50 pages • 1-hour read
We Do Not Part
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Part 2, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Night”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “Stillness”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, illness, and death.
Kyungha looks up from the oral histories to find that the room is shrouded in darkness. Inseon tells her that her father developed a heart condition as a result of having been tortured. The two discuss Inseon’s decision to quit making films as well as their proposed project, which Kyungha adamantly maintains they abandon.
Kyungha thinks back to their early days of friendship. Inseon had been out of college for two years when they met, and Kyungha recalls feeling that Inseon was much more mature than she was. She remembers a picnic they took to a mountain and folk stories about a group of tall stones on the mountain: They were women who were turned to stone because they had been instructed to flee and not look back at their village, but they disobeyed. Kyungha has long been grateful for Inseon’s friendship; the two passed all their life’s milestones together, including when each woman buried her parents.
Inseon shows Kyungha the contents of some of the many boxes she noticed upon her arrival, and Kyungha realizes that Inseon has spent years out here, alone on Jeju, poring through oral histories of the massacre. Inseon recounts another story from her own family’s history, that of her mother’s young sister, who was cruelly gunned down by soldiers.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Descent”
Inseon tells Kyungha that she doesn’t truly feel that she knew her mother. She pulls out several boxes of old files and sits down to show Kyungha their contents. One of the boxes contains newspaper clippings, and they examine an article that details a memorial for victims of massacres in Gyeongbuk province.
The clippings are nearly 50 years old, and Kyungha realizes that it must have been Inseon’s mother, not Inseon, who kept these files. The boxes also contain old family letters, including one from a relative who was jailed after the Jeju uprising. Inseon shares that after their village was torched, her mother and aunt stayed with their grandmother for a while.
The two women continue to search through the boxes, confronting a jumble of clippings, documents, and letters. Kyungha learns that one of Inseon’s relatives was forced to enter an arranged marriage to keep her safe from the soldiers, who often targeted young, unmarried girls for sexual assault. She reads about the Bodo League massacre and other wartime atrocities. She reads about student demonstrations, US support for the Korean nationalists, and the tens of thousands of people who were killed or jailed in the years leading up to and during the Korean War. Kyungha feels overwhelmed by Inseon’s family history. She thought she knew her friend well, but there is so much information here about all that they endured on Jeju.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “The Deep Sea”
Kyungha and Inseon continue to search through the clippings, photos, letters, and documents. Kyungha continues to be struck by how much material Inseon’s mother kept and how fixated she must have been on state atrocities in Korea, despite never mentioning either her interest or her experiences to her daughter. Inseon recalls that when she was young, she was puzzled that her mother subscribed to the Gyeongbuk newspaper, but once she found this trove of information, it made sense: Her mother had scoured the paper for articles about state-sponsored suppression of dissidents and then carefully cataloged each one. Many of the articles pertain to a mass killing of Bodo League members at a cobalt mine in Gyeongbuk, and Inseon’s mother tracked public responses to this particular tragedy for decades.
Inseon also shares that she found out that her mother spent decades trying to figure out where her loved ones were buried. It was hard to track down records and harder still to know where people ended up: Many people whom Inseon’s mother knew died in massacres, but some survived, only to be taken prisoner. Inseon notes the many prisoner record sheets in the boxes, and they realize that her mother spent years tracking where people were transferred in the hope of one day finding out where they were buried. Inseon shares that when her father returned to Jeju after his imprisonment, it took time to rekindle his relationship with her mother. Inseon knows that her father was tortured and theorizes that even after returning home, he never fully recovered from the experience.
Part 2, Chapters 4-6 Analysis
This section of the novel immerses Kyungha and Inseon in the historical documentation of the Bodo League and Jeju massacres. The boxes they explore contain newspaper clippings, longer articles, documents, letters, photographs, and family records. The number of first-person testimonies that they uncover highlights the importance of individual identities and lives, and the fact that these stories survived in the face of state-sponsored suppression emphasizes their significance. Historical Memory and Collective Trauma remains an important theme, as the eyewitness testimonies that Kyungha and Inseon read paint a fuller portrait of their country than either had access to before. Even though Kyungha is familiar with the general history of the mass killings from her work on the massacre in G——, the materials in Inseon’s home are extensive and detailed. The survivor testimonies that Kyungha and Inseon read add humanity to the historical record: They reveal actual personal histories and remind both women of Inseon’s family history. Both Kyungha and Inseon believe that the power of documentary filmmaking is its ability to place actual people within the historical record, and they realize that any work that they produce must center real people and their lived experiences.
This section of the novel, in addition to its focus on lived experience, also provides more historical details about the Jeju and Bodo League mass killings. These horrific moments in Korean history were suppressed in Korea for decades and are not common knowledge in the rest of the world, so this information is critical to Han Kang’s project of publicizing the massacres and drawing attention to the way that they shaped Korean society and impacted those killed, as well as the survivors and their families. She notes, “From mid-November 1948 the uplands of Jeju burned for three months and upward of thirty thousand civilians were slaughtered” (205), and these numbers reflect only a fraction of Koreans who lost their lives during the mass killings. By switching the narrative focus between general historical facts and intimate histories, Kang continually emphasizes the individuals behind these numbers.
The narrative also addresses the theme of Friendship and Human Connection, albeit from a different perspective, in these chapters. Inseon provides more information about her father, who was imprisoned for many years and tortured while incarcerated. She reveals that her father never fully recovered from his traumatic experiences: His relationship with her mother was severely damaged, as was his capacity for connection with others. This story is important because it explores the mass killings from the survivor’s perspective. Much of the research that Inseon and Kyungha engage in focuses on those who died in the massacres, and that tends to be the focus of public discourse as well. This is for good reason: Part of their work and the conversation around these events focuses on their causes and how to prevent them in the future. However, Kang argues through Inseon’s father’s story that there is another, hidden class of victims: those who lived through the tragedies but whose lives were irrevocably altered by what they endured.
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