Human Acts by Han Kang and translated by Deborah Smith was a surprise read. The first chapters of the book takes place during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in Korea, in the perspective of a young middle school boy named Dongho who volunteers to clean the bodies of deceased protesters. Yet, Dongho soon dies in the hands of police. Since then, the Human Acts shifts through different perspectives and different time periods of people who affected Dongho in his life and were affected by his death, they create a broken collage of fragmented people and fragile emotions.
"Whereabouts in the body is that a bird when the person is still alive? In that furrowed brow, above the halolike crown of that head, in some chamber of the heart?" - Han Kang
Han Kang, the author of this book, wrote Human Acts that contains an emotional and intriguing perspective of a political event. This was something I had never seen before. When portraying movements for democracy and equality, writers are often invested in revealing the political reasons and the emotions behind such values. Yet, Human Acts was, in fact, not focused mostly on the political perspective of the Gwangju Uprising and instead focused on singular events that are constantly remembered in the book and the aftermaths of them. Apart from Dongho's and his friend Jeongdae's perspective, the other characters have their thoughts and stories told in that current moment intertwined with the reflections of their past. Throughout the whole book, there are only flickering signs of hope, such as the release of Jeongdae's soul from his corpse, but most do not feel liberated and are traumatized from the physical and mental torture from prison, the memories of Dongho's death or events affected by Dongho's death, such as Kim Jin-su's suicide, and certain moments of death and sadness that overlap in the book, like the two corpses of college girls lying in the dew-covered grass. The way Han Kang writes and Deborah Smith translated with all the specific details conveying an emotion were like light and heavy feathers.
What was most interesting about this book was how Han Kang was someone who was personally affected by this issue. The last chapter comes from the perspective of Kang, who goes back to her hometown to recollect her past and the memories left from the Gwangju Uprising. Kang did live in Gwangju but moved out near Seoul before the protests in Gwangju city occurred. Yet, the house of the narrator of the last chapter in Gwangju is hinted to have been occupied by a family with a young middle school boy who died in the Gwangju Uprising. Although it is unknown whether this Dongho did exist, he is an example of several young children in middle school and high school who died fighting for a cause greater than themselves.
My mother was living in Korea when Gwangju occurred, about two or three hour drive away from the city's uprising. When I asked her about this event, she told me it was not wide known due to the government coup's crackdown, and if it was, the oppressive government painted people in Gwangju as communists, not fighters for democracy. Because I had a brief knowledge about my parent's home country, I did know that there was constant oppression after the Korean War. But to fully encompass and understand Human Acts, one may need to learn more about the Gwangju Uprising as Han Kang writes about the human reaction to the event. Still, because the Gwangju Uprising is not a very well-known event in the world, Han Kang reveals the horror of a hidden and tragic event, which is why I recommend this book to anyone ready to take the emotional toil in it.
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