I had thought to conclude this short series on the necessity of history with my last post, available here. I had planned to move on in several different directions, including some thoughts on the significance of the Reformed theology of the divine decrees, trying to retrieve from that seemingly stale theology something of value for the present; a few comments on the spread of the idea of “generations” in the popular press, which I think to be mostly mistaken; and a more systematic presentation of a way of reading the Bible that addresses some of the failures of popular evangelical thinking. But having recently read the latest book (in English) from the Nobel Prize-winning Korean author Han Kang, I thought I should bring this important book and important author to the attention of my readers.
What follows is a review of the book with a few theological comments thrown in. I hope after reading the review you will consider reading the book.
Clay
Han Kang, We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. (London/New York: Hogarth, 2025)
What Cannot Be Named
Seventy-five years ago, at the beginning of the Korean War, Syngman Rhee, the dictatorial first president of South Korea, gave the order to round up and execute thousands of suspected leftists. Many were members of the Bodo League, an organization created by Rhee himself to identify and pacify leftists. Members of the Bodo League (along with others added to fill out official quotas) were promised protection in the case of war. It was not protection they received. In the months of July and August 1950, Bodo League members were arrested and executed. Estimates for the massacre run as high as 200,000 people.
One of the execution sites was a former Japanese-owned cobalt mine near Daegu in Gyeongsan. Prisoners, including many political prisoners from the Daegu prison (and many of them from Jeju), were placed on the edge of a vertical mineshaft, shot in the back, and dumped into the mine, perhaps 3,500 in all. The shaft was sealed with dynamite, intended never to be reopened. Knowledge of this massacre was officially suppressed for 50 years until the late 1990s, when the truth of what had happened began to leak out.
Our own government was complicit in the executions, at times attempting to restrain the Korean administration but never acting to stop the killing. General MacArthur, then in command, conveniently considered it “an internal matter.” And the Americans, along with the Koreans, kept it covered up for years.
The site still has not been systematically excavated. Of the estimated 3,500 executed, the remains of up to 3,000 people have not yet been recovered. Just today, as I write this (August 6), The Korean Times has a storyabout a new phase in excavating the site. The money to complete the excavation is still at issue.
Naming the Unnamable
Han Kang, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, performs a different sort of excavation in her latest novel to appear in English, We Do Not Part (2025). It is one thing to excavate the remains of the summarily executed prisoners, give them their names, identify their families, and grant them a proper burial. It is another to excavate the grief and heroism of those who lived through the massacre.
Han is the excavator of memory and pain for the forgotten masses in the recent history of Korea. Her earlier Human Acts (2016) tells the story of a 1980 massacre in Gwangju, where army troops killed perhaps 2,000 people, many of them students. She tells the story in personal terms, excavating not only the history but the pain of the history. She does the same for the Bodo massacre in We Do Not Part.
The novel begins with a dream—a nightmare. In the dream, Kyungha, who stands in for Han in the novel, sees black tree trunks jutting out of the earth along a low hill. The trees give “the impression of a thousand men, women, and haggard children huddling in the snow.” Suddenly, she is aware of water around her ankles. The sea is crashing in. It threatens to bury the tree torsos on the beach. Many are already out of reach, buried in the sea. She wants, needs, to move the others up the hill to safety, but she has no means to do so, “no shovel,” she says. “How,” she asks, “would I get to them all?” And then she awakes.
At first, she is sure that the dream is about the Gwangju Uprising and her need to preserve the truth against the tide of time. When the dream first appears in 2014, as the novel has it, Kyungha is writing a book about the Gwangju massacre, echoing Han’s own Human Acts (2016). But it soon becomes apparent that there is more to the dream than Kyungha knows. It’s the more that drives the novel forward.
The Persistence of Memory
Han poises the novel on the edge between the phenomenal and the dream world. It’s as if there is a dimensionality to time and events. They take place not only on a two-dimensional scale, past, present, and future, but on a third dimension, a depth dimension, in which events remain powerful even when they have been forgotten. Events—especially outbreaks of violence like the Bodo massacre cannot be entirely suppressed. They continue to resonate, even for those who did not directly experience them. Kyungha’s dream wells up, as it were, from the depths of collective memory, and forces itself on her consciousness.
Kyungha tells the dream to a friend, Inseon, a documentary video maker. She proposes to Inseon that they collect tree trunks, plant them in sea, and create a video of the dream. Inseon, in the wake of bad reviews for her projects, has largely left video making aside, but she is hopeful about Kyungha’s project. They decide to do it, but then time intervenes. They never find the occasion to create the project, and eventually Kyungha decides she does not want to make the video after all.
Against this background, as the novel opens, Inseon has moved to her native Jeju, the large island at the tip of the Korean Peninsula, and taken up carpentry. An accident puts her in a hospital in Seoul, where she summons Kyungha and sends her on a mission to rescue her bird Ama at her house in remote Jeju. When Kyungha arrives in a harrowing snow storm, Kyungha discovers that Inseon has been collecting and working on the trees for the project. There are masses of them in the workshop and outside. And along with these, in Inseon’s isolated house, she discovers much more.
Han Kang is an intricate storyteller. Images that appear in one place in the novel reappear in others, shifting and deepening. The snow keeps coming, both revealing tracks and covering them. The snow must be wiped from the faces of the dead for them to be recognized by those who love them. Birds, with their monaural vision, are never able to see everything at once, as is the case for survivors of the massacres, seeing first the horrors of the past and then the present without being able to put the two together. Sea creatures, a symbol in the novel for the forgotten dead, swim in ocean depths where the pressure all but extinguishes the light, but those who persist in looking will eventually see them moving in the depths. Images like these abound in the novel.
Resurrection and the Persistence of the Past
In all of this, the point is that past persists. In an earlier post, I noted that at the heart of Christian theology is resurrection. The past is never entirely gone. The project of authoritarians, whether in Korea or in the US or anywhere else, to extinguish or rewrite the past is never safe. The past will not stay hidden. The dynamited shaft on the cobalt mine in Gyeongsan will not stay forever blocked. The history that the current US administration does not want told will be told. The past exerts continual pressure on the present.
The crucifixion of Jesus was the summary judgment of the state on the value of his life. Crucifixion was designed to stamp out memory. The crucified often hung for days. At the end, there was not much left. For the crucified, the point was oblivion. As a couple of followers of Jesus said after his death, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21) That hope was dashed.
It is against the dashing of hope that the New Testament proclaims the resurrection of Jesus. In the following verses in Luke 24, Jesus himself hosts a eucharistic meal for his despairing companions. And in the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the wine, hope is reborn.
In her subtle way, drawing on the resources of Korean spirituality, Han Kang in We Do Not Part expresses for the survivors of the 20th century massacres the hope that the past will not sink into oblivion. In the dream that opens the novel, Kyungha fears that she has no way to save the torsos of the past against the sea of time—“no shovel,” as she says. But as Han in this and others of her books proves otherwise. She has shovel enough.
And the story once told cannot be untold. Or so I hope.
Clay