The Handmaiden (2016)

directed by Park Chan-wook

Maeve Ren

“I kissed her and forgot death.” — Jeannette Winterson

cw: sexual assault, abuse, suicidal ideation

The two of us grieved so separately we let love out of sight. From far away we saw our stunned bodies facedown in the sea of women’s hearts without each other, and we didn’t want our bodies anymore, didn’t want throats and tongues cut adrift in new night terrors from which there was no waking. How little I remember from that oblivion except a ghost of a desire to live and sing again. How desire ebbed from me as I vanished from my body and she vanished from my reach: mist dispersing over tongueless waves.

Not quite drowning in those waves but not swimming or even treading water, I began to love a story as I couldn’t love myself. I was only a woman who’d loved men, trying to save my own life by not loving them anymore, and here I was aching over, loving, two women in a movie. Aching, loving, and missing her. When you’ve lost the will to live in your body, how do you say anything to the one that you love? When the one you love loses her will to live too, how then can she speak to you? We tried not to remember the faces of the men, their grasping, their rage at not possessing more on this earth. The men in the story emitted the same rage, grasped at women the same way. Meanwhile she and I lost the aliveness you need for wanting. Meanwhile the women in the story wanted anyway.

I loved Hideko and Sook-hee for that: their want. No one permitted them want, living as they were at the mercy of abusers in a Korea abused by imperialist Japan. How unseen they were by the men dissecting them with their gazes—men fixated on conquest who talked about plundering women’s bodies the way men got rich plundering countries, or in the case of Hideko’s uncle, helping colonizers plunder his country. Orphaned, abused by her traitor uncle, raised to be an instrument of his obsession with becoming Japanese, what chance did Hideko have to grow intimate with her own desire? And Sook-hee, lured by a con man into his plot to marry Hideko and take her inheritance—what chance did she have to grow intimate with hers? They were instruments of men’s ambition in a place where men were instruments of colonization. Subjugation polluted everything around them, left no air for love. They were never supposed to whisper to each other in Korean at night. They were never supposed to unravel the ways they’d been used and kept apart, or to hold each other, weeping, and confess love. They were never supposed to want anything.

We weren’t supposed to want anything, so for years, I believed I didn’t. I thought my capacity to want had been sucked away. Perform other people’s desire long enough, and you forget your own: you think desire is dead, or that desire, like death, is something that’s done to you, visited on your body like the consuming gaze of someone who wants you extinct except in their fantasy. I was seeing an older man who loved me with a colonizer’s love, who knew I’d been prey but still expected me to warm at his touch. For my part, I didn’t know to disobey. Slant-eyed woman in the West, I was used to being desired in a way that left me doubting I was human, and it was a small step from doubting I was human to doubting I was alive. I’d shut my eyes and wonder which countries his GI forebears warred in. How many women had they raped who looked like me? How had his Japanese nanny felt raising the son of her conqueror, and when he turned his gaze on me, did he see her, giving him her breast? Later the one I love would tell me that being preyed on killed her desire too—that by the time she finished seeing her body through every gaze but her own, she was dead even to herself.

When you’re dead even to yourself, resigned to life as to everything else you carry, how do you access desire? All the chasms between being desired and desiring, between the way Hideko’s uncle and Sook-hee’s con man wanted the women and how the women began wanting each other. Hideko was an heiress and Sook-hee her maid, but neither of them had had a chance to want, not when a woman’s life and death depended on which man legally controlled her body. Not under the regime that would go on to force “comfort women” into sexual servitude with America’s tacit permission and, after WWII ended, the U.S. military’s participation. When what there is is exploitation, the basis for true desire isn’t there. Only the hate welling up from traumatized ground. Only the ugly tedium of power. My grandparents and parents told me so in their stories of Japanese occupation and Western paternalism in Taiwan, and true to their word, I often felt myself buried under a centuries-old accumulation of colonizing desire. By the time I watched The Handmaiden, I’d learned not to mistake that desire for someone’s love. But because I’d been an object of hateful desire and lived with my own desire out of reach, I understood why Hideko initiated lovemaking by asking Sook-hee What is it that men want? It was why the one I love revealed her love by telling me I’d be her soulmate if only I were a man. Smothered all their lives by desire that wanted them extinct, they had to murmur in code about the desire keeping them breathing.

As the women in The Handmaiden unearthed desire, I felt hope tumbling down on me that desire wasn’t dead, that we were not dead. Hideko had been beaten and terrorized and stayed alive enough to feel her own heart beating. Sook-hee was snared by a depraved opportunist who claimed he’d free her from poverty, but when she imagined fleeing colonial rule with riches stolen from Hideko, she could only dream of Hideko’s face. We, too, passed through terror by dreaming each other’s faces. So many months we didn’t hear each other’s voices, but we kept us both alive, and to this day I don’t know how. I wish she’d called me when she felt alone. We’d have murmured to each other like those pretty girls in their blankets, every word spoken not in the language of our silencing but in a hidden tongue of grief and rebellion. All of it softer than touching. I wish we’d whispered outlandish questions over thousands of miles, my lips to her ears and hers to mine: My love, do you want men? I don’t, do you? My love, do you want life? Not yet, but I will. Knowing we’d always loved like this would’ve made life easier to carry. It would’ve opened us sooner to our desire, and through our desire, our selves.

Sometimes I think the worst thing about that time is not knowing how we survived it or not knowing if we’d survive it again. Then I remember the nights of wanting nothing and being without her. I could and did tell people that I was not in despair, but I must’ve been, if I spent nights with my fingertip close enough to my phone’s call button to feel its warmth and never press it. We must’ve been, if we didn’t reach across the sea for each other. But even when the idea of living looked as foreign to me as my own body in a mirror, I could still sing if I pictured myself singing for her, could still moon-gaze if I imagined giving her that moon reflected in a body of water. The yellow moon would glow on the sea of women’s hearts, and we would choose together: death or desire, out or onward.

It happened sometime after we began to see how every person is an open wound, but before we awoke to how much we craved from existence. We’d reconnected after suffering apart for a long time, and we’d pieced our shattered selves together so we resembled those graceful vases reassembled from shards. Painfully, over several months, we shared the stories of our years without each other. I don’t understand how my choice became desire, only that with every story, the hearing and the telling, the sea shifted, or the earth, and I felt it in the body I was starting to recognize: what kept me living was no longer resignation, but desire. Desire that wants so much I probably won’t outlive it. Not understanding where it comes from, not knowing when it will leave again, I can’t even beg the sea to give her the same capricious blessing. But I foolishly and selfishly wish it will. Maybe then we’ll have all the time we need to salve each other’s open wounds. We’ll batten down the hatches together. We’ll run through a green field like Sook-hee and Hideko, the shore unfurling, the ocean with its infinite ships opening to our clasped hands and our laughter. The soft night will cradle all that it touches, all that is given us, and all that is taken, and how it will be, then, for both of us to gaze up at stars and want.

Maeve Ren (she/they) is a queer, autistic Taiwanese-American writer and grad student living in California. She reads for Pidgeonholes, Knight's Library Magazine, and One Story, and can be found on Twitter @maeve_ren.