Han Kang: Human Acts, transl. Deborah Smith, Portobello Books (Granta), 2016
This was the book by Nobel Prize winner Han Kang that I was most looking forward to reading, because I like fiction that brings in political and social themes, and I can usually handle dark subject matter pretty well. And it proved indeed to be a remarkably well-written and memorable book, but I was not expecting it to open some wounds inside me that I didn’t even know I had. I’m still reluctant to label what I experienced as PTSD (considering that others have experienced far, far worse things than I have), but it was a sneaky pain that crept up on me unawares, making it difficult for me to read more than one chapter at a time, especially since the chapters build upon each other in a crescendo of emotion.
The book is about the student uprising in May 1980 in the southern city of Gwangju in South Korea. Following the assassination of President Park Chung Hee in late 1979, there was a period of instability and attempt at democratisation and unionisation, but a military coup installed another dictator, Chun Doo-Hwan, who promptly declared martial law. The students and some of the population of Gwangju protested against this and demanded free elections, but their brief uprising was brutally repressed and there is still no consensus about the actual death toll during that month. It remains a sensitive topic in South Korea even nowadays, with an investigation into government repression being reopened in 2017 and a Truth Commission being established in 2020. However, this novel was written in 2014, before these last two events. It might also help to know that the US tacitly (and militarily) supported the repression of the movement, for fear that North Korea might intervene and lead to another Korean war.
Han Kang’s family were from Gwangju and had just moved away from the city a year before the uprising. The author herself was nine years old at the time, but, as she explains in the last chapter of this book, her family had a personal connection with the boy who disappeared and whom she writes about in the novel. Each chapter is written from a different point of view and at a different point in time, demonstrating just what long shadows such brutal events can cast.
The Boy 1980 is written by Dong-ho, who followed his friend Jeong-dae to the streets and the university campus, then witnessed the attacks and later helps clean and store the bodies in the morgue for the families to be able to identify them. It is written in second person, and it is probably the most factual of all the chapters, introducing the young people involved, establishing the links between Dong-ho’s family and Jeong-dae and his sister Jeong-mi, who are tenants in part of their house, and also describing the outburst of violence and its aftermath. Dong-ho is still very young (third year at middle school, so about 15) and shocked and puzzled by what he sees around him:
The one stage in the process that you couldn’t quite get your head around was the singing of the national anthem, which took place at a brief, informal memorial service for the bereaved families…. It was also strange to see the Taegukgi, the national flag, being spread over each coffin… Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.
When you cautiously voiced these thoughts, Eun-sook’s round eyes grew even larger. ‘But the generals are rebels, they seized power unlawfully… The ordinary soldiers were following the orders of their superiors. How can you call them the nation?’
You found this confusing, as though it had answered an entirely different question to the one you’d wanted to ask.
The Boy’s Friend 1980 is written from Jeong-dae’s point of view, as a dead body in a mountain of cadavers, with the spirits of the dead hovering above them, unsure where to go or how to communicate with each other. This was the most poetic chapter, but also quite simply heartbreaking.
I moved quickly up to the top of the tower of bodies, anchoring myself to that final man to watch a pale light seep through wisps of grey cloud, a shroud for the half-moon. The leaves and branches of the thicket intersected that light, their shadows throwing patterns on the dead faces like ghastly tattoos. It must have been about midnight when I felt it touch me; that breath-soft slip of incorporeal something, that faceless shadow, lacking even language, now, to give it body. I waited for a while in doubt and ignorance, of who it was, of how to communicate with it. No one had ever taught me how to address a person’s soul.
The Editor 1985 is written by a former demonstrator who has just been slapped seven times for daring to bring a translated document to the censor (Chun Doo-Hwan’s dictatorship continued until 1988) – the most effective chapter at showing us how events are deliberately forgotten or manipulated to fit a certain narrative, and how futile the protests seem in retrospect. The Prisoner 1990 is written by another former demonstrator, who was imprisoned and tortured for taking part in the uprising. This is perhaps the most difficult chapter to read, as it contains graphic details about torture methods and suffering. It also explores the long-term consequences, the trauma endured by all prisoners, even the ones that were eventually released.
Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.
Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable to being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered – is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?
The Factory Girl 2002 is from the point of view of a woman who was part of a union at her factory and participated in the uprising as a young girl, who has tried to forget and close herself off from those traumatic memories, but is plagued by survivor’s guilt. The loss of innocence once you’ve witnessed the worst that humans can do to each other is very difficult to stomach.
Twenty years lie between that summer and now. Red bitches, we’re going to exterminate the lot of you. But you’ve turned your back on all that. On spat curses, the abrupt smack of water against skin. The door leading back to that summer has been slammed shut; you’ve made sure of that. But that means that the way is also closed which might have led back to the time before. There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre.
The Boy’s Mother 2010 is the shortest and saddest chapter, describing the pain of a mother that has lost her youngest child. Her two older sons blame each other for not taking care of their brother, and she joins the association of the bereaved parents demanding justice. Finally, the author herself describes her research among pictures and archives, how some soldiers were particularly cruel, while others were particularly non-aggressive. The book ends with the author’s visit to the gravestone of the boy, after the bodies had been exhumed, identified and reburied in the newly constructed May 18 National Cemetery.
While the subject matter is tough to stomach (but probably easier for those who have not had personal experience of similar events), it is undoubtedly an important book, certainly in its specificity, to make sure that the Gwangju massacre is not forgotten. A Korean friend born that year told me that for her parents, living in Seoul at the time, Gwangju seemed very remote, so it felt like a mere ‘incident’ or riot – probably also because of how it was reported at the time. For those unaffected by the events, it probably remained a mere chapter in history, still open to some debate. However, Han Kang has found the words to describe universal experiences of mass protests and their consequences, which is why it resonated so profoundly with me.
The book brought home to me how many memories of December 1989 I’ve suppressed myself: how I’ve blithely talked about the Romanian Revolution as if it has been a highlight of my life, carefully locking away the emotions that existed alongside the euphoria and reckless courage of those days. I was almost proud to have participated in such a historical event, despite the subsequent anger and depression that followed when I realised that the revolution had been stolen from us (and that we protestors were cannon fodder for hidden internal and external interests). Inevitably all revolutions morph into something more manageable, either new dog old tricks, or else same dog new tricks, or at best a diluted version of your ideals. But how much more painful it must be to find out the futility of such movements, that political changes are often decided elsewhere, and that your blood is used merely to seal a deal.
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