"As if there were a causal link between the unmelting snow she had seen decades before in reality and the snow on my face in her recent dream, and this link was the single most terrifying logic running through her life."

What makes a great anti-war novel?

We Do Not Part centers the Jeju massacre, the repression of an uprising in which the Korean government displaced, disappeared, and killed tens of thousands of Jeju Island's inhabitants. A precursor to the Korean War, and, I think it could be said, an act of war in and of itself, perpetrated upon a country's own people. For all intents and purposes, this book is an anti-war novel; one which has firmly lodged itself into my growing personal canon of anti-war literature. Many claim that war - that violence more broadly - is human nature. But to my mind, there is nothing more human than standing against war. I believe that the anti-war novel is the ultimate humanist narrative - the archetypal story which, more than any other, postulates the inherent worth of all human life, and which indicates that we not only should do better, we can do better. After all, why bother being anti-war, anti-violence, if you truly believe a world without those things is impossible?

When Kang accepted her Nobel Prize in 2024, she said that "the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life." This speaks to, in my estimation, either optimism or humbleness. In a perfect world, Kang's statement would ring true, but some writers, unfortunately, write or wrote in the service of destruction (see: Ezra Pound and fascist Italy). I wholeheartedly believe, though, that this is the ethos behind Kang's work. One can see this opposition to destruction, cruelty, and violence in the very structures of her works, in the fabric of her prose. It's in We Do Not Part that this energy feels particularly directed toward the cruelties of war.

How to Read Ezra Pound by Martin Espada
"At the poets' panel
after an hour of poets debating Ezra Pound,
Abe the Lincoln veteran,
remembering
the Spanish Civil War,
raised his hand and said:
If I knew that
a fascist was a good poet,
I'd shoot him
anyway.

In this way, We Do Not Part is not a book about a haunting - it is a haunted book. The details of the Jeju massacre, the composite images of depraved brutality and gentle humanity, the weight of it all suffocates reader and narrator alike. It becomes a physical pain, an illness. This seems to be the books sole aim, and it hits the mark dead-center at every moment.

This is precisely why it's taken me so long to collect my thoughts on this book. It deeply affected and upset me. I began reading it just as my country began its reinvigorated terrorization of its Latine and Middle Eastern civilians [1][2][3]. They call it "immigration enforcement," but it's the ultimate project of our current fascist regime: an excuse to exile dissenting voices [4][5][6] and form a presidential militia, Nazism in all but name (well, actually, sometimes in name as well). I'm familiar enough with history to know that displacement and capture are always the first steps toward attempts at eradication. It has happened, and continues to happen in some cases, to Native Americans, Jewish Europeans, Palestinians, and Black South Africans, to name a few. Thus, my fear and anger surrounding the American government's treatment of immigrants (and other minority groups) has persisted for years, both because of my general wish to preserve the dignity and well-being of all people, as well as the fact that some of the people I love and cherish the most have targets on their backs for various aspects of their identities. Living as I do in a sanctuary state, it seemed in the past that immigrants were (mostly) safe here - we could afford to focus on providing public services for immigrants because basic safety was already in place, even if imperfect. Now, in my neck of the woods, a father has been abducted by ICE from the parking lot of his child's pre-school; entire communities are living in constant fear and stress; we are not a safe place anymore. There are no safe places anymore.

I recognized, in the (fictionalized yet grounded) accounts of the Jeju massacre, those mechanisms of suppression, capture, and displacement which were used at that time and which ultimately led to forced labor, torture, and murder. I read these pages in between helping someone find the location of their detained cousin through the purposefully confusing and obtuse American detention system. I read these pages in between articles about our "president" sending the National Guard to suppress its own people, who were merely trying to protect their community members. It felt like living in three times at once, caught in the circular lessons of history, the fear of the present, and a premonition of a far more dire near-future. Time collapsed. It keeps collapsing. I live my days preparing for possibilities which feel immediate; possibilities which, in my most fearful and hopeless moments, include the deaths of loved ones; massacres like Jeju (which, it's important to remember, was partially implemented through the US's involvement). Each day is both the day I'm living and, inside my mind and body, the day I'm terrified of living.

At points, reading this brought me to the verge of a panic attack. But I'm glad it exists and I'm glad I read it. It felt as if Kang laid her hand on my shoulder and said, simply, "I see it, too. It would drive anyone crazy, who dared to open their eyes."

"Each legend followed an almost identical pattern. An old drifter shows up at a mountain village and knocks on every door for a meal, only to be turned away by everyone save for a lone woman who offers him a bowl of food. As a show of gratitude, the drifter tells the woman to make sure to go up the mountain before daybreak the next morning without telling anyone where she is going. She is not to look back until she has crossed over to the other side of the mountain. The woman does as the man says, and when she is halfway up the mountain, a tidal wave or torrential downpour submerges the village whole. In every story, without exception, the woman looks back. She turns to stone on the spot."

This book embodies the woman who turns to stone upon gazing at the destruction behind her, which she could have fled if only she kept her head down - an archetypal folktale cited in the book itself (though I'm more familiar with this story as it concerns the wife of Lot in the Bible). If you've ever given enough of a shit about a group you're not a part of to resist, protest, shout, teach, work, and/or grieve for them, you're surely familiar with the blank stares of apathy from passersby, classmates, acquaintances, even your own damn mother. You've probably been asked that horrible question: "why do you care so much?" (My answer - why don't you?) We Do Not Part is not interested in such a stupid question. It accepts the premise of caring, and is more interested in witnessing, remembering. In looking back. It's just the human thing to do.

"There must've been someone she wanted to save. Isn't that why she looked back?"