Summary
In Chapter 7 ("We Do Not Part"), Kyungha watches the tide go out, but it turns out to be a nightmare which she wakes up from. She is stunned to hear the sound of a bird chirping. Though she remembers burying Ama the night before, it turns out that Ama is alive (or that Kyungha is hallucinating Ama's presence). Kyungha immediately gives Ama some water and food, and feels hungry herself. With the power outage, Kyungha cannot cook anything, so she makes do with raw tofu and walnuts.
When Kyungha enters Inseon's wood workshop, Inseon herself appears. Kyungha asks her friend why she made the figures from their project larger than life, and she decides to call the project We Do Not Part. During their discussion, Kyungha wonders what is simultaneously happening to Inseon at the hospital in Seoul. There could have been a medical procedure or accident, and Kyungha would have no way of knowing. Inseon's apparition tells Kyungha that she managed to live alone in such an isolated place (on Jeju) because she wasn't actually alone—she had Ami and Ama.
Chapter 8 ("Shadows") begins with Inseon leading Kyungha quietly into the house. Inseon lights a candle and asks Kyungha to cover the empty birdcage. Kyungha sees a large shadow of a bird flitting across the wall despite the fact that the only source of light is the candle in front of Kyungha (and no bird flies in front of it). Inseon tells her it's Ami. Kyungha hears a faint reverberating voice say "no," and she reaches between the shadow and the light where the bird's body should be. The voice belongs to Ami, who learned the word from Inseon.
Kyungha traces the shadows on the wall with a pencil. The lines intersect with previous drawings she made while on past visits. Inseon shares that for the past decade, she has felt the presence of departed beings. This began when she saw a photo of the bones unearthed beneath the Jeju runway. Kyungha expects Inseon to exclaim over Ama's absence, but she does not. At the end of Chapter 8, Inseon examines her hands as though searching for a wound or a scar.
In Chapter 9 ("Wind"), Inseon recounts being struck by the photo of the bodies exhumed from beneath the Jeju airport. Specifically, the arrangement of one set of bones suggested that the person they belonged to died in a different manner than the rest. While the news article speculated that the victims were ordered to stand around the pit before being shot, the distinctive posture of the one body suggested that the person was buried alive. The shoe size indicated a woman or a teenage boy.
This photo got under Inseon's skin; she was unable to stomach the brutality of what happened. In the winter after she saw the photo, she took to lying beneath her desk and mimicking the posture of the distinctive set of bones. This gave Inseon the idea for her next film. Inseon ended up filming herself talking about her father, who was sent every day to hide in the caves in order to avoid arrest and torture. He witnessed soldiers burning the homes in his village. He also found his own father's body.
Inseon also found written accounts of those violent years, and she shares them with Kyungha. One woman whose husband joined the police witnessed a massacre on the beach. Years later, she agreed to be interviewed repeatedly despite the way it upset her to recount what she'd seen. An anonymous man once came to her house to ask whether a baby had turned up on the shore after the massacre. When the woman briefly entered her house and returned outside, the man had already gone.
Analysis
Part II is called "Night," and the first three chapters in this section are entitled "We Do Not Part," "Shadows," and "Wind." Han casts Kyungha as a somewhat unreliable narrator when it turns out that Ama is actually alive. Kyungha's memory of burying Ama was perhaps caused by a feverish hallucination. However, Kyungha's ambiguous grasp on reality opens the possibility that multiple things can be true at once. Perhaps Ama is in fact dead and buried, but Kyungha sees her in the present just as other dead beings have appeared in her consciousness. Regardless, Kyungha cares for Ama, unsure if she is dreaming or if Ama is dead.
It becomes clear that Kyungha is hallucinating when she sees Inseon in her workshop with her fingers intact. Inseon has left her mark so thoroughly on the place where she lives and works that Kyungha's mind (under pressure from the snowstorm and her chronic pain) conjures her friend's presence. This opens the question of how those killed in the 1948-9 massacre have left their mark on Jeju. In this novel, people remain present even after death. The life force animating their bodies still exists in the present day as a felt presence in Kyungha's body. This gives the book its title: We Do Not Part, which is the name of Kyungha and Inseon's project.
Inseon carried on working on the project that Kyungha conceived of but later abandoned. It was this work (of creating larger than life figures out of tree stumps) that severed Inseon's fingers and led her to call Kyungha, and in turn brought Kyungha to Jeju Island. The longer Kyungha is there, the more she feels that Inseon has also struggled with historical traumas. Inseon's apparition informs Kyungha that she has felt the presence of departed souls ever since seeing the bones of murdered civilians unearthed beneath the Jeju airport around a decade ago. It seems to be for this reason that Inseon agreed to work on Kyungha's vision of tree stumps as people: something about enacting this resolves the haunting that both women feel. Closing the loop through an arduous artistic endeavor does not dismiss these historical traumas as unfortunate (but ultimately irrelevant) issues of the past. Instead, ritualizing a memorial honors the people killed. Carving the figures out of logs highlights the way that humans, too, are part of nature.
Han writes the beginning of Chapter 9 ("Wind") in italics to provide Inseon's account of seeing evidence of the Jeju Massacre. Just as wind (the title of this chapter) itself blows impartially, the casual and factual tone of Inseon's account makes sweeping statements without using elevated language. For example, Han writes that "the article below the photo speculated that the victims were likely ordered to stand around the pit in groups of ten before being shot from behind and falling to their deaths. Then the next group would be have been summoned, shot, and so on" (Chapter 9). Particularly the adverbial phrase "and so on" casually indicates that the horror continued beyond what is explicitly mentioned in this passage.
It took some degree of speculation for Inseon to connect the dots between facts and create a narrative about what happened. Working with just the printed photograph in the newspaper, she figured out the context. Words like "understood" and "imagined" demonstrate this active mental processing (Chapter 9). She could only do this process during the daytime because she "couldn't stomach the brutality of the scene at night" (Chapter 9). This processing also took on a physically embodied element. One unidentifiable person in the photograph lies curled up with their legs drawn up to their chest, and Inseon mimicked this posture to see what kind of sensations she experienced. All of this seeded the idea for her next film, which would be about this anonymous person whose individual identity was obliterated among the thousands killed in the massacre.
