“In other words, ‘Gwangju’ had become another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down, and brutalized, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair…”[1]
Those words, voiced by a character who’s a stand-in for author Han Kang, speak to what drove Han to write Human Acts—a novel meant to be commensurate to the uprising against martial law in South Korea that led to mass murders in the city of Gwangju in May of 1980. The story, as narrated by Kang’s circle of lightly fictionalized witnesses, didn’t end during that month of death. In ensuing years, more misery was inflicted upon insurgents who survived the initial massacres. Human Acts traces their sufferings as well as the unending trauma endured by every South Korean condemned to remember what made “Gwangju” a byword for terror.
I doubted I was up to writing about Human Acts but, prodded by wind gusts on a bright Saturday that made May seem like March (and reminded me I’d been stalling), laggardly me made a start. Though I stopped to attend a Standing Together protest in Union Square. (I’m guessing Han would’ve given me dispensation.) What was blowing in the wind that weekend was amped up by news from Gaza—where bombs (I help pay for) drop on innocent Palestinians as Hamas hides in their tunnels and the hostages moulder. At Union Square, one demonstrator read from her correspondence with a Gazan who reported that he’d just placed the corpse of a dead child in a plastic bag. Like everyone else he knew, he was dodging bombs and marauding gangs out to steal food (and anything else of value). Under IDF skies, with Islamist hard men in retreat from the streets, there’s no civic order on the ground in starving Gaza. Hell is real there…
Despair is often in the air in Human Acts and there’s hunger too. (Post-Gwangju, imprisoned pro-democracy protestors were starved by their captors.) One of them remembers “most of all how savage, how animalistic, the thirst was, how I’d’ve jumped at the chance to do literally anything to wet my lips, even a splash of urine would have done.”[2]
The stories of Han’s broken witnesses tend to start with aftermaths and work backwards to originary acts of terror that rise up, italicized, from memory…
Is it possible to bear witness to the fact of a foot-long wooden ruler being repeatedly thrust up into my vagina all the way to the back of my uterus. To a rifle butt bludgeoning my cervix…Is it possible to face up to the fact of my continuing to bleed for the next two years, to a blood clot forming in my Fallopian tube, and leaving me permanently unable to bear children. Is it possible to bear witness to the fact that I ended up with a pathological aversion to physical contact, particularly with men. To the fact that someone’s lips grazing mine, their hand brushing my check, even so much as a glance running up my legs in the summer was like being seared with a branding iron.[3]
Human beings are often reduced to “lumps of meat” in Human Acts. It begins with a fifteen-year-old boy, Dong-ho, searching for the corpse of his best friend among the reeking bodies piled up in a university gym after the first mass killing in Qwangju. Dong-ho finds himself working with young adult volunteers who help families identify lost relatives. He ends up sacrificing his own life when the military returns to wipe out the remnants of Qwangju’s pro-democracy movement. (Years down the line, Dong-ho’s mother will watch as his brothers polish the bones of his corpse before reburying it.) Han lingers on the details of bodies in various states of decomposition and putrefaction. The novel’s translator, Deborah Smith, in a short introduction to the English edition, suggests that Han’s attentiveness to lacerated corpses is informed by South Korean culture’s traditional animist “idea of somatic integrity—that violence done to the body is a violation of the spirit/soul that animates it.”[4] (There are also echoes of Antigone in the opening scene, where the boy encounters sisterly young women who oversee the corpses in the gym and try to look out for him.)
Kang’s book of mourning morphs into a modern book of the dead. Human Acts’ daring second chapter follows the spirit of Dong-ho’s best friend whose corpse has been trucked away with other victims and then stacked up in a thicket: “I hovered around my cheeks and the nape of my neck, clinging to these contours so as not to be parted from my body.” His hovering hangs around in your memory when one of Han’s witnesses equates death with a tiny bird taking flight and another gazes at candles by a gravestone as she feels a sudden chill from wet snow that’s soaked through her socks, seeping right into her skin: “I stared, mute at the flame’s wavering outline, fluttering like a bird’s translucent wing.”
Kang signs out with this line from a cemetery. Her acts of witness are acts of imagination. She seems like a solitary type, but she’s not removed, even when she orbits the Other Side. The voice of the victim she places among the shades isn’t self-enclosed. He feels the “breath-soft” presence of other dead souls, though those intimations are fleeting due to the absence of language and bodily-boundaries. The lost boy muses that no one ever taught him how “to address a person’s soul.” Yet he proves himself wrong when he conjures up a memory of his beloved sister, exhausted after her day of factory work, shuffling over to him on her knees to caress his face, “which she had loved,” as he pretended to sleep.
Han evokes public “snapshot moments,” as well as private ones, where South Koreans became soul men and women. One witness remembers how he seemed to fuse with the crowd of protestors in Qwangju as they broke the barrier of fear, staring down the barrels of soldiers’ guns: “I remember feeling it was all right to die, I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean…the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own.”[5]
The sublime feeling gets rubbished when the soldiers start shooting. The big-hearted witness ran away (as Dong-ho did), though they both stepped “outside the shell of their own selves” once again when they joined the civil society of Qwangju who turned out to give blood after the first massacre.
One of Han Kang’s exemplars—a less than fluent talker who was still a natural-born labor leader—locked on the word “noble” as she taught unionists in a 70s’ adult ed class. She treated the word like a precious coin that each of her Sisters, used to being slighted as “kongsuni” (factory Susie), could weigh in the palms of their hands as they appraised their own value. Teacher and students would end up acting on their newfound sense of self-worth—Human Acts reveals the price they paid in Gwangju for imagining they were more than meat.
Student activists at the city’s university spurred the citizenry to challenge the coup-maker, General Chung Doo-hwan, who’d seized power after the death of the dictator Chung Hee Park (Doo-hwan’s patron). Behind the uprising, though, was a decade of labor insurgencies. Working-class women—textile operators, electronics assemblers etc.—were out front when push came to slaughter in Gwangju. The traumatized woman we met earlier who’d end up being robbed of her sexual and maternal life recalls how she was pulled into the struggle there by the sight of young textile workers in their job garb packed into a bus with white banners marked by yellow magic marker that “screamed”: “End martial law. Guarantee labor rights.”
That same character looks back (in a chapter titled, “The Factory Girl, 2002”) on an earlier episode in the history of her comrades’ mobilization against a command-labor regime that often required them to work 15-hour days (under the sway of handsy bosses) with only two days off per month. When her crew of rebel factory girls, many of them just out of high school, voted out a company union, they were set upon by police and strike-breakers. Their noble leader called out to her Sisters: “Take off your clothes!” In a minute there were hundreds of young women standing in their underwear, holding up blouses and skirts and demanding: “Don’t arrest us.” They managed to shame some of their attackers who sensed South Koreans would be appalled at the spectacle of males-in-charge putting their hands on naked bodies of virginal girls, but the jackboots kicked in. The narrator recalls how she landed in the hospital with a ruptured intestine—an injury that made her quit the labor movement until that bus brought her back into the fight.
Translator Smith commends Han for delving into the history of the newly unionized woman workers who helped galvanize the pro-democracy movement in South Korea. Smith notes that Han takes an oblique approach to the role played by workers, letting class struggle slip into Human Acts through the back stories of her characters rather than offering a “dry historical account.” Human Acts, though, got me to Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea—Hwasook Nam’s gripping history of insurgent Korean women workers from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Nam’s scholarly account confirms that Han Kang’s story of the factory girls who stripped-for-their-rights in the 70s was based on an actual event. Case studies of two labor activists who staged landmark “aerial” protests in 1931 and 2011 frame Women in the Sky (and justify its title). The book starts with the story of a woman worker named Kang Churyong, who grabbed the attention of her country’s press with a sit-in protest (and eloquent oration) on the roof of a pavilion during a general strike by rubber workers in P’yŏngwŏn. It ends with the story of Kim Jin-Sook, who climbed a tower crane 115 feet above ground in 2011 to launch a marathon protest on behalf of hundreds of laid-off shipyard workers. The saga of Kim Jin-Sook should give anyone a lift. She’s been an archetypal worker of the world whose life of labor began in a textile sweat shop in the 70s before it took an exceptional turn in the 80s when she became the first fulltime woman welder at Hanjin Shipyard. She was one of the catalysts in a revitalized union there, which led to her being fired. Kim Jin-Sook had to slip back into the shipyard (like Lech Walesa?) to take up her fight against down-sizers in 2011.[6] She won the battle after she sustained her protest for nearly a year, living in her sky-cage, fighting off “a special counter-insurgency unit.” She threw metal bolts at her nemeses and when she ran out of bolts, she used her feces, which was more effective since the cops couldn’t take getting hit with her excrement. (“The reason the human species is the lord of all creatures,” she’d declare later in a jest-lecture to a university crowd, “is because of its capacity to auto-produce weapons.”)[7]
During Kim’s seasons in the sky, a “Hope Bus” movement took off. Inspired by her tweets, caravans of supporters—“migrant workers, human rights activists, teenagers, people with disabilities, indie band musicians, and queer activists”—began arriving at the shipyard to express their support. Braving cops with water cannons, Kim’s people sang, danced and engaged in a democratic festival of resistance—a spectacle she herself termed “new and mysterious.”[8]
Women in the Sky’s account of their protest musicking seems in tune with passages in Human Acts where Han’s witnesses recall how demonstrators (and mourners) made South Korea’s national anthem—and a Korean folk tune, “Arirang”—into aspirational towers of song. Dong-ho sang along at the protests but after the first massacre he couldn’t fathom why families stuck with the anthem during the rushed memorial services in the gym where they wrapped coffins with the South Korean flag: “Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers?” One afternoon, when there were several shrouding ceremonies going on at once, “the anthem rang out like a circular refrain, one verse clashing with another against a constant background of weeping.”[9] Dong-ho tried to make sense of the dissonance, wondering if it might help him “understand what the nation really is.” It’s a scene that will take on extra resonance for Americans trying to suss the nature of our own country and the uses of Americana now.
The South Korean anthem becomes a redemption song again later in Human Acts, when a witness recalls how an ex-prisoner sang it in the teeth of a military tribunal, disarming judges and jailers (momentarily). Han evokes another suggestive sound that’s more universal than any anthem. The “factory girl” recalls how she began to hear footsteps in her dreams after being awoken by drops from a wet towel she’d hung on a doorknob as a humidifier. The drip-drop reminds her of Dong-ho’s light tread and her own dread at failing to make sure he walked away from the gym before the troops marched back into Qwangju.
Human Acts comes back, over and over, to regretful hearts of victims who can’t get over moments when they failed to come through for someone vulnerable. Sudden death robs them of the chance to make amends. The enormous heart of a social movement bleeds out as it breaks into broken pieces.
Han isn’t out to cultivate cynicism. Her factory girl allows (almost angrily) that she might forget the lessons of her tortured life and join up with Volunteers of South Korea in the next pro-democracy uprising. (No doubt, her kind were in the rebellious crowds after South Korea’s ex-president declared martial law in December of 2024, which resulted in his impeachment last January.) Still, Human Acts is the antithesis of a feel-good entertainment. It’s a true horror story. One that might get your own guilt on.
N.B.: Human Acts woke this reader up twice—once so I could shit out a swarm of snake-sperm that wouldn’t go away when I shut my eyes and a second time so I didn’t have to watch my late brother being assaulted in an open field by human apes who gave savage attention to his lower back, which went tender on him late in his life (though I never gave his pain a second thought while he was alive).
The testifier in Human Acts’ epilogue tells how she was beset with nightmares as she researched her novel. (Born in Gwangju, “the writer” was 10 years old when she moved to Seoul where she had her first brush with rumors of the Uprising. Her family had a distant connection to a murdered middle-schooler who looked like Dong-ho and she was marked for life by another image of an anonymous young woman bayonetted in Qwangju. Paging through a forbidden book of photos—a clandestine purchase by her father on a visit to their old hometown—she was cut to the core by the picture of this victim’s slashed face.) It doesn’t get better when she gets to writing about Dong-ho et al. The drip-drop from her fictional micro-histories of Qwangju’s afflicted parties wears away at her faith in humanity. (All allowances for the fact that Han has clearly never been Little Suni Sunshine).[10] At the end of the epilogue, the writer calls out to Dong-ho—asking her better angel to bring her out of a dark place. She’s flashing back to earlier scene in the book when Dong-ho’s mother recalls how she liked to stay in the shade when she’d take summer walks with him on a path by a river that led to her husband’s shop. But Dong-ho disliked the places where the trees blocked out the sun. He’d urge her to join him on the sunnier side of the path…
Why are we walking in the dark, let’s go over there, where the flowers are blooming.[11]
…
After my second time through Human Acts—and on break from the unbearable news from Gaza (and the West Bank)—I followed a link to an old Roman road that rambles through a lush landscape in Provence where there’s a wood-and-iron art-installation by Bob Dylan. (I hope I was acting under the aegis of the God o’ Synchrony, not a Big Brother-ish algorithm.) The setting made me think of Dong-ho and his grandmother on their blossomy path. There was something cross-cultural about Dylan’s metal-work as well. His installation seemed worthy of Kim Jin-Sook[12]—a burnished-by-the-sun, grounded complement to the woman-welder’s cage in the sky?
Bob Dylan’s “Rail Car”
I dug Dylan’s elegant curlicues—the filigree for the sides and roof that he put on top of a wooden base from a 50s rail car. The artful repurposing is…Dylanesque, which means it’s pretty working classy. (See Daniel Wolf’s Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913.) Dylan has mined his own memories of growing up between the mines on Minnesota’s iron range and train tracks that cris-crossed his hometown. He’s made an airy home away from Hibbing for his inner child—a box of memories open to heaven en Provence.
Art-worldists promoting a 2022 exhibition of Dylan’s sculpture and paintings in France shot a short film with a sententious guide who branded Dylan’s ungeneric “Rail Car” with the t-word.[13] “Transcendent” is probably over-the-top. Still, there is something unidiotic blowing through the guide’s art-speak. Bob the welder’s crafty mystery-train might seem like a good ride to Dong-ho’s close imaginer and to a hero of labor like Kim Jin-Sook. It’s a pacific trip. The kind we all deserve to take as long as surcease doesn’t fade into permanent disengagement.
…
Notes
[1] Han Kang, Human Acts, Hogarth Press (2016) p. 204
[2] Op. Cit. p. 107
[3] Op. cit. p. 164
[4] Op. cit. p. 2
[5] Op. cit. p. 115
[6] Though some of the laid-off workers took buyouts rather than returning to the jobs she’d saved. It took her until 2021 to win her own job back at the shipyard—a reinstatement that enabled her to claim medical benefits she needed to pay for treatment of her breast cancer.
[7] Hwasook Nam, Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea, Cornell University Press, ILR Press (2021) p. 178
[8] Op. cit. p. 182
[9] Han Kang, Human Acts, Hogarth Press (2016) p. 17
[10] See Bob Levin’s piece above: https://www.firstofthemonth.org/prelude-to-the-bright-and-warm/
[11] Han Kang, Human Acts, Hogarth Press (2016) p. 190
[12] Photo reproduced in Hawsook Nam’s Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea, Cornell University Press, ILR Press (2021)
[13] https://bobdylanart.com/exhibitions/12-bob-dylan-rail-car-chateau-la-coste-france/video/