We Do Not Part

by Han Kang

Was this terror? Or anxiety, agitation, perhaps an abrupt anguish? No, it was a bone-chilling awareness. That a giant, invisible knife—the weight of its heavy blade beyond any human capacity to wield it—hung in the air, with me as its target. As I lay pinned and staring.

There are people who actively change the course of their own life. They make daring choices that others seldom dream of, then do their utmost to be accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. So that in time, no matter what life path they strike out on, people around them cease to be surprised.

A thought comes to me. Doesn’t water circulate endlessly and never disappear? If that’s true, then the snowflakes Inseon grew up seeing could be the same ones falling on my face at this moment. I am reminded of the people Inseon’s mother described, the ones in the schoolyard, and release my arms from around my knees. I wipe the snow from my numbed nose and eyelid. Who’s to say the snow dusting my hands now isn’t the same snow that had gathered on their faces?

There were around thirty thousand murdered in Taiwan too, and one hundred and twenty thousand in Okinawa. Inseon’s voice is as calm as ever. Sometimes I think about those numbers. And how these places are all islands. Isolated.

All afternoon, I read about how from mid November of 1948, the uplands of Jeju burned for three months and upward of thirty thousand civilians were slaughtered. By the spring of 1949, when the scorched-earth policy was temporarily abandoned after the state failed to find the whereabouts of the roughly one hundred guerrillas, an estimated twenty thousand civilians were hiding out in Hallasan, mostly with their kin. They had judged it safer to brave starvation and the cold than risk facing summary executions along the shores.