We Do Not Part

by Han Kang

That is how death avoided me. Like an asteroid thought to be on a collision course avoids Earth by a hair’s breadth, hurtling past at a furious velocity that knows neither regret nor hesitation. I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.

Birds will pretend like nothing’s wrong, no matter how much pain they’re in. They instinctively endure and hide pain to avoid being targeted by predators. By the time they fall off their perch, it’s too late.

Dreams are terrifying things. No—they’re humiliating. They reveal things about you that you weren’t even aware of.

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.

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.

Still, when I placed a peeled mandarin in her hand, she would split it and give me back the bigger half out of lifelong habit, and smile. At which my heart would fall open. I remember wondering if I’d feel that way too toward my child, if I were to have a child.

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…

It’s no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer. The governing U.S. military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that’s what it took to stop their communization,

The murderous impulse to point a gun at an infant’s head was not only allowed but rewarded—to the extent that children under the age of ten who were killed in this way numbered one and a half thousand—and