Human Acts
After you died I couldn't hold a funeral,
So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine.
These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine.
These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.
I think of myself as someone who knows what's going on in the world, but somehow, what I thought was going on in South Korea isn't the whole picture. I remember the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul as colourful and successful; nod approvingly when I hear of a North Korean escaping to the free and democratic south; commend the recent impeachment of the corrupt President Park Geun-hye. But just a cursory search describes the 1988 Olympics as “a horror show of human rights abuses”; the government in Seoul still routinely clamps down on public protests (two of Park's supporters were killed in a clash with police this month); Park Geun-hye herself is the daughter of Park Chung-hee (the military strongman who ruled the country as a dictatorship, from his coup in 1961 until his assassination in 1979). Yet, in my mind I had labelled South Korea as a successful democracy and hadn't given it much more thought. In Human Acts, author Han Kang confronts this lazy thinking by revisiting the Gwanju Uprising of 1980, and through sharing the perspectives of various characters – in the moment and over the ensuing thirty years – Kang demonstrates how very different life in South Korea is from what we in the West might imagine. I personally preferred Kang's dreamy, surreal style in The Vegetarian and might have given this book four stars based on the writing alone, but ultimately, Human Acts feels too important not to award all five; everyone could get something out of reading this book.
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 the 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, slaughtered – is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?
Han Kang was born in Gwanju in the southern reaches of the Korean peninsula, and although her family had moved to Seoul before the 1980 massacre, it's understandable that her narrative would focus on this tragedy from her hometown. Some historical context: After the assassination of Park Chung-hee, his protege Chun-Doohwan grabbed power and imposed martial law. And when the students at Gwanju's university protested the closing of their school, Chun sent in the military; providing 800 000 live rounds to confront a total citywide population of 400 000. Students and labour organisers peacefully gathered in a public square on May 18th, and when the army arrived, they indiscriminately shot and killed the unarmed protesters. Events escalated, and within ten days, this “uprising” was quashed.
We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.
Bodies figure prominently in Human Acts and the book opens in the aftermath of May 18th; in a municipal gymnasium holding dozens of dead bodies awaiting identification. The central figure in this first chapter is fifteen-year-old Dong-ho – pretending to be older, Dong-ho is helping with the care of the corpses in the hopes of finding his missing friend – and although each chapter that follows is from a different perspective, each will relate back to Dong-ho or his co-workers in the ersatz morgue. There are chapters from the perspective of a freshly released spirit (who recognises that his body is nothing but a lump of rotting meat), from people who later remembered having been imprisoned or tortured (whose bodies had been treated inhumanely by the police and military), from a mother who finally receives her son's bones in 2010, and from “The Writer” (presumably Kan) who returns to Gwanju in 2013 to begin the research that will conclude at a cemetery. In my favourite chapter, “The Editor, 1985”, a theatre company proceeds to mount a play that has been nearly completely redacted by the Censorship Office – and that really brought it home for me: South Korean was operating under a Censorship Office in the years leading up to the 1988 Olympics? Why didn't I know that?
Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times, when committing such actions in wartime won them a handsome reward. It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung 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.
Human Acts is primarily concerned with “how”: Just how can anyone's first response to dissent involve snipers and cudgels and middle-of-the-night body-dumping? And how can a military/police force evolve that will follow these orders to commit violence against their neighbours? Are cruelty and brutality written into our genetic code? Our bodies? Are these, therefore, the most human of acts? Kan doesn't present any easy answers, but with spare and lovely language, and a non-prurient look at the bodily effects of totalitarianism, she has written a book that bears witness to events that flew beneath my own radar and challenges what I think I know of the world. This book succeeds on every level and deserves to be widely read.
