“I heard a story about one of the Korean army platoons that fought in Vietnam. How they forced the women, children, and elderly of one particular village into the main hall, and then burned it to the ground. Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times, when committing such actions in wartime had won them a handsome reward. It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju island, in Kwantuang and Nanjing, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.” (134)
Han Kang, Human Acts
Human Acts is a historical fiction novel that follows seven Gwangju residents during the murderous South Korean dictatorship in the 1980s. There are seven chapters, each following a different character. I started reading Human Acts because Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is the first Asian woman and the first Korean to receive this award. If I’m being honest, I don’t really enjoy reading. Though I do think that, as Knowles once wrote, “…when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”
And so this is how I’ve come to meet the Prisoner. At twenty-two, he had recently graduated from college. He was preparing to be a teacher. He was unjustly arrested in front of the Provincial Office, where civilians honored the murdered civilians by cleaning their bodies, identifying them, and reuniting them with their loved ones. He was tortured in prison. Though he was released from prison, he remains a prisoner to the memories of those “other, squalid deaths, for the rest of his life” (134). Now, the Prisoner shares his testimony with a professor writing his thesis on the Gwangju uprising.
In front of the Provincial Office, with a duty to protect human lives from becoming “lumps of meat,” stood a group of college students and younger boys against a state military with ammunition that could kill their entire city twice over. Prior to the military invading the Provincial Office, the Prisoner told the younger schoolboys to hide out of a desperate attempt to save them. When the violence subsided, the college/high school students were on their knees in front of the military. Then, the younger boys cautiously walked out of the building, surrendering with their hands in the air.
“‘Look at these bastards!’ the officer yelled. He was practically frothing at the mouth. ‘Want to surrender, do you, you fucking Reds? Want to save your precious skins?’ With one foot still up on Kim Jin su’s back, he raised his M16, took aim, and fired. The bullets tore into those school kids without hesitation.” (133)
When the officer raises his M16 and shoots the schoolboys, it’s simply what happens. When the Prisoner is tortured with the Miroro Biro pen jammed between his twisted fingers until there are open wounds that are seeping with milky discharge, it’s simply what happens. It’s as though these Human Acts belong to this world. And so there is nothing that is out of place about an armed grown man murdering a group of unarmed schoolboys or torturing an innocent man until the bones of his hands are exposed. She writes about cruelty as though it is as normal as the sunset we see each day, and this is what made her depiction of human brutality and suffering disturbing for me.
Then, she digs deeper than what happens. The brutality was a direct message to the civilians: “We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals” (120). Along with the cruelty, this book is drenched with questions about what it means to exist. “How long do souls linger by the side of their bodies?” (46) “What is this thing we call a soul? Just some nonexistent idea? Or something that might as well not exist? Or no, is it like a kind of glass?” (129) I wondered: Why is it so important to know where the soul is? Why should I care to know what it’s made of, what form it takes, and whom it occupies?
The Prisoner’s questions:“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 of 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 that history has confirmed as inevitable?” (133)
It seems that in such dire conditions they ought to understand the fundamental nature of being. It is the only way they can hold onto life as they are degraded, damaged, and slaughtered. I figured that if they knew the shape of their souls, the materials they were made of, and where their souls resided, they might know how to exist in a world that reduces them to a lump of meat.
Dongho was one of the middle school boys who was shot dead by the officer with the M16. In search of his dead friend, Jongdae, Dongho began volunteering at the Provincial Office, where he honored the dead by jotting down their information. He lit candles to memorialize the dead and thought the flickering of the candlelight indicated the nearness of the dead people’s fluttering souls. He perceives the soul to be a fluttering bird. Perhaps he viewed the soul as something that can leave as easily as a bird might fly away.
Kim Jin Su was also a civilian protestor and one of the prisoners. He perceives the soul is made of glass. He writes in his suicide note, “Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they’re good for nothing, right, you have to chuck them away. Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass” (130).
I thought that if they were to pinpoint the nature of their souls, they might find a way to live. I don’t know. Maybe Dongho could tie the bird to the branches of his heart, and Jinsu could encase his glass in layers of bubble wrap then place it in the pit of his stomach. But Dongho and Jin Su learned about the nature of their souls, and they were still killed. It seems as though there was no way for such fragile, gentle, fluttering, and transparent souls to exist in a cruel world.
I’d like to think, like Jinsu and Dongho, that human souls are fragile, fluttering, childlike, and transparent. A little bit of a side tangent, but I’m thinking of the challenge where golden retriever were given a raw egg. I remember being entertained by how most dogs intuitively knew that they should handle the egg with care. I’m thinking that if we understood the nature of human souls as dogs understood the nature of their owner-given in-shell chicken eggs, perhaps we’d care more about the way we treat each other. I’m honestly not sure though.
The literal translation of this book’s original title is The Boy is Approaching. The boy refers to Dongho, whom the book centers on, but Dongho dies. An unjustly murdered boy approaches a living reader. The book is a memorial, like Dongho’s candles, that ensures we remember and honor Dongho and those who died from the cruelty of human acts.
Citations:
Han, Kang. Human Acts. Translated by Deborah Smith, Hogarth, 2017