Summary
Chapter 10 is called "Stillness." Kyungha looks up from reading and is startled to see that darkness has fallen. In the previous chapter, Inseon tells Kyungha that a stranger came to ask the woman who witnessed the massacre on the beach whether any children washed up on the shore. That man turns out to have been Inseon's father, asking about his family, particularly his baby sister. Inseon informs Kyungha that the reason her father's hands shook is that he was tortured in prison. Inseon and her mother used to heat a stone with boiling water, which Inseon's father would place over his heart. He eventually died of a heart attack.
The last film that Inseon released did not receive critical acclaim. Inseon disagreed with the host of a film festival who characterized her film as an ode to her father. Inseon tells Kyungha that "We Do Not Part" was the only documentary project she wanted to take on in the previous four years. They discuss dreams, and Kyungha characterizes dreams as humiliating because they reveal hidden truths about oneself. Inseon tells Kyungha that she is not alone—their friendship is a testament to that. This inspires further pain and fear of loss in Kyungha.
When the friends initially began working together and getting to know each other, they visited Wolchulsan Mountain while on an assignment. There, they heard a local story about a woman turned to stone, and they speculated about what they would do if they were in the woman's situation. In doing so, they crafted a new version of the story in which the stone is actually a husk that the woman left behind. This trip laid the foundation for Inseon and Kyungha's friendship.
Inseon goes on to share about her research on the violence that took place on Jeju. She shows various books and maps to Kyungha, and she also tells more of her own family's history. After Inseon's mother and aunt went on an errand to bring food to their cousins, soldiers killed the rest of the family. Their little sister survived and crawled back to the house from the field where their parents lay dead. At the end of Chapter 10, Kyungha hears the sounds of the birds rustling around in the other room before a stillness descends.
In Chapter 11 ("Descent"), Inseon shows a fragile old newspaper clipping to Kyungha, who hears faint voices emanating from the text. Kyungha gives a lit candle to Inseon, who later passes it back. They continue to collectively piece together what happened on Jeju by relying on archives, personal and family stories, and memories. Inseon's uncle disappeared after being taken to Daegu Penitentiary and later to Jinju, and his sisters (Inseon's mother and aunt) attempted to find him before giving up in 1954. However, Jeongsim continued to scour old records and try to discover what happened to her brother.
This process of examining historical records continues in Chapter 12 ("The Deep Sea"). The articles from the early 1990s and onward describe efforts to exhume the sites where the bodies of prisoners were dumped. Though Jeongsim never managed to recover her brother's bones, there was also a slim chance that he may have survived. A story circulated about a man who escaped the prison, and Inseon and her mother wondered at the possibility that the man was Inseon's uncle.
Italicized text reveals how Inseon's father returned to Jeju Island only to be widely shunned as a former political prisoner. Jeongsim warmly interacted with him in an effort to ask about her brother, who briefly crossed paths with Inseon's father while in prison. Over time, Inseon's parents established a relationship and came to live together. Even into her final days, Jeongsim berated herself for commenting on her brother's disarrayed hair when she last saw him alive.
Analysis
Further layers of understanding settle on Kyungha over the course of her encounter with Inseon's apparition in Chapter 10 ("Stillness"). Han does not simply recount historical facts about the murders that took place on Jeju. She also incorporates the ways in which these murders traumatized survivors, leaving lasting marks on Jeju's people and land. This kind of sensibility can be seen when Inseon's apparition informs Kyungha that one witness misinterpreted why Inseon's father's hands shook. According to Inseon, the tremor in her father's hands "was an aftereffect of the torture" he underwent at the hands of the police (Chapter 10). Han places as much (if not more) weight on details such as these as she does on the objective events that took place. The characters' understandings, dreams, intentions, and imaginations play a vital role in this novel.
Kyungha also reveals truths about herself to Inseon's apparition that she never told anyone else. Inseon's reactions reflect these truths back to Kyungha, changing the nature of her self-understanding and shaking up the sediment of her worldview. For example, when Inseon tells Kyungha that she's not alone, Kyungha feels unmoored at the pain of possibly losing her friend. Kyungha's worldview has narrowed into one in which she insists on her own isolation, but Inseon challenges that. Rather than comfort Kyungha, this revelation inspires fear of further loss.
Inseon and Kyungha's friendship developed from their shared speculation about a story. When Kyungha hired Inseon as a photographer for magazine articles back when they were in their twenties, they traveled to different locations together. At one such place, they heard a local tale about the mountains. In that story, a woman offered a bowl of food to a traveler passing through who, in exchange, told her to leave the following morning without looking back. The woman looked back and witnessed a flood desolate her village. She turned to stone. However, Inseon actively engages with the story by imagining the stone as a husk of the woman's skin that she shed, leaving her free to go off into the world. This shared imagination and engagement brings Inseon and Kyungha closer. The language they used together reflects this. After that day, they "never went back to formal speech" (Chapter 10).
This novel showcases how political realities palpably impact ordinary people's lives. Relying on a mixture of newspaper clippings, old articles, family stories, and personal memories, Inseon shares with Kyungha what happened to her family members and other Jeju residents in 1948 and onward. Villagers were caught in the crosshairs as the state worked to eradicate communist forces. It is believed that about 10 percent of Jeju's population (30,000 people) were killed, but this official count may be underestimated. Not only were tens of thousands murdered, but public recognition of the atrocity was suppressed for decades. Inseon tells Kyungha that there are no more articles and newspaper clippings in her mother's archive until the military junta lost power and a civilian was elected president in 1992.
In Chapter 12, Kyungha feels reluctant to look at the photographs of bones. She states that she is "under no obligation to comply" and parse through the pages of text and photos, but she does so regardless (Chapter 12). Han often writes about what it means to bear witness to and reckon with historical atrocities. A sense of failure pervades these undertakings in We Do Not Part. For example, Kyungha and Inseon fail to realize their installation and documentary, which represents their inability to come to terms with the scale of state-sanctioned violence. Inseon's mother, Jeongsim, also failed to recover her brother's bones and find closure.
