Human Acts

The unnamed Writer, a stand-in for Kang herself, remembers that just before the Gwangju Uprising, she and her family moved to the outskirts of Seoul. One night, she overhears her father talking on the phone about a boy, one of his former students, whose family moved into their hanok (a traditional Korean house) after they moved. The hushed way Kang’s parents talk about the boy stirs her childlike curiosity. That summer, two men come and search their new house, and Kang’s paternal uncle warns Kang’s father that he thinks their line may be tapped. She remembers more snatches of conversation during the Thanksgiving festival that autumn, of people tortured and killed.

Years later, Kang’s father brings home a photograph book of the Gwangju Uprising, published and sold in secret. Although he keeps it out of the reach of his children, while the adults are watching the news, young Kang sneaks the book out and looks at the images. Upon seeing the photograph of the woman with the bayonet slash across her face, something inside of her is broken.

As an adult, Kang returns to Gwangju to do research for Human Acts. She has become preoccupied with the question of why she lived while Dong-ho died. The floor of the gymnasium where Dong-ho volunteered is torn up, the entire Provincial Office being under construction. But Kang sits there until sundown, meditating on Dong-ho. She tries to return to the old hanok she spent the first nine years of her life in, but it’s been torn down and replaced with a prefab. She finds Dong-ho’s older brother, and he gives her permission to tell his brother’s story, saying it is what his mother would have wanted.

Kang carries on with her research in Gwangju, visiting the Research Institute at Jeonnam University, the Cultural Foundation, and finally D Middle School, where she sees a picture of Dong-ho for the first time. She cannot match his face to other images she sees in her research, pondering how similar boys of this age look “poised for the growth spurt into manhood” (205). After two months of intensive research, however, she feels unable to continue with her project. Kang is being tormented by nightmares—of soldiers, of being unable to save the victims of the Gwangju Uprising, of being unable to reach the past.

Kang struggles to reckon with the extremity of the violence, stating that on the morning of May 21, dictator Chun Doo-hwan was prepared to subject the city to aerial bombardment if the Provincial Office held out. She notes the extreme measures used against civilians: flamethrowers, lead bullets, bayonets. On January 2009, she watches a violent encounter with riot police against activists and tenants on the news, which leaves six dead, and she thinks of how she has come to identify every violent struggle of the powerless against the powerful with Gwangju.