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The Book Review
Book Club: Let's Talk About "We Do Not Part," by Han Kang
00:49:29
The novel “We Do Not Part,” by the Nobel laureate Han Kang, involves a pet-sitting quest gone surreal: It follows a writer and documentarian whose hospitalized friend beseeches her to take care of her stranded pet parakeet on an island hundreds of miles away. When she arrives, the writer finds not only the bird but also an apparition of her friend, who has a devastating history to tell. On this week’s episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses “We Do Not Part” with fellow Book Review editors Lauren Christensen and Emily Eakin.
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- [00:00]
Zibby Owens
This podcast is supported by Totally Booked with Zippy, the Webby Award winning show formerly known as Moms don't have Time to Read Books. Each weekday on Totally Booked, best selling author Zippy Owens, dubbed NYC's most powerful bookfluencer by Vulture, sits down with the best and fuzziest writers, from bestselling author Kristin Hannah to actress Jennifer Love Hewitt and beyond. Stay on top of the latest book releases and hidden gems. Follow Totally Booked with Zibby on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite listening Apple.
- [00:36]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. Every month on the last Friday of the month, we come to you with our Book Review Book Club, which is a roundtable discussion about a title, new or old, that is hosted by MJ Franklin. Last month we discussed Samantha Harvey's Orbital, which won the 20th 2024 Booker Prize. And this month we have the latest novel to be published in English from the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Hong Kong. I'll let MJ Franklin take it from here.
- [01:17]
MJ Franklin
Hello and welcome to another book club episode of the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm an editor here at the New York Times Book Review, and for this month's Book Review Book Club, we're Talking about We Do Not Part by Han Gong and translated by Lee Yewon and Paige Ania Morris. This felt like a book that the universe was just telling us to read first. Last year, Han's 2016 novel The Vegetarian was named one of the New York Times Best books of the 21st century. A few months after that, Han won the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first South Korean writer to receive that honor. And then a few months after that, in January 2025, We Do Not Part was released in the US so it felt like we were just getting all of these signs to dive into Han's work. Life spoke, we listened, we made We Do Not Part our book club pick. And that is what we're here today to discuss. And joining me in that conversation are two of my incredible colleagues, Lauren Christensen and Emily Aiken. Both Lauren and Emily have joined the book club before. Lauren was here last a few months ago, I think at the end of 2024 to talk about small things like these. And Emily was here at the start of 2025 to talk about our evenings. Lauren, Emily, thank you for coming back. Thank you for being here.
- [02:32]
Lauren Christensen
Thanks for having us.
- [02:33]
Emily Aiken
It's a pleasure.
- [02:34]
MJ Franklin
Also, Lauren, I'm gonna blow up your spot just a little bit. But I have to tell listeners, listeners, Lauren has a new book that just came out, Firstborn. It came out earlier this march and it is powerful and moving and don't walk, run to go read this book.
- [02:50]
Lauren Christensen
Thank you, mj.
- [02:51]
MJ Franklin
So that is our all star lineup. Before we jump into the conversation, I want to, as always, share some admin up top. At the end of the episode, we will reveal our April Book Club book. So stay with us until the end to find out what we're reading next. And then, as always, there will be spoilers in this conversation. We just want to have a robust discussion about this book. We want to talk about its movements and how it lands and the questions of what even happens. And we can't really dig in if we're holding back. So we just wanted to pause and say if you want to go into this book completely fresh, pause this episode, read the book, come back to us. And if you don't care about spoilers or if you've already read the book, let's do it. Let's dive in to get us started. Could someone give us a brief elevator pitch? Synopsis what is we do not part about?
- [03:37]
Emily Aiken
So this book opens with a move that our reviewer said is a no, no for fiction writers, which is the account of a dream. This is a dream by the narrator, a woman named Kyun Ha. It's a nightmare really, involving rows and rows of black tree trunks, like so many human beings covered with thick, white falling snow. And over the course of the dream, the tree trunks are inundated with water as if by a tidal wave. And as Kyun Ha runs among the tree trunks, the water rises up to her knees. So we learn that Kyunha is a writer, and she associates this dream with a book that she wrote four years earlier about a massacre in the Korean city of Gwangju in 1980 in which Pro democracy student activists were killed by the military. This book has profoundly affected her, so much so that she's estranged from her family. We don't really know much about her family, but we know she has a young daughter and she's living now alone in an apartment in Seoul. She seems to be barely alive. She eats a meal a day. She never leaves her apartment. She spends her free time writing and rewriting her will. But she has one friend who knows about this dream, a woman named Insan, a documentary filmmaker turned woodworker with whom Kyun Ha has collaborated in the past when they both worked for a magazine. And at one point they seem to have had an agreement that they would try to realize Kyunha's dream by carving Insan would carve about a hundred logs, paint them black, embed them in a field near her home on the rural island of Jeju, and then film the entire installation when the snow falls. But this plan seems to have been abandoned, and the two women haven't been in touch until suddenly in sun sends Kyunha a text message out of the blue, summoning her to a hospital in Seoul. Kyunha rushes to the hospital, and there she learns that in sun has had a terrible accident. She severed two of her fingers completely while working in her woodworking shop on Jeju Island. And Kyunha realizes that in sun has been working in secret on this dream project all this time. And Insan then asks for a huge favor. She wants Kyunha to fly immediately to Jeju to rescue her pet bird, which will die if it doesn't get food and water within a day. And so Kyunha immediately embarks on this trip. And the rest of the novel is an increasingly surreal account of what happens on Jeju island as Kyunha navigates for a severe snowstorm, this kind of raging, blinding blizzard, to get to Insign's house, and then is plunged into the history of Jeju's own massacre, which involved the killing of thousands of civilians in 1948 and 1949 who were suspected of being communist sympathizers by the Korean military. And all of this was in the lead up to the Korean War.
- [06:39]
MJ Franklin
That is beautifully said. And this is a tricky book because it's a short book, but there is so much happening in so many different layers.
- [06:48]
Lauren Christensen
It's such a hard lot to synthesize. It was very hard. And I guess we'll get to this when we talk about the sort of stylistic elements, but it does not move in a linear fashion. So it is hard to piece together what happens when. Are we in the present? Are we in the past? So great job, Emily.
- [07:04]
MJ Franklin
Yeah, thank you.
- [07:04]
Emily Aiken
Thank you. We should stress this is a poetic and brainy book. It's also a visceral book. It's a lot of unusual things at once, and it is not a linear narrative. Take some adjusting to. To orient yourself, especially, I think, if you're an American reader, because a lot of these events will be unfamiliar to most Americans.
- [07:26]
MJ Franklin
But then also, I think, to non American readers too, this history was so. And I think this is explored in the book. This history was so suppressed, both because bodies weren't returned. It was taboo to discuss it. And slowly There was an opening up and I feel like a part of the project of this book is to unpack this history. But before we get into that, I just want to do a temperature check. I just want to go around the table and just get top level general thoughts. What did you think of we do Not Part?
- [07:57]
Lauren Christensen
I was incredibly moved by the lyrical, poetic, as Emily said, descriptions of the intense grief that both of these women have endured for their own reasons. Grief and suffering. Kyungha, Emily mentioned, eats one meal a day. She is suffering throughout from these mysterious migraines that make her throw up everything she eats. She is in excruciating pain in her head all the time and to the point where she seems suicidal. But there's this pull to fix a problem that her friend has called her to fix and that is really what just keeps her continuing on. And then insen remembering her mother who died, who lived through the jeju massacre in 1948 as a child or as a young woman recovering in an almost archivistic way her mother's really horrifically painful memories and in the process revealing this beautiful love that a daughter has for her mother. I mean, I was so moved by the human relationships in this book that is pretty largely takes place at least in the present, in a very desolate landscape. It's quite unpopulated. And so for a book that does not have a lot of characters or human interaction, I felt that the love and emotion was really there for me.
- [09:21]
MJ Franklin
That's really interesting to hear you say about because I completely agree. There is a desolate landscape. Ish. Right. Because part of it takes place in Seoul. Right. I think the landscape is so desolate because these characters are. And there's a sense that their interiority feels refracted throughout the environment. Also on this island, it's desolate because there's a snowstorm, but also like it's an island people live on. And so the play with that, the environment and their mental states and their spiritual states and I thought was very complex.
- [09:52]
Lauren Christensen
And I really top level can't wait to get into what you guys made of the second section.
- [09:57]
MJ Franklin
Ooh, we'll get there. I'm excited.
- [09:59]
Lauren Christensen
Upside down.
- [10:00]
Emily Aiken
I want to talk more about the first section though. First, because it's true, these women have this sort of inextricable bond. The title itself is revealed, I think toward the end of the book. We do not part is the name they decide to give to this project, which is the realization of Khun Ya's dream in actual logs in Jeju Island. But These women also exist in a kind of profound solitude, right? The writer in her apartment, where she's barely alive and insan in this rural area, alone in this workshop. Her mother has died. So they're both in their sort of own worlds and yet have this connection through this history, this buried history. But one of the things that I found both very disorienting and then I decided, very beautiful, that I had to adjust to was this. There's also a static quality to the book, which is, I think, all embedded in that original dream, which is a recurring dream. And you see these elements, and they're also colors. So there are these black. There's painted black tree trunks. That's the idea, is that somehow they've been painted black and this pristine white snow falling on them. And then the water. So you have the snow, the tree trunks and the water, and also blood. The red blood is a recurring sort of image, both through the wound, that in sun experiences in the workshop. And there are other incidents involving blood. So those were the colors of the book. And it felt a little bit to me like a painting. Did it feel that way to you? As if we're starting with a painting that we have to push on?
- [11:37]
MJ Franklin
For me, it wasn't a painting that came to mind. It was just a general haze. Like, for me, there was a materiality to it. And actually, I was looking up an interview, and Hong Gong said that she wanted to, in this book, work with specifically light things. Snow, light, water, shadow, birds, birds, to convey this very heavy mystery. And so I thought that was really interesting. But for me, the texture of a fog came to mind rather than a painting. But listening to you talk about, like, the vivid black of the trees or the red of the blood is also. She has such an eye for image and detail and color and vibrancy.
- [12:21]
Emily Aiken
And it's also very pared down. It's like she's working in a palette of these four colors, just as the women, both women in the book are when she's describing them. Physically, they're very pared down. They're very practical, unobtrusive. They're not flashy. Their clothes are minimal and loose. I think we know that Insan sews cardigans into her one coat. These are stylishly so. Stylishly. Like somehow she comes across as stylish, even as these. These vivid sort of colors come across as very powerfully aesthetic. But there is a kind of minimalism that she's repurposing these elements. So snow keeps coming up. It's Associated, I think, with death mostly in that sense.
- [13:01]
Lauren Christensen
I mean, a minimalism and a two dimensionality. And I don't mean that in a negative way. There's also this recurring image of both of the women. Kyungha is constantly watching their shadows and the ways in which their shadows interact with one another in this very planar way. And it's almost not human she's observing. It almost feels universal. Just this is the way she's watching how human beings interact.
- [13:28]
MJ Franklin
One of the things I really loved about this book is I feel like you read books sometimes and you're like, oh, this has taught me how to see in a different way. I, after reading this, noticed shadows more often. What lays over top of each other? What new images do they create? When shadows merge, I notice like the feeling of the air and the atmosphere. And like, maybe it's because it's like spring right now where it's randomly hot and randomly cold, but like those days where it's just like you're outside and it's just crisp, not unpleasant, and you're just feeling that on your skin. Like, this book is so sensory in a way that I took away from.
- [14:00]
Emily Aiken
It's very tactile. I think it's very tactile. And there's such a level of minutiae.
- [14:07]
Lauren Christensen
When you just said tactile. It of course, made me think of this recurring motif of actual fingers throughout, like physically, the characters themselves touching each other, working with their hands. There's this beautiful, beautiful scene of Ensign's mother. It's a memory that Ensign's recall of her mother when she was young and tragically lost her baby sister during this horrific period. And her sister, she sees her sister on the snow, bleeding out. So again, to bring back that really intense imagery of just blood soaked red on white. Exactly. And it's her young, young sister. And Ensign's mother is herself a child. And in a child's logic, it is so beautiful, it's like gonna make me choke up. She thinks to. I don't know if she bites her own finger or somehow cuts her own finger and sticks her bleeding finger into her baby sister's mouth to suck on, almost like a bottle or something or a nipple. And thinking as a child, like my sister, she's, look at how much blood she's losing. I can replace it for her. I can transfer it. And then her mother, as she's older, insign's mother, when she's older and dying and on her deathbed and losing it, her instinct is to stick her finger in Ensign's mouth as this symbol of nurturing. And then of course, the whole inspiring incident of this novel is that Insign chops off her finger in the. In the carpentry studio. So it's quite literal, but it's not. So it's not heavy handed, not to. No pun intended. It's a really graceful. It's a very graceful metaphor.
- [15:46]
MJ Franklin
I'm getting like chills hearing you talk about that.
- [15:49]
Emily Aiken
And there's something really powerful that this wound also ties us to this history. But we need to see this. The wound that Insan has in the present. We experience her present wound and the treatment that she receives is so brutal.
- [16:04]
Lauren Christensen
This is.
- [16:04]
Emily Aiken
I don't. I assume this is what happens. This is state of the art treatment. But in order for her sutured fingers to still work, the nerves to still function, they have to constantly, every three minutes, prick her finger so that she bleeds, so that blood flows through the whole nerve, the whole finger that's been re sutured. And so there's this idea that the infliction of pain is a form of care.
- [16:27]
MJ Franklin
But then also for me, it's not just the infliction of pain as a form of care, but that we need to watch. Kyungha can't stop looking at these images that she's like, it's gruesome, but I can't look away. And then the same when she's in the room with Insan, she can't look away in sun has to feel the pain. And it's not just to make sure that her fingers are better. Or I guess it is to make sure her fingers are better. But what happens if she doesn't feel the pain? What happens if she stops treatment? She loses the fingers because they rot. And that is such a sense, that's such a potent metaphor for the feeling of we have to feel this history, we have to painfully look at it. Because otherwise we as people, as a nation rot.
- [17:09]
Lauren Christensen
Or like, thank God we feel pain, otherwise we become totally desensitized to horrific violence.
- [17:16]
Emily Aiken
It's almost like this history is being resurrected so that we actually witness it. We're not just reading an account, but we're experiencing it indirectly via these women.
- [17:26]
Lauren Christensen
Right. Every three minutes it's being poked.
- [17:28]
MJ Franklin
So I'm gonna come back around and ask you very directly, what did you think about this book? Did you like it? Love it? Hate it? Yeah.
- [17:36]
Emily Aiken
It took me an adjustment to get into this book. And I think it was only when I went back after finishing it and reread it did. I appreciate how expertly and elegantly it was structured. There were places where, especially in the middle, which I want to discuss with you guys because I feel like there's a real transition. The middle of the novel is a snowstorm, and we're in it for a long time. And MJ invoked that fog at the beginning. Well, this snowstorm is also very. It's very hard to know where we're going. It's very unclear what's happening, who's alive, who's dead, who's going to survive. And I found myself disoriented and I found it in places hard going, I'll be honest. But when I got to the end and went back to the beginning, I began to see how everything was so deliberately planned and that these elements were constantly being repurposed and rearranged. The elements we've talked about, the snow, the blood, the trees.
- [18:32]
MJ Franklin
Did you feel that too? Because it's so meticulous. You feel like you're in good hands and you're like, I don't know where we're going, but I'm along for the ride. Did you feel that?
- [18:40]
Lauren Christensen
How did you feel? Yeah, I got a little lost in the nature description that might be my own short. As a reader. I'm into like heavy dialogue, a lot of like people interacting kind of books. So the exact opposite of what this book is. And it's not even like it's a quixotic journey, but it's not really about the physical journey. And I was relieved once we got there. And then it became this kind of surrealist, ambiguous. Is this a dream? Are we alive? Are we dead? Who's. Is the bird buried? Is the bird back? It was. I was relieved to kind of get to that part. Mj, what about you? What were your top level thoughts?
- [19:14]
MJ Franklin
So this was my first Hong Kong book that I'd read and I loved it. I also just got very lost in what was happening and the surreal nature of it. But also, yeah, I mentioned before, you could feel the precision and care on every single page. And that's what stood out right away to me. And then the images and the metaphors. And one of the things that I loved is how they morph as the book goes on. At first you're just getting snow and snow and trees and snow and you're like along for the ride. And part of the snow is the storm that's happening on the island. But Kyung Ha has these nightmare visions of snow, which is the way that the Gwangju massacre in her book about that haunts her. And so you're never sure what's happening. Is it a hallucination or it's real?
- [20:05]
Emily Aiken
And for In San's mother as well, the snow, of course. When In San was young and her family was massacred, she and her sister go to find their bodies. The bodies of the victims are covered with snow and they have to wipe away the snow to see who is who. And the snow is. Because the bodies are cold, the snow hasn't melted. And this becomes a motif that recurs as well. There are points in the book where Kyungha wonders, am I dead? Wait, the snow. Wait, it's melting on my face. I'm still alive.
- [20:37]
Lauren Christensen
I just remembered a major sort of atmosphere setting in the very beginning, which is that before, as Kyungha's suffering through her life, trying to figure out, like, who would I even burden with my will? She's so mired in her pain. It's a intense heat wave in Seoul, right? She cannot survive. Her apartment is so hot, but she can't muster the strength to even go to a public location where there's air conditioning. She's sweltering in her home. She can't. She has taken cold showers to revive herself. And so this kind of. This idea of the sweltering heat, the melting city just crowded with so many bodies, and then this. This completely unpopulated, desolate, freezing cold, but bucolic, pristine white landscape where this horrific history occurred, that that real shift was beautiful. That was. That really worked.
- [21:36]
MJ Franklin
You get the sense that this is not just a writer just describing what's happening, but like she's really taking everything that she has in her tool belt and is using that to tell this historical reckoning. So I really loved it. And also, while we're talking about general plots, I just wanted to share a few reader comments. Because we have been talking about this book online with our online community of readers, we have put up an article titled Book Club Read We Do Not Part by Hong Kong with the book review. And readers from all over the world are talking about it. So I just want to share a few comments. Juliana from Portland says, I fell in love with this author. The kind of love you just want to hug her with your whole soul. Her writing in this book was body gripping, heart gripping, and mind gripping. It was powerful, jarring, and extraordinary. Jin from Tacoma says, as someone born in Korea, but who lived most of my life in the States, it was so powerful to read this book. I see my reading of these books and in listening to the stories of the survivors as an act of love. And one comment that I especially just really loved. It's so poetic. It's from someone who goes by, I believe. I hope I'm saying it right. Helekala Sunrise and they wrote, I just finished the book. I had to stop and put it down a few times when the depth of the losses became too much to continue on. I felt the weight of many bones, the weight of many trapped souls. There's no closing this book. It does not close. Couldn't have said it better. So thank you for reading that.
- [23:03]
Emily Aiken
And I think that's an important point that reader makes because when you get to the end of the book, it's not really an ending, is it? I went right back to the beginning and I bet other people did too.
- [23:14]
MJ Franklin
That's a good point. And I want to pivot to talk about part two. We've been talking about part one a lot, but I want to talk about part two. But first, I think you should take a quick break.
- [23:39]
Zibby Owens
This podcast is supported by Totally Booked with Zippy, the Webby Award winning show formerly known as Moms don't have Time to Read Books. Each weekday on Totally Booked, best selling author Zippy Owens, dubbed NYC's most powerful book fluencer by Vulture, sits down with the best and buzziest writers from best selling author Kristin Hannah to actress Jennifer Love Hewitt and beyond. Stay on top of the latest book releases and hidden gems. Follow Totally Booked with Zibby on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite listening app.
- [24:10]
Lauren Christensen
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MJ Franklin
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Lauren Christensen
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MJ Franklin
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Lauren Christensen
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MJ Franklin
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Lauren Christensen
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- [24:43]
MJ Franklin
And we're back. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm chatting with Emily Akin and Lauren Christensen and we're talking about We Do Not Part by Hong Kong. Before the break, we talked about the first half of the novel. Now we're gonna pivot to the second half and I was wondering, Lauren, can you give us a setup of the second half?
- [24:59]
Emily Aiken
Sure.
- [24:59]
Lauren Christensen
Although I'm not sure how much there is to actually pin down in terms of plot. So the first part insign has summoned Kyungha, as Emily mentioned, to rescue her pet bird who can only survive for a couple of days without food and water. And so she takes this quixotic journey that involves a plane, a bus, everything. And by the second part, the first part was called Bird. The second part is called Night. And by the time night falls, by the time she. As soon as she's at the moment, you think she's going to physically crumble. She's having migraines in the freezing cold snow. She has not eaten, she's completely weak. And suddenly, like a mirage, she sees Insign's carpentry studio. The door is gaping open as if welcoming her into its sort of it's lit cavern. And she, she finds there the bird, whose name is Amma. And the bird has unfortunately died. So her first goal upon arriving is how do I bury this bird? So she's wrapping this bird with so much care in several different materials. There's a. I think there's a cloth, there's a metal sort of cage that is holding these remains of the bird. And she has to work to find soil so enough to be able to dig because it's a snowstorm and everything's frozen. And she finally does. And then somehow, and this is where everything. The rug is pulled out from under you. She looks and the bird's alive, the bird is out. The bird has either escaped Houdini like her multiple layers of wrapping and emerged from the ground, or the bird was never dead and she never buried the bird. And then she's. She's experiencing almost like, you know. And meanwhile, as we've said, she's suffering from intense migraines. So she's not sure she can trust her own vision either.
- [27:00]
MJ Franklin
And then on the journey she like falls in the snow. She passes out. She passes too.
- [27:04]
Lauren Christensen
Exactly, exactly. Everything is dreamlike. But in one of those visions, what she feels, she experiences, she's seeing is none other than Insign, her friend, who is, we thought was in a hospital in Seoul with her fingers, and her fingers are intact, so we don't know what the hell is happening. She's even, she says, am I dead? Am I the one who's not alive anymore? You know what's happening. And the rest, the second half is this protracted dialogue conversation between these two women who seem to be alive. And they are engaging in this intense and intimate act of remembering together.
- [27:44]
MJ Franklin
And my last setup question is, what are they talking about? What are they remembering?
- [27:48]
Lauren Christensen
They're remembering Insan. Well, it's mostly, it's one sided dialogue. Insan is really narrating to Kyungha what her mother imparted to her before she died. This is one of those books. Not only do we not know what's a memory, what's in the present, there's no. There's no quotation marks. It takes some investigating, some analysis, to figure out who's saying what, what's a thought, what's being spoken out loud, what's an actual archival material.
- [28:16]
Emily Aiken
And that seems very deliberate, so that the boundaries between life and death, who's alive, who's not, between people, and even between nature and animals and human beings seem so porous.
- [28:29]
MJ Franklin
So then my question, open question for the table is, what did you make of it? Part two. Very weird. What's going on? We don't know. One of the things I noticed is there's a different register in part two. The first part is this treacherous journey. It's this travel narrative. We're trying to get through this storm. It's this odyssey. The second part, though, has. I felt a horror movie energy. There are so many jump scares that happen. She looks out the window and sees this tree. And she isn't sure if it's a body or what it is. And she's like, oh, it's a tree. Or then she looks over and she's like, what is that figure? Is it. No, it's the apparition of incense. There are way more jump scares. The register has changed. And I don't know what to make of that. But I noted it. It felt so intentional. But I'm curious. In part two, how did you feel about it?
- [29:17]
Lauren Christensen
I interpreted it in a lot of the passages. Made me feel that this was another instance where Kyungha was summoning not a dream, but summoning this kind of tableau. Actually, do you go back to your painting of historical significance that is almost entirely in her mind? It's not possible that Ensign is there. Either that or she's hallucinated her friend calling her in the hospital. But that seems more unlikely. It does feel like she has this whole setup of. I thought the project was off. I thought the documentary, the film we do not part was nil. We abandoned that project, and somehow Ensign's been working on it this whole time. That feels like a fantasy. It feels like this project in her mind. And then there's also this. Really something I found so rewarding, and ultimately no answers, but was just this strange, ambiguous relationship between the two women. Also, like, we're close, but not that close, you know? Kyung Ah is like, I am not the person. I wouldn't have even burdened Insan with my will. Why is she calling on me, of all people, to. Like, I'm basically her colleague. Like, I didn't realize we were that close. But then there's just this sort of symbiosis between them. And just this. By the time we're in the second part, it's almost like she's hallucinating. This unspoken intimacy between them where they. They know what each other is thinking without having to say, well.
- [30:48]
Emily Aiken
And we learned so many. A few interesting things that prepare us for why they would have this bond that would transcend their individual lives and go beyond even in death. We know that Insun is, as a documentary filmmaker, made, I think, films that were notable, and they were all about women. We should talk about the fact that this book is all women except for the bus driver. And those films were really about women who survived atrocities. And the last film in sun turns the camera on herself. And during the snowstorm, as Kyunha is trekking through the blizzard to In Sun's house, she recalls these films as if she's almost playing them in her mind. And I think that also sets us up for when we get to the house. Whether they're both phantoms, one is alive, one is dead. That this is like they have this. They have access to this history in a way that I think. I don't know what you guys thought, but I felt like women in this novel and in Hong Kong's work in general, have access to history and pain and trauma.
- [31:52]
Lauren Christensen
Well, the men were all rounded up and shot. There are men in this book, but they are remembered as murdered. And so it is the women's duty, responsibility, it is their. Their lot to. Their burden to dredge up what happened.
- [32:11]
MJ Franklin
Can I tell you I had a slightly different interpretation of the second half? I'm gonna say what I thought as I was reading the second half. And then disclosure, like the ending, made me change all of my thoughts once again. But I thought that she made it to the house, and I didn't think that she was hallucinating. Somehow. I felt like that in sun could actually be there as an apparition, not necessarily as a ghost, not necessarily as a hallucination from Gyung Ha's mind, but like a projection from Insun herself. And that is because in sun tells this story at one point that when she ran away as a kid and she was in the hospital and she was, like, close to death, her ghost appeared to her mother in the house. And so we have some type of precedent for that idea that, like, there is another type of Insan, there's another form that can appear. So I thought that that is what Gyung Ha was facing throughout. And then again, my feelings about whatever happened and what we were actually reading changed again in part three. But for me, I was like, gyeong Ha's alive. Barely in. Sun is alive and her ghost is here. Because of the weight of what in Sun's going through, and because of the weight of the history that they are telling each other.
- [33:27]
Lauren Christensen
Something I just remembered, I forgot to mention in my little summary of what happens in the second part. Kyung Ah is cured. She starts to feel better. Her symptoms go away. She suddenly has this hunger she hasn't felt in since we've known her. All of a sudden, the insign ghost, whatever is making her porridge, and she's eating it and she's wanting to eat it. And it's this mystical sort of healing that happens. And when you said just, I have forgotten about that memory. And it's almost as if insign is this. She really does have this kind of godlike presence. This sort of almost comical summoning, like sending her on this sort of silly goose chase of like, go find. Go give my bird water in a snowstorm. It feels like this kind of mission you're suffering. You are so mired in your kind of myopic existence where you have shut out the whole world or the world has shut you out. Either way, you're totally isolated. Let me. Let me save you.
- [34:30]
MJ Franklin
Which for the metaphor of the book, you have to feel the pain. You have to go through the mission. You have to move on. I know we're running long in this conversation, and we have an exciting third segment, but I want to talk about the historical project of this novel because I think that's so important. And one of the things that I recommend listeners go also check out is Hong Kong's Nobel lecture after she won the prize in 2024. Because in it, she gives a lot of background of what she's thinking about across all of her books. And she said something so interesting, which is that she considers Insan's mother to be the true protagonist of this book. And I'm curious, can someone tell us a little bit about her mother and what you made of the weight of remembering?
- [35:16]
Emily Aiken
That's a really interesting idea because we first know about the mother as someone who has died, who died as a person with dementia, who Insan was caring for. And so only later, only, she emerges as a kind of person who can recount a history and who has all this History, this trauma only at the end of the book, but where all points are pulling us toward the mother, which is so interesting. So even as Insan and Kyunha are together in the house in Jeju, the mother is there. We actually hear her voice, and we see literally the traces of her pencil marks. As Insan, we're basically in a museum that her mother has assembled that contains in it the history of the massacre that killed her family and that she became responsible for passing on and preserving the history of to the degree that she could. We learn all these extraordinary things about her. So this massacre was suppressed by official history, and only years and years later was a group formed, a community group, to go excavate the mass grave where bodies were in a mine.
- [36:26]
MJ Franklin
And Ensign's mother was like the force behind it. She was at every event, she was at every excavation. And it's not that she's just collected this history, but she's really taken charge of trying to find the bodies of the people that they lost.
- [36:43]
Lauren Christensen
Including their brother.
- [36:44]
MJ Franklin
Including their brother. And for me, that, like, so the first half of the book is so atmospheric, but when this book totally clicked into place is when you find out about her mother and just the importance of remembering that we have to remember. And for me, the animated question is, how do we remember when history is suppressed? Why do you remember? How do we honor our dead? And that felt like something that is explored time immemorial throughout so many types of books throughout the ages, and yet Hong Kong does it in such an original, haunting way.
- [37:22]
Lauren Christensen
Yeah, I can see that she's the protagonist in the sense that everything in this novel happens because of her. Her daughter quite literally cuts off her finger as a tribute. A tribute or just a way to reopen the wound out of her grief over her mother's passing. There's so much beauty in this, in that depiction of their motherhood. It's just seared in my memory that as Ensen is caring for her mother and her mother is sometimes forgotten, doesn't recognize insign, maybe sometimes thinks she's the baby sister or an older sister or just doesn't recognize her as her daughter, she still has this muscle memory, this instinct of whenever she peels a Mandarin, she instinctively breaks it and shares it and gives the bigger piece to her daughter, that somewhere in her, just the deepest recesses of her soul, she remembers that this is her child. And that is just. There's lots of moments like that that are so small and. And Han does not belabor them. She does not shove them in your face. It is so delicately woven into this book, the real humanity. Not to mention just the fact of these two women going through this archive. And I think one of. I can't remember actually which. Whose perspective we're in, but either Insin or Kyungha toward the end just says going through all of these documents, just pouring over the scale of the horror that happened. And one of the women, or maybe both of them are just like. We had to reframe what we thought was possible, what. What we thought it was possible for one human being to do to another. You just completely reorient your entire conception, not of your own life, but just about humankind. It's unthinkable. And so this book is really working on two extremely opposite scales. Incredibly intimate and really.
- [39:22]
Emily Aiken
And going back to your point about the protagonist being the mother and teaching us or inviting us not to forget. Not to forget this history. And really embodying it, and embodying it and animating it. I'm thinking again of that episode, that key episode again. This book is really brilliantly structured. Like a work of architecture, like an edifice. The episode where Insan's recounting how as a teenager, she ran away, and we know that that's an episode prepares us for this idea of the fantastic. Because she appears before her mother, who's worried sick about her and Jeju as a phantom. And that prepares us for the end. But the reason she's run away is because she is very, very angry with her mother. Disgusted.
- [40:07]
Lauren Christensen
She's just.
- [40:08]
Emily Aiken
She hates her mother. She's furious with her mother. And I feel like there's something we can explore there, because it's like that is an option. Is it an option running away from this past, Running away from this history? It turns out it's not.
- [40:20]
MJ Franklin
But even that as a whole thing is a metaphor, right? Her mother didn't share this history with her daughter. And then her daughter is furious with her and doesn't understand her silence. And that ties back to the idea of you have to feel this pain because otherwise you will rot. That's what's happened to the relationship. And then she finds out about this history, and they're able. She's able to reclaim her mother's memory, and then also the memory of what's happened. I feel like there's so much folded into this. Again, pretty slim book. And it's just operating on so many levels. I feel like we could talk about it all day, but we're running out of time. So before we go, are there Just any top level last things you want to say, things you want people to know about this book.
- [41:03]
Emily Aiken
One thing that really struck me, I think I read in a profile of Han Gong that she herself has had the dream with which she begins the book, which I think is really interesting, that she created this novel around this dream and that she herself has written about the massacre at Gwangju. We didn't talk about that novel, really. But I'm not saying this is a work of autofiction, but I think that she is exploring these connections rather than inventing them as the artifice of fiction. And you feel that that's why I think it really works. There's a powerful connection to actual history.
- [41:39]
Lauren Christensen
I came into this having read the Vegetarian, and I think I was expecting something really in my face. I think I keep saying. And she doesn't throw it in your face. I think the Vegetarian is very upfront about what it's doing, and it doesn't really leave so much room in a positive way for different affective experiences. It's pretty much giving you one really intense affective experience, and it's very powerful. This was a whole different relationship that I think Han was having with her reader. It is extremely open to interpretation in terms of plot structure, timeline. I think the emotion is extremely powerful, but it's really open to interpretation is what I'm saying. And I think that it's so impressive for both of those strategies on a narrator's part, on a novelist part, to be equally controlled.
- [42:37]
MJ Franklin
Yes.
- [42:37]
Lauren Christensen
And we've made so much of how intentional and deliberate every section is. It's just she is a writer of intense range.
- [42:47]
MJ Franklin
Yeah, that is a great point. Talking about Human Acts, which is the book about the Guangzhou massacre and the Vegetarian. Because our next segment is. Are there other books that you would pair with We Do Not Part. I'm leaving this so broad our remit. This could be books that have a similar atmosphere, books that also reckon with history, books that you just felt like you needed to read for comfort after you read this one. I'm giving it so Broad, but I'm just wondering, are there books that you would recommend readers? Pick up next after reading We Do Not Part.
- [43:18]
Lauren Christensen
So I am going to recommend a book that came out a few days ago, actually. It's called. It's another novel in translation. This is a Swedish novel. It is called the Colony by Annika Norlin. This is another story that takes place almost entirely in the woods in this kind of unpopulated, remote naturescape. I'm gonna focus on one aspect of it, it is overall about a colony of kind of incongruous individuals that decide to form a commune together in the woods in the Swedish forest. I want to specifically focus on one character, this Hungarian orphaned Hungarian man named Joseph, whose story reminds me so much. Ensign's story reminded me so much of Joseph's in that. And it's not totally unique to these characters, but it was a very powerful connection to me. Joseph's parents were survivors of, I believe it was Auschwitz one of the concentration camps. They never spoke to him about it. He grew up, they survived, they immigrated to Sweden and he grew up having to learn about the Holocaust in his school. And he was like, huh. I think that might be what my parents went through. And it's just this, really. And his parents are obsessed with him having fun and being normal and going to this pool and swimming and being on the swim team and just having friends and playing and being normal. And it's almost this oppressive silence and forced smile that is. It just pervades his childhood. And he becomes such a. A sad, melancholic boy, a lonely boy. He's well liked, you know, he's normal, but he inside feels this complete absence of connection. And it just, to me, just this. The parents silence about a history and an experience that just speaks to the child nevertheless, in this incredibly powerful way. It really, it reminded me so much of that. And then I guess my other recommendation, this is a book that is going to come out, I believe, next week. I think it was just the record scratch second section, where you're kind of like, wait a minute, everything's upside down. Where are we? If you really like that in this book, Katie Kitamura, whose previous novel, Intimacies, was on our ten best books of the year list.
- [45:40]
MJ Franklin
And that's 2022.
- [45:41]
Lauren Christensen
Yeah. Thank you. I wasn't gonna remember 2021.
- [45:44]
MJ Franklin
In the 2000s.
- [45:46]
Lauren Christensen
Recently in the past, during the pandemic. Yes, it was pandemic. Well, her next novel is called Audition, and it is a completely different novel from this, except for the fact that something switches smack in the middle of the book and you just don't know up from down and in a really satisfying, productive, totally disorienting way. So if you happen to like that part of this book, I recommend Katie Kitamura's forthcoming Audition.
- [46:14]
MJ Franklin
I love those recommendations and both so new, so recent.
- [46:18]
Lauren Christensen
This is a newspaper and news podcast.
- [46:21]
MJ Franklin
What about you, Emily? What would you recommend?
- [46:23]
Emily Aiken
I'm gonna recommend an older novel. And though I think Han Kang's voice is so utterly distinct, it's hard. This is not a novel that I can compare to hers, but I think, like Lauren, there's something in the themes that is evocative of We Do Not Part, and that is the English Patient by the Canadian Sri Lankan writer Michael Andaatshe. This book was published in 1992, and I think it's been overshadowed by the movie version, which is actually phenomenal. But the book itself is a story that takes place in the ruins of another conflict, World War II, and features a cast of characters, including the English patient of the title, who is a nameless burn victim. He's so burned and he has no identity cards. Nobody knows who he is. And he recounts his past, as does the nurse who attends to him. And this small collection of people who are he's dying but survivors, at least for the moment of this terrible conflict reminds me in its beauty. It's an utterly beautiful book. I think Anthony Lane, I remember, reviewed it at the time. Maybe he reviewed the movie adaptation and he said it's almost too painfully beautiful to read. It's a gorgeous book.
- [47:35]
MJ Franklin
That sounds also incredible. Go check it out readers. So I have two which is first, go read Hong Kong's Human Acts, which I think is a cousin novel to We Do Not Part. We Do Not Part is about how do we remember. Human Acts is about how can we remember this? That's about the Gwangju massacre. And the tragedy is so horrible that the people, the survivors are like, we don't want to remember. I can't live this. And someone says, I don't want to talk about what happened next. There is no one who has the right to ask me to remember anymore. That book is one of the most upsetting things I've ever read and I'm so happy.
- [48:16]
Lauren Christensen
I read.
- [48:18]
MJ Franklin
Feels like an important book. It's an ambitious book. It also plays with form. You're jumping around a bunch of different characters and it's playing with time. But it's one of those things where similar to this book, it's painful to look at, but you have to that's one of those books. And then my other book is April coming up is National Poetry Month. So I have a poetry recommendation and that is Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith. This book is really wrestling with a number of unarmed, innocent black boys who have been hunted down and killed in the U.S. the list goes on and on and on. And this poem, or I guess this whole collection is wrestling with that weight. And the central poem, it's this 20 page epic is called Summer Somewhere and that's where the title comes from. It says don't call us dead, call us alive someplace better. And to point out the similarities, I just want to read some quotes from it. One of them is just history is what it is. It knows what it did and I feel like that is a thing that I felt while reading We Do Not Part. And then there's another section on a page that says dear dear, my most distant love, When I dream of you, I wake in a field so blue I drown. If you were here, we could play Eden all day, but fruit here grows strange. I know before me lives something treacherous that also is the same ethos. I think of this book and Danez is a remarkable poet. Go check out all of their work. But specifically I would pair Don't Call Us Dead with We Do Not Part.
- [49:51]
Emily Aiken
Gorgeous. Wonderful choice.
- [49:53]
MJ Franklin
I unfortunately think that's all the time we have today. Emily Lauren, this has been so fun, which feels weird to say considering how heavy this is, but thank you so much.
- [50:02]
Lauren Christensen
Thank you for having us.
- [50:03]
Emily Aiken
Thank you mj. Always a pleasure.
- [50:06]
MJ Franklin
And thank you to everyone online who read with us again. We have an article headline Book Club Read We Do Not Part by Hong Kong with the Book Review. Continue the conversation there. And as promised, now is the time for our April Book Club reveal. In April, we will be reading Playworld by Adam Ross. We have an article headlined Book Club Read Playworld by Adam Ross with Book Review up on the New York Times website. Chat with us and other readers there and then we'll also be discussing the novel here on the podcast that airs on April 25th. We can't wait to talk about that book with you, but in the meantime, happy reading.
- [50:43]
Gilbert Cruz
That was our monthly Book Review Book Club roundtable hosted by MJ Franklin. He and Emily Akin and Lauren Christensen talked about Hong Kong's We Do Not Part. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thank you for listening. Your old or broken phone can let you down. But at Verizon, trade in any old phone from our top brands and get iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence with a new line on my plan and iPad and Apple Watch Series 10. After all, you don't want your old phone to die on you when you're lost.
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MJ Franklin
Perfect.
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Gilbert Cruz
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MJ Franklin
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Gilbert Cruz
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