50 pages • 1-hour read
We Do Not Part
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Themes
Historical Memory and Collective Trauma
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
We Do Not Part is ultimately an interrogation of Korea’s history of state-sponsored violence and a meditation on the impact that mass killings have had on the Korean public consciousness. The novel’s deliberately confusing narrative structure and its personalization of the mass killings through Inseon’s family history establish the effect of trauma on memory, while the factual details about the Jeju and Bodo League massacres engage with and bring attention to fraught chapters in Korean history that lay hidden for decades. With these strategies, Kang emphasizes the effects of both trauma and systematic repression on historical memory.
Kang immediately establishes the ambiguity and blurred boundaries of reality in the novel with Kyungha’s opening dream sequence. Even Kyungha, upon waking, identifies it as a symbolic representation of one of Korea’s many mass graves. This sequence establishes the importance of mass killings to the narrative and its thematic project, and the fact that the novel begins with a dream rather than factual, historical details is important. For many decades, public knowledge of massacres like those at Gwangju and Jeju was severely limited by the government, and open discussion of the killings was a punishable offense. However, the half-buried tree-trunk bodies in Kyungha’s dream symbolize the inability of the Korean government to completely conceal their crimes or erase them from the collective consciousness: Kyungha’s trees are not fully buried and are still visible despite their blanket of snow. Kyungha observes the tree trunk bodies, noting that although “[t]he graves already underwater [a]re out of reach, […] the remains higher up the slope, [she] need[s] to move them to safety. Now, before the sea encroache[s] further, but how?” (4). Her desire to “save” the bodies from being washed out to sea represents her desire to bring attention to the atrocities and help Koreans process and move on from their traumatic history. Much of what Kang reveals about the mass killings in the early portions of the novel is presented in a jumbled, dream-like way, emphasizing the ambiguous nature of the history, pieced together from survivor accounts and personal histories steeped in trauma.
As the novel begins to add more depth and detail to the history, naming several key mass killings and providing more concrete information, Kang juxtaposes this general historical information with Inseon’s family history. This strategy personalizes these massacres through the experiences of her parents and her mother’s unwavering commitment to finding her buried loved ones. It is not enough to present the story of Korean state-sponsored violence within its historical context; Kang humanizes the victims of mass killings by showing the way that the Jeju massacre impacted Inseon’s mother and her family. Kang includes details about Inseon’s mother, her father, and her mother’s siblings, noting how traumatic it was to lose family members to the violence while also exploring the ways that the survivors’ experiences resonated through their and their loved ones’ lives.
Inseon’s interest in personalizing the killings is certainly rooted in her own family’s history, but she uses what she learns from her family’s records to clarify her orientation toward documenting the massacres: Her fixation on the one woman who appeared to have been buried alive represents her impulse to restore humanity and identity to each victim of a mass killing in Korea. This impulse began to shape her idea for a new film; as she notes, “The idea of basing my next film on that person came to me as the year bled into the next. This person whose name, gender, and age were unknown” (164). Inseon understood that this woman had as much humanity as her father or uncle and hoped to illustrate that through her film, thereby showing its audiences that each of the hundreds of thousands of victims of mass killing deserves to be seen as a multi-faceted individual and not just one more, faceless person. With these strategies, Kang illustrates her argument that only through this process of restoring humanity and identity to victims can Korea begin to heal.
Grief and Loss
The impact of grief and loss is a theme that is threaded throughout Kang’s published works, many of which also explore the way that grief and loss shape individuals and societies. In We Do Not Part, Kyungha is introduced through the framework of loss, and through her character, Kang paints a portrait of a woman struggling to process both personal and collective trauma. Inseon is also presented through the framework of loss, and through her character, Kang explores the impact of familial loss.
Kyungha never fully explains any of the losses that together have caused her almost complete withdrawal from the world, but it is clear that they have deeply shaped her current life. She obliquely alludes to having lost her parents, husband, and daughter but never clarifies how those relationships ended. Her parents died, but she does not provide any details about the nature of their deaths. Of her husband and daughter, she notes only that the end of these relationships was in part by choice and in part against her will. This unwillingness to discuss the particulars of her solitude is a sign of her deep, unresolved grief: She does not even know how to talk about her loss yet, let alone process it. At the beginning of the novel, she spends most of her time alone in her apartment, struggling with debilitating migraines and abdominal spasms. She observes, “I still couldn’t cook, couldn’t stomach more than one meal a day. Mostly I couldn’t bear to remember what it was like to cook for a share a meal with someone” (18). Kyungha’s loss affects every aspect of her well-being: Her sleep, diet, and social life are all marked by absence—her dreams haunt her, she cannot eat, and she rarely leaves her home. Loss has consumed her and turned her into a shell of her former self.
Kyungha’s sense of loss is professional as well. Kyungha is haunted by her recent research project, a book on the G—— massacre, and hasn’t been able to start a new project since. However, she shows signs of healing on this front when she and Inseon begin digging into Inseon’s historical materials on the Jeju and Bodo League massacres. Through this detail, Kang argues that individual healing cannot take place when there is unresolved collective trauma within the public consciousness.
Inseon, too, is shaped by the grief that revolves around her relationship with her family and its history. She and her mother were closely bonded, and Inseon was her primary caregiver at the end of her life. After her mother died, Inseon remained alone on Jeju, so impacted by this loss that she was unable to return to her old life. Unlike Kyungha, however, Inseon has been steadily processing her grief and is able to share many details about her mother’s life and death with her friend. Inseon also uses her mother’s death as a catalyst for further research into her own family’s history, working to process the generational grief and trauma from the Jeju massacre. Because this is new information for her, the sense of grief and loss is new as well; she had never heard about this family history until her mother, on her deathbed, began to share details of the family’s experiences during the Jeju massacre. Inseon explores this history in part so that she will have an avenue into which to channel her grief but also to honor her mother and carry on her work. In this way, Inseon hopes to both process her grief and help the Korean people process their traumatic history. By addressing the collective trauma of the massacres, both women take steps toward processing and moving forward from their loss and grief.
Friendship and Human Connection
Although We Do Not Part focuses primarily on violence, death, and loss, friendship and human connection become an important theme as the novel progresses. Kang explores the importance of friendship and human connection primarily through Kyungha’s relationship with Inseon. The women become key parts of each other’s support structure in the early days of their careers, a relationship that continues as they navigate adulthood. Their friendship also becomes an important step in their healing processes, both from personal loss and from Korea’s historical trauma. Ultimately, the novel argues that it is only through personal connection, and the understanding of that connection as existing between all humans, that people can hold onto their humanity in the face of tragedy.
Kyungha and Inseon are each other’s only support; they are both solitary characters, introduced in the novel against the backdrop of their introversion and reclusiveness. Kyungha lives alone on the outskirts of Seoul and has little contact with anyone. Inseon moved from the mainland back to her childhood home on Jeju, and after her mother’s death, she stayed to work as a carpenter, alone in her workshop. Yet each woman is also defined by the closeness of her friendship with the other. The two met as young professionals and stayed connected, even after Inseon moved to Jeju and it became harder to spend time together. Both women have lost their parents and supported the other during that loss, becoming sounding boards for each other’s grief. Although both Kyungha and Inseon prefer to spend much of their time alone, their friendship is an essential part of each woman’s life: Without each other, they would have no one to help and care for them during life’s difficult moments.
Kyungha and Inseon support each other during moments of personal loss, but they also work together to process the collective grief from Korea’s long-buried history of political violence. Both women feel connected to Korea’s broader historical trajectory: Kyungha because of her research and Inseon because of her family history. They acutely feel the loss of so many lives and share the belief that without accounting for this tragic history, the Korean collective consciousness can never be healthy or whole. Inseon sends Kyungha to Jeju ostensibly to care for her bird, but Kyungha’s journey is also one of discovery: Inseon knows that Kyungha will uncover her cache of historical materials and be drawn back into her research. When Inseon arrives on Jeju, the women sift through the documents and process their contents together, finding both connection and support through their efforts. Just as they navigate their moments of personal loss as a pair, they must discuss the Jeju and Bodo League massacres together to fully understand their meaning.
Through their process of discovery, discussion, and healing, Kyungha and Inseon come to understand human connectivity in a broad, abstract sense even as they become more deeply connected. They feel a deep feeling of connection with the victims because of Inseon’s family history but also because they share a cultural and historical identity with the victims. At one point, Inseon tells Kyungha, “I remembered the people in your book, no, the people who were actually there” (41). What she means is that every person whom Kyungha wrote about was not only a historical victim but also once a living, breathing individual. Kyungha and Inseon hope to restore humanity and identity to the victims to foster a greater sense of connection. They reason that their personal relationship has fostered a connection between them, making the other’s well-being important, and that the same should apply on a larger scale. If everyone is connected, then everyone’s well-being is important, creating a network of care and support.
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