{"id":11010,"date":"2025-11-20T16:47:36","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T21:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11010"},"modified":"2025-11-20T16:47:37","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T21:47:37","slug":"we-do-not-part","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/20\/we-do-not-part\/","title":{"rendered":"We Do Not Part."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature in part for her 2021 novel We Do Not Part<\/a><\/em>, which appeared earlier this year in English translation for the first time. This exploration of one of the darkest moments in modern Korean \u2013 and American \u2013 history works through a struggling female protagonist, somewhat similar to the lead character of her novel The Vegetarian<\/a><\/em>, who finds herself called to the hospital bedside of a friend with whom she was once collaborating on a project about the Cheju genocide. This call leads to a visit to the sick friend\u2019s house, where the lines between reality and dream start to bend, and it\u2019s unclear whose memories we\u2019re reading or how legitimate they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kyungha is a writer who is deeply isolated and almost certainly depressed, often forgetting to eat, sometimes lying for hours on her apartment floor to escape the oppressive heat of the city\u2019s summers. When she sleeps, she\u2019s plagued by nightmares related to the massacres at Cheju, which inspired a scene in her latest, unfinished novel. She gets a call from Inseon, with whom she\u2019d worked on a documentary of sorts about the same killings; Inseon is injured and will be stuck in the hospital for weeks, so she asks Kyungha to go to her house to feed her bird Ama. Once there, however, Kyungha gets stuck in the house without power due to a blizzard, and she begins hallucinating, or perhaps she has died and is experiencing something paranormal, with the result that she ends up hearing the history of Inseon\u2019s family during the massacres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cheju (or Jeju) Island is located south of the Korean peninsula and currently has over 600,000 people living there. The residents of the island had begun protesting the planned election in the southern half of Korea, controlled by the United States at the time, because they believed it would lead to a permanent partition. In 1948, the communist party on the island organized a general strike, which turned into an armed insurgency. The strongman Syngman Rhee, the first President of the Republic of Korea, responded with brutal force, with the full backing and consent of the United States, killing somewhere between 15,000 and 100,000 people on the island. The Korean army forces killed children and babies and gang-raped women and girls. Tens of thousands of others were imprisoned for their alleged roles in the insurgency. After the massacre, it was illegal to even mention<\/em> the government\u2019s actions on Cheju until 1990, and South Korea didn\u2019t hold a truth & reconciliation commission until 2003, when the government finally admitted they had committed genocide against the people of Cheju. (For more on the history of the Cheju genocide, the Wikipedia article<\/a> is superb, as is this 2000 story<\/a> from Newsweek<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n