White As Snow, White As Memory
For a child, the colour white reminds them of jasmines: the flowers hanging off the sides of their head, the true Milky Way of space. The lilies that grace the pond in Swan Lake. Storks and cranes. Snow. But an adult looks at it and is taken back to the time they saw a shroud. The white shroud running across the expanse of the face of a grandfather, grandmother, an uncle, an aunt. A father, a mother, a sibling. The colour separates them from a loved one: it represents the distance between the rainbow of life, and the muted blankness of death. And therefore, white resembles grief the most: the more immediate part of you that comes back like the season of winter. Grief, in many books, has been juxtaposed with the arrival of snow, and ‘The White Book’ by Han Kang shows an entire season of grief and snowfall.
“If I sift those words through myself, sentences will shiver out, like the strange, sad shriek the bow draws from a metal string. Could I let myself hide between these sentences, veiled with white gauze?”
The book starts with the mention that the author’s mother lost a baby daughter shortly after her birth, years before their own. The girl’s skin was compared to the snow, pale; and shortly after her death, she was buried into the snow by her father. A memory that would have been seemingly carried solely by the mother, the author feels the burden of her grief through the progression of the story. Each chapter begins with the reference to a white thing: which once again reinforces the grief over the loss of a newborn, an elder sibling who could have been there for them, or would have resulted in them never being born. The author acknowledges this, but is not fazed by it as it would mean that she would survive. There’s a togetherness that brings both their mother and them towards one another; a collective memory of grief that the family holds.
“Paint can in one hand, brush in the other, I stood unmoving, a dumb witness to the snowflakes’ slow descent, like hundreds of feathers feathering down.”
The book’s first part (titled ‘나’ which translates to ‘me’ in Korean) resembles a kind of a collective memory. The concept of collective memory is when a particular incident becomes so embedded into the system that it slowly turns into a memory that everyone holds, regardless of the fact that it happened in their timeline or not. The section displays a more familial, private memory of a newborn child dying, and it has been reinforced so much that the author resonates with the grief as a close person, sometimes even resembling a mother losing her own child. They imagine the way the girl must have died, the way she must have looked after birth, the manner in which their mother would have held the child. The above quote, which references paint and brush, reflect the manner in which they’re creating these memories: imagining them to such an extent that they can call them their own memories. Below, they talk about the transition from this world to the next; from colours to the plain white, blank fog that surrounds the night. The soul of the girl floats up, like fog.
“The vast, soundless undulation between this world and the next, each cold water molecule formed of drenched black darkness.”
The second section of the book (titled “그 녀” which is “that girl” in Korean) is a reliving of her life. The author places the newborn, lost girl in the place of their friend’s daughter; and imagines their elder sister’s life through her eyes. They paint a life that could have been lived: filling it with equal amounts of sadness and happiness, and with their own musings. They imagine her in a different place, trying to learn the language. The chapters represent life in all its splendour, yet there’s a part that is amiss. Despite of showcasing the manner in which her living would evolve, the constancy of white stamped across the items she uses (such as snowflakes, cotton sheets, white swaddles) reminds the readers that she’s not real: that the person who’s living the life envisioned by the author is not really their elder sister but a different person altogether. Perhaps the visions of white across life is a reminder to the author themselves too.
“A group was able to discern a body of water glittering white in the distance, they would have felt lacerated with happiness. Which would have been life. Which would have been beauty.”
The last section of the book is titled “All Whiteness” where this fantasy breaks and the author is left alone and bereft. They look at every single white object in the world and it reminds them of the shroud with which the girl would have been covered while being buried. Even the water that shines under the winter sun (which, while overhead, is also white) is also symbolic of her death, rather than the life that water often symbolizes. It’s here that her memory comes across as being ‘inherited’: it could have been the author’s mother, but it could have easily been a grandmother, a great-grandmother in her youth. Even if her being alive meant that having the author would have been an impossibility, they want that reality as well, so that their mother can gain the daughter she lost (“my life means that yours is impossible.”).
“If that were so, would the souls of this city sometimes drift to the wall where they were once gunned down and flutter there for a time with such a soundless motion?”
What’s poignant about Han Kang’s novella is the way it represents two most glossed over aspects of losing a loved one: grief and memory. There are times where one would think that they’re referencing to their own mother; however somewhere the language twists and it’s a different person in the same timeline. It represents the fluidity of memory, and how it can translate into different generations of people as if they ‘inherit’ the incident and the feelings that come with it. The intensity of grief that moves from the author and their mother is the same: as the author remarks, ‘my black shoes stamped prints into the early morning snow […] like a clutch of words strewn over white paper.’ However, there’s a soft hope that showers upon the author, that her life’s ending was the beginning of their own (‘it is not true that everything is coloured by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin’). Even in the realization of that, the author accepts it as a challenge, a thing to live up to. Because perhaps, the newborn sister’s death was meant as the commencement of the author’s very own life. And maybe, she gave it up so that the author could see the world and the mother she did for just a few hours.
“Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released.”
