Summary
The unnamed first-person narrator in Chapter 1 ("Crystals") stands on a snowy hill lined with thousands of black tree trunks. She wonders if this is a gravesite before noticing water underfoot. The horizon turns out to be the shoreline, and the sea comes crashing in. The narrator struggles to recover the bones before waking up from the dream.
The narrator began having this recurring dream after she published a book about the massacre in Gwangju. After failing to go back to sleep, the narrator lies sweltering on the bare floor. A "bone-chilling awareness" strikes her, and she wonders if her nightmare is a personal moment. She recounts having parted ways with people in her life, and how she signed the lease on an apartment outside of Seoul. There, she subsists on little food and hardly leaves her bed. She writes a will and leaves post-mortem instructions, but remains unsure of who to address the instructions to.
The question of who will arrange the narrator's affairs after her death rouses her from her "mire." She cleans her apartment and slowly ventures out into the world. After she resolves to keep living, a relentless summer heat wave sets in. The narrator remembers the nightmares and insomnia she experienced while writing her book, and how this impacted her relationships with family members. Kang hints at an estrangement between the narrator and her daughter. In her initial nightmare, the narrator realized she had to turn her back on the lost bones if she wanted to survive.
In the second chapter (entitled "Threads"), the narrator continues to struggle with chronic pain and insomnia. She maintains her isolation and, every morning, rewrites her general farewell note to the world. One morning in late December, the narrator's friend Inseon sends her a text message that just reads "Kyungha-ya" (her name). Inseon proceeds to ask Kyungha to meet her at a hospital in Seoul. There, Inseon tells Kyungha that she sliced her fingers off with an electric saw. Kyungha watches as hospital staff wound Inseon's fingers every three minutes to keep the nerves functioning properly.
Kyungha wonders if there is not a more modern and refined technique to preserve Inseon's dexterity. Inseon endures the wounding process stoically, but is unsure if she will be able to last for another full three weeks. While speaking to Inseon, different memories appear in Kyungha's mind, including about their intention to make a collaborative art project. Kyungha realizes that Inseon must have gotten injured while working on this project, despite Kyungha telling her previously to abandon the idea. When Inseon requests that Kyungha immediately travel to Jeju Island to feed her pet bird, Kyungha agrees.
In Chapter 3 ("Heavy Snow"), Kyungha flies to Jeju in a snowstorm and navigates the bus system. A migraine begins to pain Kyungha, who had no time to pack her medicine before departing Seoul for Jeju. The bus driver makes his way through the snowstorm, and Kyungha considers giving up the whole endeavor. However, the winds luckily die down right before Kyungha reaches her stop.
Kyungha remembers a story Inseon told her about running away from home when she was in high school. Though Inseon and her mother were extremely close in later years, Inseon went through a period in her adolescence during which she could not bear to be around her mother. She left for the mainland, where she promptly had an accident that severely concussed her. Inseon's mother knew of the danger her daughter was in due to a dream.
Analysis
Part I of We Do Not Part is called "Bird," and the first three chapters are entitled "Crystals," "Threads," and "Heavy Snow." Throughout the novel, Han presents various motifs that weave nature into human political realities. The first such image occurs in the opening chapter when the author personifies black tree trunks by describing them as "a thousand men, women, and haggard children huddling in the snow" (Chapter 1). The narrator (whose name is later revealed to be Kyungha) wonders if the setting is a graveyard, which naturalizes humans as part of the environment while simultaneously evoking death. This turns out to be a dream sequence that frames the entire novel with a validation of subconscious experiences. Another example of this validation occurs when Kyungha recalls Inseon telling her about the time she ran away from home. Inseon's mother knew when her daughter got hurt because the message was delivered to her in a dream.
Kyungha wonders if her recurring dream is in fact not related to a Korean historical trauma, and is instead just a "personal omen" (Chapter 1). This opens the question of the novel's scope, and the narrator herself poses this question. Han often approaches historical events and traumas through individual perspectives, intertwining the personal with the political. The first chapter ("Crystal") mostly focuses on the narrator's inner consciousness, showing her brush with death and her realizations about how tenuous life is as she attempts to figure out what unraveled her in the first place.
The narrator goes from completely isolating herself to witnessing her close friend in extreme bodily pain. Inseon faces the choice of suffering intensely by enduring a wounding process (to keep blood flowing in her reattached fingers) or amputating them. The phantom pain she would feel if she chose the latter course of action resembles the psychological pain that Kyungha experiences. Historical traumas haunt Kyungha in the present day even if others cannot perceive them. In an attempt to resolve this pain, Kyungha feels an urge to collaborate with Inseon on a project in which she physically constructs the scene from her dream and films it. In other words, she wants to remedy the haunting through a physical and artistic performance.
The threads that give Chapter 2 its name come from the speaker witnessing Inseon's sutured fingers and trying to follow the threads of her own sanity. In the first chapter, Kyungha asks herself when everything had "begun to fall apart." This questioning continues in Chapter 2 as she recalls different personal histories, including the origin of her friendship with Inseon. The hospital where Inseon is recovering is known as "the nation's best in surgical wound closures," and Kyungha is appalled at how the medical staff have to wound Inseon's fingers every three minutes for the next three weeks to keep the blood flowing. If not, the nerves below the cut will die. Kyungha asks whether "rousing such agonizing pain [is] the only way to keep the threads of nerves intact[.]" This metaphorically relates to Kyungha's own psychological suffering and poses the question of what purpose (if any) it serves.
Kyungha wonders why Inseon chose to reach out to her of all people, and is unsure whether she trusts Inseon's claim of having no other options. While Kyungha spent the last months isolating from the world, Inseon also seems to have withdrawn from the human world gradually over time. Her primary concern is for her bird, Ama, who she asks Kyungha to look after. This will mean Kyungha has to live in Inseon's house on Jeju Island for close to a month. Inhabiting Inseon's world connects Kyungha to the Jeju uprising and massacre, which occurred from April 1948 to May 1949 and personally affected Inseon's family.
