Heavy Snow & Scientific Ephemera in We Do Not Part by Han Kang
Kyungha, the narrator, turns to fact recall when under pressure in a snowstorm, and it tells us a lot about her.
The main character and first-person narrator of We Do Not Part by Han Kang knows her scientific trivia. Interesting facts percolate in Kyungha’s mind and drip meaningfully into her narration — especially, in Chapter 4: Birds, when she’s freezing her butt off at a rural bus stop in a snowstorm.
Coalescing information is part of her job and interiority.
Kyungha is quiet, introspective, and extremely solitary. She’s a writer. She has spent significant time in archives fusing fact and narrative together.1 But no longer. Writing has wrecked her and her life.2
In We Do Not Part, we meet Kyungha coming out of a housebound state, rising from the floor of her new Seoul apartment. Loneliness, migraines, and appetite loss have immobilized (and practically starved) her. She explains, in one of my favorite lines from the book: “I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.”3
A flurry of facts in Chapter 4: Birds
It’s hard to picture Kyungha with vigor, spending her youth and leisure time feasting (sometimes unhealthily) on information from books, film, and scientific magazines. But she reveals that old, private pastime to us in Chapter 4: Birds as she frets at the bus stop.4 Seeking comfort and distraction, Kyungha recites facts on these subjects with her inner voice:
the physics, geometry, and lightness of frozen water molecules
a dinosaur extinction theory that “feathered dinosaurs, or birds”5 survived by flying above the earth’s fiery surface, plus how their uniquely evolved bodies kept them light and aloft
the weight of a human fetus when its heartbeat is first audible
These facts = feather-light foreshadowing of a fall.
After riding the bus, Kyungha walks in the snow and takes a nasty fall. Her accident occurs off the page as soon as Chapter 4: Birds ends.
But Chapter 4: Birds gave us clues about this fall. The facts Kyungha recited are all preternaturally predictive and tied to it. Each fact has to do with lightness and/or evolutionary survival, making her random thoughts, IMO, not so random.
Kyungha, through sickness and starvation, has developed (was tempted to write evolved…) a scary physical lightness and ephemerality. But her body, unlike the birds or snowflakes she thinks about, will not fly, float, or defy gravity’s pull as she falls. The evolution she’s experience is not a strength. It is not survival.
I wondered….
Does her mind reach for extinction theories because the fall will be a near death experience for her?
Does she think of extinction because a bird’s survival is in her hands, and she’s worried? (Forgot to tell you: she’s trudging through the snow storm to take care of her hospitalized friend’s pet bird.)
Does she think of a fetus because she will survive the harrowing night curled up like a fetus in the snow?
I could be reaching, but…
Throughout the book, I got the sense that we are quite lucky, as readers, that Kyungha takes time to share contextual or extra information freely in this book at all. Certainly with Chapter 4’s science stuff, she’s not a here’s-a-fun-fact kind of person. She doesn’t have the energy or enthusiasm to offer information that way. Given how her last book emotionally drained her, her sharing now has to serve a purpose and be efficient. Even for her own narrative, the effort it takes to tell pulls from energy she doesn’t really have.
Where to find the quotes:
Chapter 4: Birds page 69-70 (the science of snow formation)
Chapter 4: Birds page 82-83 (dinosaur extinction, the evolutionary anatomy of birds, fetus)
Textual Reference: Kyungha’s book was about a massacre (pg 4). After writing the book, she experienced a recurring nightmare (pg 5, 10).
re: divorce, no custody of her daughter, and the onset of chronic illness
Chapter 1: Crystals, page 8
still amazed the buses were running in that storm!
Chapter 4: Birds, page 82