“I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t realised was there.”
– Han Kang
IN Korean, “Hello” (ahnyoung hasehyo) literally translates to “Are you at peace?”
Though used casually, the greeting carries weight – especially against the backdrop of Korea’s turbulent history.
Wedged between China, Japan, and Russia, the Korean Peninsula has endured colonisation, war, dictatorship and internal conflict.
South Korea, ironically called the Land of the Morning Calm, lives under the shadow of a nuclear-armed tyrant to the north.
In early 1980, following the assassination of authoritarian president Park Chung-hee (father of then-president Park Geun-hye), South Korea stood at a crossroads.
The economy was faltering.
Protesters – students, professors, labourers demanded democratic reforms.
But General Chun Doo-hwan, Park’s protégé, seized power, declared nationwide martial law, shuttered universities, and detained dissenters.
Most of the country fell in line. Gwangju did not. There, 160 miles south of Seoul, troops attacked protesters and civilians alike.
The city fought back. For five extraordinary days in May, Gwangju ousted the military and ran itself. Mothers cooked for the community. Taxi drivers ferried rebels. Middle schoolers helped tend to the wounded and identify the dead.
This is where Han Kang’s novel ‘Human Acts’ begins.
Dong-ho, a 15-year-old boy in search of the corpse of his best friend, ends up volunteering at the municipal gymnasium, where some of the corpses are being stored.
Han is smart to focus not on the gruesomeness of Dong-ho’s work – which would be redundant, melodramatic and expected – but on its mundanity:
“There was nothing technically difficult about the tasks you’d been assigned. Seun-ju and Eun-sook had already done most of the heavy work, which involved covering plywood or styrofoam boards with plastic, then lifting the corpses on top of these boards. They also washed the necks and faces with a cloth, ran a comb through the matted hair to tidy it a bit, then wrapped the bodies in plastic in an effort to combat the smell.
“In the meantime, you made a note in your ledger of gender, approximate age, what clothes they were wearing and what brand of shoes, and assigned each corpse a number. You then wrote the same number on a scrap of paper, pinned it to the corpse’s chest, and covered them up to the neck with one of the white cloths.”
By focusing on the logistics of cataloging the bodies, Han lulls us into the horror, and before we know it, we are there, inside the gymnasium, awe-struck by the amount of pain humans can inflict on one another and, in the obverse, the dignity with which the volunteers wash and care for the dead.
In essence, we witness the impossibly large spectrum of humanity, and wonder how it is that one end could be so different from the other.
To explore that spectrum, the book’s polyphonic structure comes across as necessary and natural.
Each chapter offers a piercing psychological portrait of a character affected by the Gwangju massacre: There’s Dong-ho, labelling the dead in the gymnasium; Dong-ho’s dead friend, who has been killed by troops (“Our bodies are piled on top of each other in the shape of a cross”); an editor facing censorship; a prisoner who has been tortured for his involvement in the uprising; a factory girl activist; Dong-ho’s mother; and finally, the author of ‘Human Acts’ herself, Han Kang, who provides her own testimonial on how she was personally, though indirectly, affected by those 10 days in May 1980, when she was nine years old.
‘Human Acts’, much like Han’s novel ‘The Vegetarian’, which won the Man Booker International Prize, shows Han’s imaginative and meaningful obsession with violence upon the body.
It also reveals another, perhaps more fundamental, obsession: dissonance.
Each chapter explores what happens when two seemingly dissimilar or even opposing elements try to coexist: when innocence is surrounded by violence, when the dead keep on living, when survivors live like the dead, when freed prisoners still feel imprisoned and when the past becomes the present.
Han’s attraction to dissonance is evident even on the sentence level.
In one instance, a volunteer “wiped the face of a young man whose throat had been sliced open by a bayonet, his red uvula poking out”.
Here, the “red uvula poking out”, so redolent of a child sticking out his tongue, provides a certain softness to an otherwise sharp, grisly image.
It is Han’s graceful ballet along this fine line, artfully replicated in Deborah Smith’s translation, that makes this harrowing book about the Gwangju massacre compulsively readable, universally relevant, and deeply resonant.
While reading ‘Human Acts’, whose original Korean title means ‘The Boy Approaches’, I kept thinking of the Korean greeting ahnyoung hasehyo, “Are you at peace?”
My answer, at nearly every page, was a resolute no.
This gut-wrenching novel about the Gwangju massacre has no interest, and rightly so, in making us feel at peace.
It lacerates, it haunts, it dreams, it mourns, and because of its effective use of the second-person narration, the characters call out to you – persistently – until you feel what the dead feel and, perhaps worse, what the survivors feel.
“What is humanity?” the book asks.
“What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?”
This question made me rethink – and retranslate – the Korean greeting, and realise how hasehyo could be taken as a more forceful verb, insinuating a command.
Instead of “Are you at peace?”, it could also be, “Are you doing peace?” Or “Are you practising peace?”
As in, peace comes not with passivity but with participation.
As in, peace requires action, just like violence.
And only now do I see yet another aspect of the novel’s English title: ‘Human Acts’, the tacit verb suggesting that, in the end, perhaps our actions are what matter.
‘Human Acts’ is, in equal parts, beautiful and urgent.
Though it might not have been Han’s intention, her novel reads not only as a lyrical post-mortem on violence but also a call to counter that violence.
So, how do we keep humanity “as one thing and not another”?
If humanity is under assault, and violence, oppression and authoritarianism rise to the surface, then is it not our human responsibility to act and resist, however forcefully, with everything in our power?
