The timing was uncanny. In December 2024, Han Kang arrived in Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the first South Korean and the first Asian woman to be awarded. The judges unanimously lauded Han’s “intense poetic prose” in her treatment of searing historical traumas. And yet, only three days before, Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol had declared emergency martial law, sending armed troops to the National Assembly and allegedly ordering arrests of political opponents. The trauma suddenly ceased to be “historical.” “Can the past help the present?” asked Han Kang in her Nobel lecture, knowing full well the dangerous events unfolding in Seoul. “Can the dead save the living?”

Like many South Koreans of my generation, I used to take democracy for granted. I grew up in the 2000s, when the country’s political climate was mellowing after the military dictator Chun Doo-Hwan stepped down in 1988. Buzzwords like “world peace,” “globalization,” and “the United Nations” were all the rage.

Nevertheless, specters of authoritarian regimes still haunt the nation, poking through the historical amnesia. My textbooks were scrubbed clean of references to the Jeju massacre, which took place between 1947 and 1954 and was backed by the US military. The tragedy single-handedly wiped out over 10 percent of the island’s population, yet I didn’t learn it had even happened until I moved to Jeju for high school. More recently, the 1980 Gwangju uprising led to a mass killing of hundreds of civilians peacefully protesting martial law. Both Gwangju and Jeju remain touchy subjects for many Koreans, with the conservative party still reluctant to own up to its authoritarian legacy.

Han Kang’s works are no mere novelizations of enshrined historical consensus. Rather, they powerfully relive past wrongs too often overlooked. The atrocities of Gwangju—Han’s native city—is the subject of her magnum opus, Human Acts (2014). The driving force behind the book, Han explains, is the question she posed that night in Stockholm: Can literature, by preserving past trauma, stop history from repeating itself?

Han’s speech was quoted just days later by the Democratic Party spokesperson, Park Chan-Dae, in the push for President Yoon’s impeachment following his ill-fated coup.

“When martial law was announced, I immediately thought of Gwangju,” Park stated. “If civilians hadn’t run out at once to stop the takeover, if lawmakers hadn’t climbed walls to get the assembly to overturn the decree, … if military leaders and soldiers had actively followed their unjust orders, South Korea now would be where Gwangju was in May 1980.” Park then credited the legacy of Gwangju for the failure of the takeover. “The past has saved the present. The dead have succored the living. The Republic of Korea—the democracy of the Republic of Korea—owes much to Gwangju.”

“Can the dead save the living?” The question became a mantra that winter, as the investigation stretched out into the new year and hundreds of thousands of people kept the protests going.

When I arrive at my first protest, it’s a party. The music is deafening. There are thousands and thousands of people thronging the streets. The large blue dome of the National Assembly cheekily glows above us like a disco ball. Smiling women go around distributing heat packets and comfy cushions. Everyone is double- and triple-clad in padded coats, gloved hands clutching glowsticks and flashy signs. The crowd pushes us forward, and we are borne away by the mob. They’re playing “Into The New World” by Girls’ Generation, a Y2K K-pop hit reclaimed as a millennial protest anthem.

Everyone’s waving glowsticks in the air—a Gen-Z update from candles, the go-to protest symbol in Korea—and singing along. We chant, dance, and march down the streets outside the assembly building, where lawmakers are voting on the impeachment motion. I sing alongside an estimated 420,000 protestors, frosty breath fogging up the air. “In this world where sadness repeats / Goodbye to it from now on / I follow a dim light / We will be together forever / The world where we meet again.” When the impeachment motion passes, the crowd breaks into an uproarious cheer. The entire city is a knot of human bodies, rejoicing. People embrace. A woman bursts into tears. I look up and see a tangle of white balloons streaking across the sky.

I was standing at the heart of a bloodless triumph. And my thoughts turned inevitably to the violence that came before, to the blood that we owed this to.

Han Kang’s new novel, We Do Not Part, is about the Jeju massacre and its aftershocks. Given that Human Acts focused on the Gwangju uprising, the premise seems deceptively simple: Korean national trauma. But such a crude summary does Han a disservice; throughout the book, she ironizes the occupational hazard of writing about mass suffering. She is a writer who never purports to find writing easy.

At first glance, We Do Not Part picks up where Human Acts left off. The narrator, Kyungha, is a novelist, haunted by a book she wrote about “the massacre at the city” (translated in English into “the massacre at G____”). She suffers from recurring nightmares, featuring military violence and sightings of “the mass murderer” (referring to the dictator Chun Doo-Hwan). Her editor encourages her to time the publication of “the manuscript” to May (the massacre took place on May 18, 1980) so that more people are “likely to pick it up.” Despite the heavy allusions, “the book,” “the murderer,” and “the city” remain unnamed. From its first pages, the novel establishes an aesthetic of obscurity, gently rebuking the readerly presumption that, having read Human Acts, one can claim to understand what happened at Gwangju.

Equally elusive are the circumstances of the narrator. Anonymous until the second chapter, Kyungha suffers from “a number of losses” that remain unspoken. There are merely hints. She once had a child. Now she lives alone. She once cooked meals for her family. Now she struggles to feed herself, vomiting up everything she manages to swallow. She contemplates suicide and starts drafting a note but can’t think of a recipient and draws a blank instead. We follow the contours of her suffering without knowing what’s going on. The pages slip away, fugitive, and the reader is none the wiser.

Can literature, by preserving past trauma, stop history from repeating itself?

Han knows what she’s doing, of course. There is a tinge of meta-irony in the figure of Inseon, Kyungha’s friend who makes documentaries about historical trauma. After her well-received films featuring women in Vietnam and Manchuria, Inseon moves on to a more abstract project about her native Jeju. It leaves people “perplexed and disappointed, especially those who had hoped for a reiteration of the straightforwardly moving accounts of her previous work.” Han perhaps is responding to the newfound pressure of addressing a much larger readership, following the breakout success of The Vegetarian in 2016, and the particular challenges of making national history legible to international readers.

The plot picks up when Inseon’s fingers are severed in an accident. Trapped in a mainland hospital, she asks Kyungha to fly to Jeju Island to take care of Ama, her pet bird, who may or may not be alive. Kyungha’s journey soon turns life-threatening when she is caught in a snowstorm. Han dedicates roughly half of the book to Kyungha and Inseon, taking many pages to get to the heart of Jeju. This distance is necessarily frustrating. Han does not reproduce the news media’s assumption that we can “get” a tragedy by naming cities and counting bodies. Like Kyungha, Han wants us to start at the periphery and fumble our way toward a site of historical violence, always already a stranger.

When Kyungha finally reaches Inseon’s cottage, wounded, freezing, and exhausted, in what appears to be a small miracle, the reader shares Kyungha’s stakes. She wants Ama (meaning “maybe” in Korean) to be alive, after all the trouble she went through to get there. So when Kyungha reaches over, only to touch Ama’s “softness without warmth,” there is a pang, a sense of real loss. Only then can the novel begin.

Han makes the reader suffer a loss—a small, fictional bird—to question our entrenched assumptions about spectating suffering. Before she lets us peruse tremendous historical losses that happened in a time and place that seems far from here and now, this small fee is charged. Only then are we admitted into the presence of ghosts.

The second half of the novel is a séance.

Through hypnotic prose hauntingly laced with magical realism, Han conjures the lost voices from Inseon’s dark family history. In Inseon’s family home, Kyungha discovers a ghost-like presence of Inseon, and the two friends begin a conversation about Inseon’s late mother and the family documents she has gathered over the years. The narrator in this section takes a back seat, letting the archive speak instead.

As Inseon shares her mother’s personal collection of ephemera from the massacre—reports, photos, maps, newspaper clippings, and eyewitness testimonies—we receive a heartbreaking education. Han is relentless in laying out bare facts, presenting each document like a scarred tissue or a lost bone. This makes the reader long for the gentle obscurity of the earlier chapters. Inseon, narrating her late mother’s life story, functions as a living archive of her trauma. Cast as a docent figure, Inseon walks us through her mother’s desperate search for her brother, who was arrested during the massacre and has been missing since.

As in Human Acts, Han is unflinching in her depiction of raw violence. Here she increases scrutiny of the processes such violence undergoes in art. After all, in any artistic recreation of a tragedy, Inseon muses, pieces are necessarily excised. “The smell of blood-soaked clothes and flesh rotting together, the phosphorescence of bones that have been decaying for decades will be erased. Nightmares will slip through fingers. Excessive violence will be removed.” In considering this inevitable limitation of fiction, We Do Not Part experiments with form, moving away from realism. At times, it reads more like reportage, a chorus of testimonies, or even an illumined tour of a family archive.

Two things become clear as we trace the story of Jeongshim and her search for her lost brother: the horror of state-sanctioned violence and the penetrating force of love navigating these structures of abjection. As Jeongshim assembles documents to track her brother down, she encounters inevitable gaps, which are filled via testimonies of other survivors, creating a collage of voices. Through one woman’s lifelong search for a loved one, Han explores the ways the brutal and totalizing nature of state violence flattens all individuality, but also how tenacious hope manages to salvage a single person fallen through the cracks, touching and illuminating the lives of other victims through the archive.

Jacques Derrida argued that archives are necessarily political in their operation of including some and excluding other materials. Jeongshim’s collection is a selective and loving reorganization of the papers that document an authoritarian government’s violent machinery. When with great difficulty she acquires a piece of paper noting prisoners’ mass transference, the document is chilling proof of both mass incarceration and Jeongshim’s determination to locate her brother in a throng of unnamed bodies buried under history.

The archive, then, memorializes two groups of people: those like Inseon’s uncle who have been sacrificed by state violence, and those like Jeongshim who survived and witnessed. Her collection is a testament to both her brother’s suffering and her decades-long mourning. Grief like hers was shushed and indefinitely suspended due to a tumultuous Korean history of civil war, military dictatorship, and pro-US regimes that shied away from publicizing an atrocity in which the US played a crucial role. A formal government apology for Jeju was only issued in 2003, and reparation talks were only begun in 2022.

Despite Jeongshim’s efforts to find her brother—or his remains at the very least—the paper trail ends abruptly. This, it seems, is the point of parting, of letting go. The archive falls silent. The state’s indifference to a single man’s fate drowns out Jeongshim’s hope.

But this is when the novelist steps in. In what is possibly the most touching scene of the novel, Han lets go of the reportage-like style, but not the lost man. Breaking open the archive, she turns the book back into a novel. At the end of the paper trail, Han creates a scene shimmering with the possibility only fiction can afford, transforming archival loss into a poetic liberation.

Han’s archival experimentation is reminiscent of Saidiya Hartman’s work Venus in Two Acts. Hartman, a scholar of Black history, enacts critical fabulation to imaginatively mobilize the archive, an abject site of historical marginalization for her subjects—enslaved women of the transatlantic slave trade—in a new mode. Developing this into what she calls “close narration,” Hartman’s Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments inscribes women’s biographies with new possibilities by “press[ing] at the limits” of the archive. This recuperative reading endows her subjects with lives that could have been, freeing them from the confines of the paper records.

If Hartman, as a historian and a scholar, stretches the genre of scholarly writing to critically fabulate historical subjects, Han works in the opposite direction. As a novelist whose project veers close to a historical witnessing, Han embeds her work with carefully curated factual documents. If Hartman’s counterfactuality is inspired by the despair of written history, Han works from the same impulse. Instead of providing her characters with romanticized fictional lives, she pays counter-fictional, curatorial respect to history. This scrupulous adherence to fact makes We Do Not Part beautiful when it finally decides to become a novel, a small grace note at the end.

As in “Human Acts,” Han is unflinching in her depiction of raw violence. Here she increases scrutiny of the processes such violence undergoes in art.

Han Kang has never been an easy writer to translate. Initially a poet, Han writes in a poetic, achingly subtle prose. Especially considering the scandal in which her International Booker Prize-winning The Vegetarian was embroiled (the book was rendered in an eminently readable translation that included many errors, sparking fierce debates for years afterward), Han’s translators must reckon with much critical scrutiny. As if expecting this, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris provide a lucid, meticulous, and careful translation. We Do Not Part poses a particular challenge in its robust use of Jeju dialect and the vividly oral quality of its sentences, crucial to its polyvocal and confessional tone. Reading the testimonies of victims in their rustic Jeju dialect is a deeply emotional experience that doesn’t always transfer into the English. It is a shame, but inevitable; the Japanese translation got around this by translating into Okinawan dialect, from an island often likened to Jeju for its fraught history of US- and mainland-inflicted suffering. But can we really substitute an oral testimony about a region’s traumatic past with any dialect that isn’t its own? It is a difficult question, and the decision to translate the testimonies into standard English seems most fitting. Perhaps, like Kyungha and Inseon poring over the neatly glossed newspaper articles that put Jeju dialect into standard Korean, the English reader must contend with the necessarily untranslatable nature of certain confessions.

The original Korean title of Human Acts is 소년이 온다, or “The boy is approaching.” If that book is put side by side with her new novel, the titles read: “The boy is approaching. We do not part.”

Han Kang has always emphasized the present tense, which demands that we walk with the dead. They have never felt more present to me than this past winter. I watched my country save itself overnight from a potential coup, purely through muscle memory of past traumas. If that isn’t haunting at its finest, I don’t know what is.

Han’s novel honors these tragedies and gives something back, opening a temporal rift in her text in which the dead and the living talk to one another. It is in no way a comfortable conversation; the novel is full of blanks and silences, whether withheld names or missing links in archival investigation. It is through and despite these gaps that Han brings about moments of brief yet lasting contact between the past and the present, the unimaginable suffering of Jeju and the global readership who dare to imagine anyway.

It snowed during the last rally I attended. The snow thickened as the sky darkened, yet I saw thousands of people standing steadfast, shivering through the December night. It was Christmas Eve.

In the novel, wading through the snowstorm on Jeju, Kyungha thinks about the innocent dead and the snow that covered their faces, unmelting on their cold cheeks. She wonders, “Who’s to say the snow dusting my hands now isn’t the same snow that had gathered on their faces?”

Who’s to say, indeed? After all, when I looked around that night—seeing thousands being snowed on, their warm faces open and upturned, keeping vigil—I was reminded of a past I had never lived in and felt the touch of a future not yet come. 

Feature image: Protests at Gwanghwamun Square (December 5, 2024). Photograph by Revi / Wikimedia Commons