling that there is another presence in the house. She notes that this feeling began when she returned from Dongbei 10 years ago and learned that a mass grave had been unearthed under the runway at the Jeju airport.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary: “Wind”
Inseon recounts the article she read about a mass grave from the Jeju uprising that was discovered under Jeju airport’s runway. There was a photograph of the grave in which one body was positioned differently than the others, curled up on its side rather than prone. The article’s author speculated that people were taken to the edges of a mass grave and shot in groups of 10. The curled-up body was likely that of a person who had been alive when they were cast into the pit.
Inseon recounts becoming fixated on this person. She read the article over and over and eventually began curling up under her desk, mimicking the person’s position. She decided to structure a film around the search for this person’s identity. Based on the size of their body and their shoes, the person was likely a woman or teenage boy. Inseon believed that the person would probably have been about her own mother’s age, and she could not stop thinking about their divergent paths: One would spend the next 60 years buried under a runway, the other in a small, remote hut.
Inseon’s father was also caught up in the violence surrounding the Jeju uprising. He was of the age group most often suspected of fraternizing with the pro-communist guerillas in the hills. Young men were often rounded up by the military and police, and his parents worried constantly. One night, when he was out, he returned to his village to find it ablaze. He heard gunshots and waited, watching as many of the villagers, including his sisters, were led away by armed soldiers. After the procession departed, he returned to his home and found the body of his murdered father. The soldiers had visited each home and, assuming that men not present had joined the rebels, executed those who remained. Inseon’s father buried his father properly before leaving. He was captured a week later and tortured. Inseon notes that her own family’s history wasn’t going to be part of her film and that she wasn’t even aware of it until shortly before her mother died. Her mother kept it hidden for decades, like so many other people on Jeju.
Kyungha and Inseon pore over volumes that contain individual accounts of the Jeju uprising and massacre. Kyungha largely ignored these oral histories during the research for her book on the massacre at G——, finding it easier to think about the massacre in broad, abstract terms. The stories she reads now are difficult and emotionally impactful. Many of those interviewed were elderly, and Kyungha reflects on how long these people stayed silent about their experiences.
Part 2, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
In this set of chapters, Inseon appears at her workshop on Jeju, despite being in her hospital room in Seoul. This plot point is one of the novel’s key moments of ambiguity, foreshadowed by Ama’s return to her cage in earlier chapters, and Kang does not fully resolve it. Kyungha is shocked when Inseon arrives and wonders if she might be dreaming, but the two quickly begin to converse as though the situation were normal. Inseon reminds Kyungha that her idea for the working title of their shared project was “We Do Not Part” (148), and here, too, there is ambiguity: Inseon now questions whether this means that they do not say goodbye or that they refuse to part entirely, but Kyungha remains mute. As with Ama’s return and Inseon’s appearance, the narrative again gestures toward the idea that some moments of ambiguity and confusion cannot be resolved. The process is more important than the endpoint, and the questions that researchers ask along the way do not always yield easy-to-interpret answers or even any answers at all. This, in turn, speaks to the general difficulty of researching war, mass atrocities, and trauma: Much of the information that Kyungha and Inseon uncover does not provide easy answers, and the novel asks how it possibly could: There is no sense to be made of a government that would slaughters its citizens by the thousands, and there are few lessons to be learned from these tragedies when governments have created a culture of silence around them.
Historical Memory and Collective Trauma continues to be a focal point in the novel’s less ambiguous moments. Inseon describes a photograph of a mass grave in which one of the victims was alive when they were thrown into the pit. Inseon tells Kyungha that she began to fixate on this image and on the person. She describes spending hours thinking about who this person might have been and even tells her friend, “By winter I had gotten into the habit of lying under my desk and mimicking the posture [of the body]” (164). Inseon’s attempt to identify this person is a key moment in the novel: She seeks to restore identity and humanity to an individual denied both by the Korean government. It is too late to give this person a proper burial, but Inseon hopes that by telling their individual story, she will be able to give the person the respect and peace they deserve. This desire is rooted in part in her own family’s specific history with the Jeju massacre, which Inseon shares with Kyungha in these chapters.
However, in a broader sense, both Kyungha and Inseon care about the humanity of all Korean people, and their desire to restore that humanity to victims of mass slaughter reflects their interest in the inherent dignity of human life. This is another key way that the author engages with the theme of Friendship and Human Connection: Their friendship is important to Kyungha and Inseon, but so, too, is the connection that they share with everyone by virtue of culture, nationality, and history. This theme connects to one of the novel’s key subtexts: A broad understanding of connection that creates unity and compassion across populations is the only real way to avoid atrocities like the mass killing on Jeju.
This section of the novel does not overtly discuss the Korean government’s silencing campaign, but Inseon does share that her mother did not talk about her experiences on Jeju until the very end of her life. She tells Kyungha, “Mom didn’t tell me any of this until right before her memory started to fade” (169). Grief and Loss become intertwined with this silence, which prevented Inseon from fully knowing her mother, and Inseon’s research gains greater significance as it becomes clear that she views it as a way to honor her mother’s experiences and legacy. She already knew that the Korean government concealed records of its mass killings but was not able to place her own family in that broader historical context before her mother broke her silence. Just as she sees her work as an opportunity to restore humanity and dignity to the dead, in light of this new insight into her family’s history, it also becomes a way to restore her mother’s silenced voice.
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