We Do Not Part

by Han Kang

There are people who brandish their sharpest weapon as they are taking their leave. We know this from experience. They do this so as to slice the tenderest part of the person they are leaving with the precision that proximity grants us.

I’ll carry on in any case. How those words set me at ease. No matter how demanding our interviewee turned out to be, no matter what curveballs we were thrown and how ruffled I might be, the simple act of watching Inseon’s serene face as she peered at the viewfinder would always instill a sense of calm in me.

It can be difficult to distinguish forbearance from resignation, sorrow from partial reconciliation, fortitude from loneliness. I thought about how difficult it can be to tell these emotions apart on the basis of facial expressions and gestures, about how the person in question may struggle to distinguish these feelings in themselves.

People say “light as snow.” But snow has its own heft, which is the weight of this drop of water. People say “light as a bird.” But birds too have their weight.

Seeing her hunker down, I followed suit. She heard and turned to me with a smile, reaching out to stroke my cheek. She stroked the back of my head, my shoulders, my back. I remember the feeling of aching love, how it seeped into my skin. Clogging the marrow in my bones and shriveling my heart…That was when I realized. That love was a terrible agony.

During the day I carved wood in the workshop, and at night I returned to the house and read oral testimonies. With each item, I made sure to cross-check and confirm with the data I had on others who had died. I retraced the sequence of events through U.S. Army records that had been declassified and made accessible after fifty years, the press reports of the time, the lists of prisoners from Jeju who had been incarcerated without trial between 1948 and 1949, and witness accounts and images of the 1950 Bodo League mass killings. At some point, as the materials piled up and began to take on a clearer form, I could feel myself changing. To the point where it seemed nothing one human being did to another could ever shock me again…Something deep within my heart had dislodged and the blood that streamed from that gouged space was no longer red or flowing. Instead, a flickering pain throbbed at its jagged surface that only resignation could still…