I’ll Be Right There: Nostalgia and Regret
“Listen to me if you know what’s good for you: come back home, right this minute.” — Han Kang.
Han Kang, in her book ‘Human Acts’, presents a brutally honest narration on the Gwangju Uprising and its aftermath both on the city of Gwangju and South Korea in general. She looks at the entire revolution as something embedded within the strings of the city, one of its foundations: the forming narrative crafts the Uprising as intricately intertwined with the people who were born after the event as well. Kang makes the violence of it take center stage, cold yet full of the emotional turmoil in the air. However, Kyung-sook Shin’s ‘I’ll Be Right There’ takes a crucial turn by focusing not on the violence, but on three friends living amidst the cool, slow din of the ensuing Uprising in the background.
‘I’ll Be Right There’ chronicles the journey of four friends: Yoon, who returns to the city after losing her mother; Myungsuh, who joins the ongoing protests; Miru, who burnt her hands whilst saving her sister Mirae; and Dahn, Yoon’s childhood friend. The first three meet in a class at college, and guided by Professor Yoon: who kicks off Yoon’s memory trails by narrating the story of St. Christopher carrying baby Christ over the river. The book begins eight years after college, when Myungsuh calls Yoon to tell that Professor Yoon was dying of cancer, and so our protagonist begins telling her story, starting from her mother’s own demise.
“Each time I moved my fingers- tak tak tak - the quiet keys leapt into action, and inky black letters appeared one by one on the white paper, like an answer to a question.”
From the beginning, the author creates a kind of atmosphere that pointed towards how them coming together was fateful: the way Myungsuh and Miru are described as ‘shadows of each other’ (‘She and Myungsuh were like each other’s shadow, making the thought of sitting between them inconceivable. It was strange.’); and when Myungsuh tells Yoon that she seemed to have always reached out to Miru unconsciously. All of them spent their times and days either in class or walking through the city, exploring the various places and visiting every single place of memory. No matter where she was, Yoon always found her way back to Myungsuh and Miru. Later in the story, they live together briefly, in the midst of which Dahn joins them. They all are people who click within one another akin to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, inseparable even after years of not keeping contact.
“To hold someone’s hand, you must first know when to let go. If you miss the chance to let go of a hand that you have carelessly grabbed, the moment will pass and turn awkward.”
While both Myungsuh and Dahn act as the twin loves of Yoon, it is her relationship with Miru that takes the center stage of the majority of the narrative. Miru and Yoon have an instant familiarity to one another, for they have the commonality of grief shared between them: Miru losing her sister Mirae and Yoon losing her mother. The sharing of grief leads to understanding beyond the recognition of words: and this mutual presence of grief in both is represented in terms of sharing space. When the two women go into the saunas and take bath with each other, it showcases the proximity, the closeness that grief brings in the two; they always gravitate to each other for comfort. Yoon was the first to see Miru’s scars (apart from Myungsuh, of course) and the way her holding the latter’s hands is always described in a very delicate, ‘as-if-she-were-made-of-glass’ way. The line ‘Whenever you want me, wherever you want me, I will be there’ describes their dynamic, their comfort the best.
“Everything is the same. It only feels like time is passing, and only the characters change. We are torn apart and chased around. We fight back and get chased some more… We all stare at the walls and complain of loneliness. All we have to do is turn around, but instead we keep our faces to the walls.”
The book is divided into two narratives: that of Yoon’s and of Myungsuh’s, with a few entries of Dahn’s dwindling letters to the former. There, we glimpse at the strength of the book: it derives its momentum from nostalgia. Nostalgia, where Yoon remembers all the times she spent with the rest three, and which still affects her present. The nostalgia is what that pushes the entirety of the violence to the side and focuses on the characters: its effect is overpowering in nature. In the most dire of times, the only things we recollect and call back are those with loved ones that give us eternal strength, and that’s where Yoon tells her story. From the standpoint of nostalgia, she narrates with smaller memories here and there, adding her own observations. But even within that space of supposed ‘comfort’, there’s this odd sense of discomfort too; because for all her good memories, the bad ones resurface. Miru and Dahn’s death is the worst of all: for after that tipping point, the storyline goes into a drowsy tangent. As if the story itself is grieving, like her thoughts going haywire like her mind is.
“It was as if my heart had opened up to them while I was typing Professor Yoon’s manuscript, but it closed again the moment the typing was done. […] ‘Why do you do that?’ I asked. ‘Because then it feels real’, she said. ‘What does?’ ‘Being alive.’”
There’s a quote in the latter half of the book by Stendhal- ‘lived, wrote, loved’- and it best describes the role of literature in the nostalgia of the book. Throughout the book, poetry books are gifted (Dahn gives Yoon a collection of poems by Emily Dickinson; Miru’s cat is named after her), manuscripts are typed, poems said and passed and remembered. All these exchanges are the standing sole memory that literature and art have the power of the human mind: to remember all the joys and the mistakes. The nostalgia of this book is that of regret: filled with if only. After Dahn and Miru’s death, Yoon becomes both a slave to moving on and to regret: she wants to celebrate Miru’s fleeting, petite existence, but she also ponders upon whether she could have done things better. And this exact regret brings her into a spiral, pushing her into this cycle of memories that bring her to the edge of dreaming. After Dahn’s passing, in an unsent letter, Yoon recounts going to a palace and lying on the floor as they used to: and the way Shin narrates this part is as if it were a dream.
This confused narration ends as it begun with Professor Yoon. He is representative of a closure: he brings the story back to the present and urges them to move forward with life. He is the instrument of this realization that while this grief is carried through multitude of generations, it is not the end. Life must, and indeed goes on. And the fact that they’re there, standing in front of his ailing body, is enough reason to say that their life has not been robbed by the sensation of regret. Life is still moving on, like a walk under the rain, and these lines from the epilogue prove it to be true:
“Whenever I refer to a certain time as long ago, I feel like I am walking somewhere. Maybe those things that we realize only after so much time has passed that we can describe them as long ago are what we are made of.”
