I have lived in Korea. I have been to Jeju. I have memories there that I’d call beautiful. And to think that I could physically visit a place without knowing what the ground carried. That humbled me.
This was me after reading Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, and it’s also where our first Reading the Room conversation started. We came together to discuss a novel, but it didn’t take long before the conversation moved far beyond the book itself. We talked about Jeju, about memory, grief, silence, about Nigeria, and what it means to love a country whose history includes things you wish it didn’t.
Three of us were in that first conversation, and each of us arrived at the book from a different place. I came to it after having lived in Korea myself. Our co-founder came with a newer, more outside relationship to the country. And our cultural guide, a Korean member of our founding circle, came to it as someone for whom this history sits much closer to home. We were reading the same book, but we were immersed in three different realities while we read it. That, more than anything, is what Reading the Room actually turned out to mean.
The Korea We Thought We Knew
For a lot of people outside Korea, the first things that come to mind are the familiar ones: the music, the dramas, the food, the language, the beautiful landscapes. Jeju itself usually gets filed under that category, too. I’d always thought of it as something close to the Hawaii of Korea, a destination, a postcard.
So when I learned how devastating its history actually was, how recent it was, I was genuinely shocked.
“But even Hawaii has many sad stories.”
— our cultural guide
She went on to describe it as a kind of tapestry, the beauty and the pain woven into the same place, which is probably true of more places than we’d like to admit.
The Jeju 4.3 Incident
We Do Not Part is built around what’s now referred to as the Jeju 4.3 Incident, which began on April 3, 1948, and the killings that followed continued for years. For some of us in the conversation, this history was almost entirely new. For our cultural guide, it wasn’t.
She described how difficult the book was for her to read, precisely because this isn’t just something she’d encountered in a textbook. It’s connected to the pain of her own people and to people who were victims of that period.
What she said next is, I think, the heart of why this book club exists at all.
“Without this book club, I couldn’t finish the book.”
— our cultural guide
She explained that the conversation helped her face some of that pain and helped her connect Jeju’s history to histories elsewhere in the world, histories of violence, and silence that span countries and generations. A book she might not have been able to sit with alone became something she could finish because she wasn’t carrying it by herself.
What Happens When the Beautiful Version Isn’t the Whole Version
At some point, we started talking about the versions of countries that get exported to the rest of the world.
“Every country has its export version of itself.”
— Host, Dr. Mo!
Nigeria has one: Afrobeats, jollof rice, fashion, humor, warmth. Those things are genuinely us, the same way K-pop and K-dramas are genuinely Korea. But behind the export version, there are rooms. Histories that don’t travel as neatly as the music does.
Our co-founder put a name to something many of us have felt but rarely said directly: that most democratic countries are, in a sense, two countries in one. In America, a minoritized person’s experience of the country is different from the version that gets sold publicly, the version built for export. The PR tends to overshadow the harder parts, which is exactly why encountering the harder parts later can feel so jarring.
It’s one of the reasons we ended up calling this group Reading the Room. We’re interested in the rooms behind the postcard version, not instead of the postcard, but in addition to it.
When Silence Becomes Part of the History
One of the biggest questions the book left us with was about naming and about what happens when something painful never got an official name at all.
“It’s not a revolution. It’s not a massacre. The reason we don’t have the language for this means we are still processing it.”
— our cultural guide
That idea sat with us for a while. An event that’s still being fought over in language, generations later, because naming it one thing or another changes what it means, and who gets blamed.
Our cultural guide also shared how she reads the book’s title differently in Korean. The word for “part,” she explained, carries the sense of being part of a whole. So, no matter what happened in Jeju, those who died are still part of the whole.
“They are here in me, in my heart, in my consciousness. This is our story.”
— our cultural guide
I found myself thinking about the difference between being silenced and learning silence, and between forgetting naturally and being taught to forget. Those aren’t the same thing, even though they can look identical from the outside.
And silence itself isn’t one thing. Our cultural guide pushed back on treating it as uniformly harmful: silence carried out of love, like a parent protecting a child from a pain they’re not yet ready to carry, is different from silence carried out of fear or shame. She spoke about her own parents hiding pain from her growing up and said that silence, in that case, may have genuinely helped her. But she was clear that it depends entirely on the intention behind it and that the same silence can serve people or fail them.
We connected this to Nigeria’s own history with the Biafran War, and to a pattern that isn’t unique to either country: people who lived through something choosing not to speak about it, not necessarily because of official censorship, but because speaking means reliving it. The erasure, in that case, doesn’t come from outside. It comes from people protecting themselves, which leaves the generations after them without the oral history they might have needed.
Giving a Number a Name
At one point, I talked about when history stops being a statistic and starts being a person. You can tell me a thousand people died, and I’ll understand it intellectually. But give me one person looking for one name, one mother who never stopped searching, and the scale becomes human in a completely different way.
Fiction seems to do this particular thing well: take something too large to hold, and hand you one family instead.
Women as the Unofficial Archivists
We also talked about who, within the novel, actually does the work of remembering. Our answer, more or less in unison, was: the women. The ones searching, preserving, carrying the histories of people who were gone.
That led to a question I’ve been sitting with since: Why does it so often fall to women to become the unofficial archivists of a family? I’ve noticed it in my own life, relying on my mother for parts of family history I can’t get anywhere else. It’s hard not to wonder whether that’s simply who women are or whether it’s a role that’s been placed on them repeatedly until it started to look natural. Either way, it can feel like an unfair weight to carry.
Our cultural guide offered a different frame: that it may have less to do with gender specifically, and more to do with empathy and how connected someone feels to the people around them. She was careful not to turn it into a fixed statement about women generally, but she did agree that, in practice, it’s women who tend to carry it.
What Does It Mean to Love a Country?
This was one of the more unexpected turns in the conversation, and it’s best told in our cultural guide’s own words.
She described having the American dream in her twenties, moving there with real hope, and being disappointed. But over time, her love for the country came back, deeper than before. She said the same thing is true of how she feels about Korea: she loves it, and she’s proud of it, and she still looks directly at the parts of its history that are difficult, without needing to look away to keep loving it.
“My conclusion is love. This book is all about love.”
— our cultural guide
She connected that love to responsibility, wanting to understand Korea, Nigeria, and the wider world more deeply because she cares about them, not because anyone asked her to. Not the kind of love that only wants to see the good, but the kind that cares enough to see the whole picture.
What Do We Ask When We Encounter Another Culture?
Think about the questions we usually default to when we’re learning about somewhere new. What do they eat? What do they celebrate? What music do they listen to?
After this conversation, we found ourselves reaching for different questions instead: What do they remember? What happened before the version of the country we already know? What has this community had to carry, and what have they had to learn how to remember?
That last question, in particular, changes the whole posture of how you approach a culture. You stop only looking at what people celebrate and start getting curious about what shaped them.
Remembering Is Work
We often talk about remembering as though it just happens on its own, because someone was there, because a photograph exists. But someone has to preserve the photograph. Someone has to ask the question, search for the name, and decide that what happened is worth carrying forward.
Remembering is work. And sometimes it’s resistance. But it’s also, maybe especially, something that needs community. Some memories are too heavy to carry alone, which is part of why spaces like this book club exist in the first place, not so everyone agrees, but so that one person can bring a piece of the puzzle, someone else brings another, and together something becomes visible that none of us could see on our own.
Grief, Memory, and the Shape of Time
If you’ve read We Do Not Part, you’ve probably been disoriented at some point. Is this happening now? Is it memory? Is it a dream?
We found ourselves wondering whether that blurring between dream, memory, and reality might reflect the way grief and traumatic memory can disrupt time altogether. We’re not claiming that’s definitely what Han Kang intended. It’s simply a question the book left us sitting with, rather than one it answered for us.
What We Carried Out of the Room
Near the end, we asked each other a simple question: What would you carry out of this room that you didn’t bring into it?
Our co-founder spoke about the value of hearing directly from someone connected to a culture, rather than only encountering its history secondhand. Watching someone interact with a book about their own people, in real time, isn’t something reading alone can replicate.
For me, it was a new question to carry into how I encounter any culture going forward: not just what do they eat or celebrate, but what do they remember, and what have they had to carry quietly for a long time.
And our cultural guide put it simply.
“Alone, we are very weak, but together, we are strong.”
— our cultural guide
Where This Leaves Us
We didn’t leave this conversation with a tidy summary of the book. We left with something closer to this: Three people read the same novel, but we entered it from three different places, and the conversation showed each of us something none of us would have seen alone.
Our next book will be Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, chosen by our cultural guide, who’s reading from the African side of this exchange for the first time. You don’t have to finish the book to join us.
So the next time you encounter another culture, another country, or even your own history, pause for a moment. Ask yourself: What am I not seeing? What do they remember?
That’s it. That’s where we’re trying to sit. So we can read the world and read us.