Human Acts
The best book I read this year. The perfect year to read it.
The best book I read in 2024, one of the most brilliant I have ever read, was not published in 2024. But there was probably no more appropriate a year to read Han Kang’s 2016 novel Human Acts, which was written about the events and aftermath of the Gwanju Massacre of 1980, when the South Korean dictatorship killed around two thousand of its citizens in brutal repression of a communal uprising, a human act of state-sponsored violence followed by years of repression, denial, censorship and torture.
Why so? Perhaps you would know. The week before I started reading Human Acts, as I had already intended to do, its author Han Kang received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Asian woman to do so, only the second South Korean ever to win a Nobel. (The first was former President Kim Dae-jung, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for attempts at reconciliation with North Korea.)
Two weeks after I finished reading Human Acts, and only a week after I finished writing about it, the current South Korean President, Yoon Suk Yeol, condemned his country to repeat its tragic history as farce - imposing, even to his own party leaders and generals’ surprise, martial law in dead of night. (He is unlikely to be nominated for a Nobel Prize of his own.)
It had been the instigation of martial law back in 1979 that led to the Gwanju Uprising, to the subsequent massacre of students and other civilians, to the torture and repression and censorship in the first place. Fortunately, this 2024 version lasted all of a few hours: the South Korean people, denied extensive knowledge of the Gwanju massacre for far too long, but familiar with it now in the shape of memorials and museums – and international best-selling novels like Human Acts - proved all too unwilling to be afforded a second taste. Immediate street protests in the capital and a recall of a Parliament that unanimously voted it down served to send the army back to its barracks; Han Kang, who ironically was in Sweden to receive her Nobel Prize, held a press conference where, in her quietly understated manner, she spoke of trying to stay optimistic about future human acts: “hoping for hope is a hope.” While the fall-out from the brief martial law continues, it serves as a reminder of how rapidly a supposedly democratic economic powerhouse can slip into enemy costume. Never say “It could never happen here,” wherever you live.
Finally, as if these all too literal and literary bookends were not enough, barely had I finished writing about Human Acts than the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad fell in Syria, revealing in its wake confirmation of what was widely known in this country’s case all along: the existence of a concentration camp of a prison, a “human slaughterhouse” per Amnesty International, where anywhere from 30,000-200,000 state enemies were disappeared, many of them dying only after heinous “human acts” of torture. Kang’s Human Acts renders this violence as indelible on the mind as the ink on its pages. If you have read the book, you will know. If you have not, I invite you to do so, via my further words below.
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Lives on a Thread and the Banality of Violence
“The thread of life is as tough as an ox tendon,” writes Han Kang in her breathtaking novel Human Acts, speaking in the voice of a mother who has lost her middle-school-aged son in the Gwangju Massacre of 1980. The mother says these words to justify her continued existence, the fact that “Even after I lost you, [life] had to go on”.
We tend to think of our existence in this manner. As humans, we are equipped with survival techniques, not just a physical hardiness to survive pain, starvation and other deprivations, not just an emotional sturdiness to keep going even when we have had to bury our own children, but like most animals, with a “fight or flight” instinct. Self-preservation is our second nature. No, surely it is our first. “Life just wants to be,” wrote Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything, a perfect proverb of sorts that has resonated far and wide.
But is that truly so? Even as she says these words, the bereaved mother – with Han Kang holding the quill – must know this is not true. For if ever a novel has depicted, in such soberly graphic detail, that the thread of life is as thin as rice paper, as easy to snap as a dry twig, as effortlessly extinguishable as a damp match, surely Human Acts is that novel. It is not just the banality with which Kang describes atrocities and tortures, the likes of which make this book truly awful to read even as the reader recognizes they are compellingly engaged in a literary and historical masterpiece, but the distant manner in which she describes the lives of the survivors, so thoroughly broken by their experiences that any tendon by which they cling to life steadily erodes in front of them, some protagonists choosing an early release from the endless suffering of this thin mortal coil. She has a rare ability to write of unconscionable violence in an absurdly everyday manner, seemingly devoid of emotion and yet all the more powerful because of it.
To be clear, while Human Acts is referred to an “a novel” on its front cover, and while the category of “historical fiction” would be demeaning to a work of such importance, this book is essentially an imagined version of very real events. The 1980 Uprising in Gwanju, a city on the South Korean peninsula with a history of progressive political activity, began after the country’s “military strongman” Park Chung-hee, who had been in power, with strong US support, since 1961, was assassinated by his own director of security services. Demonstrators across smaller cities in the politicized, industrialized south of the country, those who bore the brunt of bruises from the country’s rapid economic rise, had already been agitating in the streets, to which Park had instigated martial law before his death. When Park’s assassination clarified as a coup, with an even more authoritarian military leader Chun Hoo-dwan taking his place, the stakes rose rapidly, with the University city of Gwanju serving as its main locus.
Protestors massed in the streets by the hundreds of thousands, and despite taking civilian losses after brutal attacks by paratroop regiments, they succeeded in temporarily expelling the army from the city. But that was only a tactical retreat, during which Chun prepared for a full-scale assault – and it is in this subsequent assault that the book’s central character is killed. Using the (historically unproven) pretext that Gwanju had been infiltrated by North Korean communists, Chun launched a military attack on his own people, and the Uprising was subsequently crushed with a brutality that rivals the worst excesses of the so-called “civilized” world. The number killed remains undetermined to this day, though it is surely not less than 2,000. Among them were many children of high school, and at least one of middle school age. That boy’s name was Dong-ho and it his killing from which everything else in Human Acts radiates.[i]
Han Kang spent her first nine years in Gwanju; in fact, her family only moved from there after her father, an aspiring writer himself who filled the family home with books, gave up his teaching job and moved his family to the capital, less than four months before the uprising. After establishing herself as her country’s leading new novelist in her thirties, then after discovering a family connection to Dong-ho, Han Kang took it on herself to investigate further. With the blessing of the boy’s oldest brother, and by poring through now-public historical records and from her own knowledge of the city and its inhabitants, she set about telling the boy’s story with incredible literary imagination. She was not the first to write about Gwanju, and perhaps she will not be the last. But, and allowing that in 2024, Han Kang received the Nobel Literature Prize, it would take a brave or yet more brilliant writer to dare trying to best her.
The Nobel committee awarded Han Kang her prize “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” That the thread of life is indeed fragile is immediate within the two pages of Human Acts when “The Boy, 1980” of the chapter’s title reveals his role, here in the midst of the Uprising: watching over the corpses of victims assembled in the University Gymnasium, waiting for families to claim them and coffins to be prepared. The boy – and he is but fifteen years of age, though his latent puberty makes him seem so much younger – presents as emotionally detached from the brutality and horror of what is laid out in front of him, as perhaps indeed would have been the case for someone whose mind and body were still far from that of the supposedly mature adult.
Perhaps it is this youthful perspective that allows for the first description of horror to feel so vivid, yet so coolly remote: “stab wounds slash down from her forehead to he left eye, her cheekbone to her jaw, her left breast to her armpit, gaping gashes where the raw flesh shows through”. I suspect, however, that this is Han Kang’s purposeful approach; while the Korean title of the novel approximates as “The Boy Is Coming” or “A Boy Comes,” the English-language title Human Acts allows for multiple interpretations, including that of the routine banality with which a military can inflict seemingly unfathomable atrocity upon the very people it should have been sworn to protect.
For those who choose to read a book from beginning to end – i.e. for someone like this reader, who eschews the back cover summary giveaways – Human Acts proves especially complex to unravel. Who is Dong-ho in the bigger scheme of things? Why has he been charged with such an apparently senior task? What will become of him? And why is the author using the second person narrative perspective to write about him - for example, “suddenly it occurs to you to wonder, when the body dies, what happens to the soul?”
The answers begin to unravel in subsequent stories. For, while Human Acts has already declared itself “a novel,” it is, as equally as a historical statement, a collection of short stories. (Indeed, almost every “chapter” stretches typical definition of same by its length.) The second of these, “The Boy’s Friend, 1980” not only switches perspective to the first person, but dares to answer the previous chapter’s above-referenced question: it is expressed through the soul of Dong-Ho’s friend, Jeong-mi, who was shot dead in Dong-Ho’s full view when the Army opened fire on the mass protest march of May 18, another life snapped in two by the immediacy of a modern military’s weaponry. Jeong-mi’s body has been transported to a military site, where his soul seems initially content at first, fascinated by its existence outside of its dead human body. There it is free to flit alongside those other victims who are daily amassed on top of him, until suddenly – with “an agony that almost broke me” - it is condemned to an invisible, intangible hell in the sudden realization that its sister Jeong-mi, with whom Jeong-mi had roomed in the annex of Dong-ho’s family, is also dead.
A few pages later, that soul describes with what is already a familiar air of detachment, soldiers setting fire to the assembly of victims, including his own body: “the flames ate steadily through the head’s thick hair, the fine down covering the body, then fat, muscle, and innards”. Yet this is not the most chilling content of the chapter story. Nor is it the conclusion, when the soul feels the real-time death of Dong-ho, a moment of tactical literary genius. For this reader, that moment comes instead when, “flickering around their necks and shoulder,” Jeong-mi’s soul chooses to look into the faces of the two young soldiers who have been condemned to watch over this funeral pyre – “how their black pupils, dilated with fear, reflected the bonfire of our bodies”. In a novel that takes little pity upon the military until the author interjects herself as narrator of the final chapter story, this is a rare humanization of soldiers who, one must presume, had not signed up for this. They are merely following orders. It’s how human acts like this always unfold.
Such stories, such details, such mundane horrors, continue unabated. “The Editor, 1985,” is told in the third-person account of a woman who has been assaulted in a police station, for harboring details of a playwright’s whereabouts. The country was still under Chung’s dictatorship at the time, and whether or not Han Kang has imagined the actual play for herself, it is notable that 1985 was the year when the first eyewitness accounts of the Gwangju Massacre were published. The country’s firmly established (though politically agitative) novelist Hwang Sok-Yong took credit for the authorship to protect the identity of the real author(s); he was arrested, and spent five years in prison for his non-violent act.
One would nonetheless hope that as the calendar continues to turn towards the present day, evidence of life’s fragilities might become less horrific. But no. Is there anything more traumatic for the reader than the details of torture submitted upon the survivors who tell of it in “The Prisoner, 1990” (in the first person) and “The Factory Girl, 2002” (back to the second)? Yes, and it is the sudden detail in the midst of the former story, almost at the absolute epicenter of Human Acts (by design?), when the narrator, having already detailed how the army had been supplied with two rounds of ammunition for every citizen in Gwanju, and how students like him had effectively surrendered, sacrificing themselves to avoid a bloodbath on the entire city, and how that still not prevented blood from flowing when the Provincial Office was stormed – it “literally flowed, gushing over the stairs in the pitch dark” – delivers the novel’s coup de grace, almost in passing. A particular sadistic officer has entered the occupied premises, boasting of killing thirty “filthy fucking Reds” during the Vietnam war. He is obviously keen to add to his tally and he is about to get his chance. Five of the youngest boys on the premises come down with their hands above their heads. Four are high school students; the fifth is Dong-ho. The army officer yells abuse at them and, even as his boot remains embedded in a student’s back on the floor, rakes them with his M16.
“As good as a fucking movie, right?” he “whoops” at “his subordinates” as the students fall like so many bowling pins, but in an even line. Is Han Kang consciously alluding to Robert Duvall’s infamous “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” from Apocalypse Now? I would not be surprised. Does she stop to question how such human acts can be committed? Indeed. A subsequent paragraph concludes with this question: “To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered – is this the essential fate of humankind, one that history has confirmed as inevitable?”
Perhaps so. Perhaps not. In the final story, the author’s own, Han Kang discusses how, “just as there were some soldiers who were especially cruel, so there were others who were especially nonaggressive,” and goes on to detail specific examples. This is the real fate of humankind, to walk an unsustainable balance between sadism and compassion, between dictatorship and democracy, war and peace. Somewhere in the middle of these human acts are those of our artists - the poets, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, painters and writers who try to make sense of it all. Han Kang offers no further conclusion, and throughout Human Acts she appears to fully understands the contradictions I have raised. The thread of life is never thinner in the story of two prisoners who survived their physical torture only to spend their remaining years in a form of mental torture, broken beings as was surely their abusers’ intent, lost in an alcoholic daze of PTSD until one of them takes his own life. The survivor uses a metaphor about glass, but it is Han Kang who is writing.
“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.”
Ox tendon? Only in our dreams. In Human Acts, real life – and the permanent specter of death that surrounds the events of Gwanju – is a waking nightmare.
It never fails to amaze me, that humans are capable of producing wonderful things yet so easily slip in to acts of uncontrolled cruelty. We must all stand up for human rights and voice out at all times !