Han Kang writes between death and life
May 16, 2025
We are living in an era of mass death. We always have been.
Writing as I am, a Korean American existing in the heart of the American empire, much about my comfortable life seems designed to allow me to forget the truth of these statements. In fact, the project of my adult life feels like recognizing that every era of human existence has been one of mass death, if we choose not to forget the past.
2025 has been a period of intense cognitive dissonance for me and for so many others. On both a personal and a global scale, my grief and joy have zigged and zagged: Trump’s inauguration; the birth of my best friend’s child; a long-overdue, temporary ceasefire in Gaza that has yielded to still more atrocities; reeling in shock over plane crashes, senseless loss, political turmoil; then finding a moment in therapy to recognize incremental ways that I am healing… it’s been jagged and constant.
In these recent months, as I’ve sought ways to ground myself, I have turned to the words of Han Kang.
This past January brought the release of the extraordinary Korean author’s latest novel in English translation, We Do Not Part, which explores the porousness between the realms of the living and the dead. The same month, I also found myself watching Han’s Nobel Prize lecture and reading its English translation, which she delivered in December after she was named the 2024 laureate in literature. The lecture, titled “Light and Thread,” is included in Han’s newest book by the same name, a concise essay and poetry collection that was published in Korea in late April and is slated to be published in English translation in the U.S. in September.
“What does it mean to belong to the species called human?” Han asks. “To negotiate an impossible way through the empty space between these two precipices of human horrors and human dignity, I needed the assistance of the dead.”
To be a writer is to serve as a portal between the living and the dead. We imagine or record what it means for us to be alive. We commit these words to the page for posterity, in hopes that those reading in the future might find some illumination there. To write is to refuse to forget.
It’s striking to hear Han articulate this concept with such immediacy; it’s not just that she holds her memory of the dead in her mind as she writes—rather, she seeks their “assistance,” as if conjuring their active participation in her craft.
She recalls in her Nobel lecture that back in her mid-twenties, she would write these lines on the first page of every diary:
Can the present help the past?
Can the living save the dead?
Decades later, as Han describes, she experiences a breakthrough related to these questions that have driven her work thus far. Until this point, Han says, she had never considered writing about Gwangju, the city of her birth that became in 1980 the site of a massive, pro-democracy uprising against South Korea’s military dictatorship. For 10 days in the month of May 1980, Gwangju transformed, in Han’s words, into an “‘absolute community’ of self-governing citizens” before the dictatorship reclaimed the city by massacring its own people.
While reading the testimony of a departed Gwangju protester in 2012, Han realized “with the clarity of lightning” that she must change her approach. This prompted her to reverse the questions that guide her writing:
Can the past help the present?
Can the dead save the living?
Context is everything. To understand Han Kang, to truly appreciate the value of her work, it’s critical to gain a baseline understanding of contemporary South Korea.
If New York is the city that never sleeps, Seoul is the city that never slows down.
Ppalli ppalli, Koreans say. Quick, quick. Hurry, hurry. Twinning this word, we add emphasis, rhythm, as if to aid its speed.
Ppalli ppalli is a mindset so intrinsic to South Korean culture, people joke that’s why the country code for calling from overseas is +82 (pal-i).
I lived in South Korea for most of my twenties, but more than six years have passed since I last visited. A part of me aches when I think about how unrecognizable parts of the capital will be when I return. I’ve grieved the disappearance of favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurants, entire office buildings where I used to work, rustic pockets of old Seoul, all lost to startlingly fast urban redevelopment.
I trace the ppalli ppalli mindset back to the decades between the 1950s and 1990s. The Korean War, which ended unofficially by armistice in 1953, reduced much of the country to rubble. But in the following decades, South Korea transformed—and I mean utterly transformed—through “the Miracle on the Han River,” an overly optimistic term for the rapid economic growth that a series of brutal military dictatorships rammed through.
Progress was indeed real, but it came at a dear cost. Too many South Koreans became casualties of this so-called miracle: I fear we’ll forget those who died by man-made disasters and political torture, with their stories overshadowed by the futuristic skyscrapers that now loom over the capital’s skyline.
For decades, politicians, both Korean and foreign, have loved to tout the country’s U.S.-aided transition from its past authoritarian dictatorships to the vibrant, if imperfect, democracy that it is today. Not enough people remember that this progress was, in fact, built on the backs of generations of Korean political protesters, many of whose lives were lost to state violence.
But in December 2024, the world witnessed how vulnerable that democracy is when South Korea’s president at the time, Yoon Suk Yeol, made a late-night, surprise declaration of martial law.
This time, martial law lasted only six hours. Watching from New York, knowing it was the middle of the night in Korea, I fully expected people to take to the streets once they woke up to the news.
Instead, I was exhilarated to see Koreans, regular citizens and lawmakers alike, rouse from their beds en masse, at midnight, 1 a.m., to protest immediately. Within just four tumultuous, protest-filled months, South Korea’s National Assembly impeached Yoon, and the Constitutional Court formally removed him from the presidency. As of this writing, he is on trial for criminal charges.
As an avid reader of Han Kang, I knew how South Korea’s last declaration of martial law went. After reading her Gwangju novel, Human Acts—and upon the realization that I, too, was a daughter of Gwangju, from my paternal line, I researched the 1980 uprising. Indelible in my mind are images of Korean lawmakers filing out of the National Assembly at soldiers’ bayonet points and the military chaining shut the gates of universities. In contrast, in 2024, sexagenarian lawmakers scaled fences to fight their way into the National Assembly to strike down Yoon’s martial law declaration. The memory of the past helping the present, indeed.
In Human Acts, survivors of the massacre at Gwangju are told repeatedly to try and forget the horrors they’ve witnessed: “Can’t you just put it behind you?” they’re asked. “Just forget about what happened.” Again, “It’s best you forget, then…”
But in committing these memories to the page, Han’s work exists in fierce opposition to the ppalli ppalli mentality, resisting the slippage of these historic events into a collective amnesia. Of writing Human Acts and We Do Not Part, she says in her Nobel lecture, “I read testimonies from massacre survivors, pored over materials, and then, in as restrained a manner as I could without looking away from the brutal details that felt almost impossible to put into words, I wrote…”
Much of We Do Not Part is set on Jeju Island, off the southwestern coast of South Korea. Like Gwangju, it is the site of mass killings, only these took place during the 1940s following another declaration of martial law and civilian protests. History cycles endlessly.
One character in the novel, Jeongsim, is known to have survived the Jeju massacres as a 13-year-old girl. “She who refuses to stop mourning,” Han says in her Nobel lecture of this character. “She who bears pain and stands against oblivion. Who does not bid farewell.”
In her works, Han is explicit about linking incidents of state violence across borders, reminding readers that our grief is interconnected. “It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic cycle,” she writes in Human Acts.
As a reader, too, I do my own linking, connecting Han to a rich network of contemporary Korean women writing protest movement-centered political literature. No doubt, by winning the Nobel (after winning a slew of other literary honors), Han certainly finds herself even more visible, particularly to international readers.
My hope, then, is that as readers find their way to Han’s works, they then connect the threads to the work of Kim Soom, whose novel One Left bears witness to survivors of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery; then to Hwang Jungeun’s novella One Hundred Shadows that details the haunting violence of Seoul’s hypergentrification; and still forward to Hawon Jung’s nonfiction account of South Korea’s #MeToo reckoning, the 4B campaign, and the wider feminist movement in Flowers of Fire. (A journalist—and former colleague of mine from our Seoul days—Jung also has reported brilliantly about Yoon’s 2024 ousting and the role of young women in the so-called Light Stick Revolution.) Each of these books corresponds to protest movements that have mourned their own dead and serve, too, as a refusal to forget their names.
I had the privilege of seeing Han Kang speak once, at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, no less. It was before the onset of the pandemic, 2019, a year after I’d last visited Korea to research and report on the Gwangju uprising. At the time, I was struggling to finish an essay about losing my mother when I was young, first to her mental illness, and then to estrangement when it became clear to me that maintaining a relationship with her would continue to harm me. But there was no way I was going to miss seeing Han Kang in person, so I scurried along the Brooklyn sidewalks to the subway, my annotated paperback copy of Human Acts in hand.
While riding across the Manhattan bridge, gazing back and forth between the East River and Hudson in the early evening light, I felt a bolt of writerly lightning, too. Perhaps this was the first time.
The essay about my mother that I’d been working on hadn’t been about Gwangju, which is my father’s hometown. But Gwangju was the reason I’d come back to Korea the year before and hired a young, bilingual interpreter to help me with research. Gwangju was also the reason why I was riding the subway that day, because Human Acts had been the book that really made Han Kang a literary idol to me. Hers was the work that inspired me to seek out my own dead.
On one of my last days in Korea, once we were back in Seoul, I asked Kathy, my interpreter, to help me request family records from my mother’s side at a local government office. There, in the pages of a simple computer printout, with Kathy’s help, I’d discovered that the woman I’d called “grandma” my whole life was, in fact, my mother’s stepmother. I had never known to mourn my true maternal grandmother, my mother’s mother, who had died when she was a child.
A year passed between that discovery and the night I would see Han speak, and I hadn’t yet written anything about this long-hidden familial truth. I was still grappling with its meaning, turning this new reality over in my mind for months. But on that subway ride, thinking about Han and her work as I puzzled over these linkages between the living and the dead, it came to me. A lightning strike: although my mother and I had lost our respective mothers in different, tragic ways, she and I shared the fate of becoming unmothered daughters. I stepped out of the subway car and emerged into the Manhattan dusk, knowing that this would be the truth that would close out my essay.
All these years later, I still feel guilty when I write that I’ve “lost” my mother. I wonder whether I am even allowed to claim loss when I was the one who made the choice to cut ties. But here is yet another truth that I hold today: when I chose estrangement, I chose to save my own life.
Knowing now that I can link my own grief to my mother’s, I can feel in my bones the way the past helps the present, how the dead save the living. I know it, because I am the living proof.
