[FIRST IMPRESSIONS] “A Meditation on Whiteness: Han Kang’s 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑊ℎ𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝐵𝑜𝑜𝑘” by Jennifer Eagleton (2025)

Han Kang (author), Deborah Smith (translator), The White Book, Portobello Books, 2016. 128 pgs.

As Han Kong wrote out her list of white things at the beginning of the book, she felt a “ripple of agitation”, that this was something she wanted to do, indeed had to do, and that the process of writing about them “would be transformative, would itself transform, into something like white ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound”.

The first white item we are given is a door—we are aware that the narrator is not in her usual place, painting a “scruffy old door” in a rented apartment, a door that had once been white, but “deep-gouged” with scratches like “long-dried bloodstains” on it. She paints it white again, and with “each swish of the brush over the scar-laced surface, its imperfections were erased”. Going outside, she is a “dumb witness to the snowflake’s slow descent”. Being out of her natural habitat (Han was on a writing residency in Warsaw), obviously led to the heightened receptivity to the memories and recollections of the past that appear in the book.

The narrator doesn’t say at first say why the emphasis is on white things, but the first white thing, “swaddling bands” (the second white thing), used for a newborn “to mitigate the shock of its abrupt projection into limitlessness” after the “snug fit of the womb”. This hints at what is to come.

A “newborn gown” (the third white thing) was the garment that the writer’s mother, aged 22, made for her newborn when she gave birth alone in her house on the kitchen floor in early winter, the first frost of the year, a child that died within two hours of being born, and we are told that she was a girl with a face as “white as a crescent moon rice cake” (the fourth white thing)—a clean slate, ready for experiences, “a face startingly pristine as that”.

The writer walks around a building that was once destroyed in a 1944 air raid and then rebuilt; she observes how it has been faithfully reconstructed, incorporating into its new structure an old pillar that had survived. I can attest to that, having visited Warsaw some years ago. Her sister’s presence, like that pillar, is part of her history (stories told by her mother), despite hardly existing. This book is a way of giving her new life.

We are given short meditations that are directly or indirectly in relation to her sister’s death and life: swaddling bands, salt, rice, bones, pills, hair, breast milk, and fog. These white things are perhaps part of the rituals of mourning and remembering. Reflecting on a small white pebble, Han writes: “If silence could be condensed into the smallest, most solid object, this is how it would feel.” The book, it seems to me, wants to solidify the transience of life.

In the second section of the book, “She”, there are white things in plural: “certain objects in the darkness” that “appear white”, and that waiting is needed “to be able to read the expression it holds”. Objects and faces “glow with a hazy pallor waiting for contours to coalesce”, perhaps into fully fledged recollection.

The third section of the book, “All Whiteness”, starts off with the loss of a second child: “This life needed only one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now. My life means yours is impossible.” Again, it is the eyes: “I peered into your eyes, as through searching for form in a deep, black mirror”.

While there are many tangible white things, there are also intangible white things such as “parting”, “silence” and “spirit”; the phrase, “laughing whitely”, an expression the narrator explains that is likely “exists only in her mother tongue”. To laugh whitely means to laugh but not to mean it: “Laughter that is faint, cheerless, its cleanness easily shattered. And the face that forms it.” Laughter in many cultures can mean embarrassment, an attempted truncating of a discussion.

The last white thing in the book, is an encompassing whiteness: “Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released.” I will make you (her mother, the babies) live beyond death.

I’ve heard someone call The White Book a “secular prayer book”, a meditation on colour. I liked how the narrator speaks directly to her baby sister. “I wanted to show you clean things. Before brutality, sadness, despair, filth, pain, clean things that were only for you, clean things above all. But it didn’t come off as I intended. Again and again, I peered into your eyes, as though searching for form in a deep, black mirror.” When you think of one thing, you think of it’s obvious.

There are eleven blank pages at the end of my hardcover copy of The White Book. Is this intentional? If so, is it for us to think up our own white things? Or another colour significant to us?

How to cite:Eagleton, Jennifer. “A Meditation on Whiteness: Han Kang’s The White Book.”Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 23 Oct. 2024,chajournal.blog/2024/10/23/white-book.

Jennifer Eagleton, a Hong Kong resident since October 1997, is a close observer of Hong Kong society and politics. Jennifer has written forHong Kong Free Press,Mekong Review, andEducation about Asia. Her first book isDiscursive Change in Hong Kong(Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and she is currently writing another book on Hong Kong political discourse for Palgrave MacMillan. Her poetry has appeared inVoice & Verse Poetry Magazine,People, Pandemic & #######(Verve Poetry Press, 2020), andMaking Space: A Collection of Writing and Art(Cart Noodles Press, 2023). A past president of the Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society, Jennifer teaches and researches part-time at a number of universities in Hong Kong. [All contributions by Jennifer Eagleton.]