Summary
An unidentified person slaps an editor named Kim Eun-sook seven times, causing her face to bleed. (This is the same Eun-sook who showed Dong-ho kindness in Chapter One). She decides she wants to forget the whole ordeal of being hit, and gives herself a day to forget each of the seven slaps dealt to her.
While curled up in bed, Eun-sook remembers the unremarkable man who hit her in the interrogation room. He did this in an attempt to force her to reveal a certain translator's whereabouts. People at work question Eun-sook about what happened to her face, but she refuses to divulge any information or to go home early. Her boss insists on taking her out for a meal, and she wonders how he escaped questioning unharmed.
As Eun-sook heads to City Hall to meet with an official from the censor's office, she remembers an incident four years previously when she was a university student. A group of students burst into the cafeteria, chased by police. They dropped flyers printed with the phrase "Down with the butcher Chun Doo-hwan." When Eun-sook picked one up without thinking, the police dragged her out by her hair for questioning.
Eun-sook picks up the manuscript proof she turned in weeks before and finds that the vast majority has been redacted. Devastated, she understands that there is no way she and her colleagues can print the collection of plays. While breaking the news to the theater producer, Mr. Seo, Eun-sook apologizes profusely.
When she wakes at 4 AM and is unable to sleep again, Eun-sook obsessively arranges her apartment and feels as though the walls are closing in around her. Hunger and the need to eat shame Eun-sook as they have since the police attacked her at the university cafeteria.
Eun-sook remembers handling corpses at the Provincial Office with Seon-ju, and leaving before the army returned to Gwangju. From her place inside the hospital where she spent the rest of the night, Eun-sook heard a woman using a megaphone to beseech citizens to demonstrate in front of the Provincial Office. The sound of the approaching army terrifies everyone. Eun-sook thought of Dong-ho, who refused to leave the office despite his fear.
Back in the present day, the publishing house where Eun-sook works succeeds in getting a book published with only two paragraphs removed. The book concerns the psychology of crowds. On the opening night of the play, Eun-sook wonders how the performance will go on considering how much of the manuscript was redacted. The actors mouth the lines instead of saying them aloud. Eun-sook knows the lines since she edited the manuscript. One of the actors makes her think of Dong-ho.
Analysis
Chapter 3 is written in the third-person point of view. The chapter's structure parallels Kim Eun-sook's struggles to forget each slap that an interrogator dealt to her. Correspondingly, the original Korean title of this chapter translates to "Seven Cheeks." By paying meticulous attention to details (such as her immediate temperature, degree of comfort versus discomfort, and her nuanced memories), Eun-sook works to erase the slaps from her mind. Due to Eun-sook's reticence, the questions of who slapped her and why remain at the forefront as she works backward through her memories.
Details surface in a non-chronological order, and what may slip the notice of others obsesses Eun-sook. For example, she wonders why, if the interrogator used his right hand to do certain things, he would hit her with his left hand. This attention to detail characterizes Eun-sook as an analytical person, and it makes sense given her job as an editor. However, there is only so much critical reasoning she can do related to the traumatic incident of being slapped while under questioning. Throughout the chapter, timelines merge as Eun-sook thinks of past memories and events alongside her present circumstances. For example, directly after wondering how Mr. Seo will put on a censored play, she recalls details from a traumatic encounter with police when she was in university.
When the interrogator slapped her, Eun-sook recalls having "sat there, neither seeking to flee nor uttering the faintest cry of protest, merely waiting." Here, the author depicts the encounter between the South Korean state and its people as one where police and military officials dehumanize citizens. Whether under questioning or opening her bag for a police officer to search, Eun-sook thinks about how "a part of one's self must be temporarily detached from the whole." Since the novel largely deals with the relationship between the human body and soul, this detachment is akin to being forced to peel away a layer of humanity in order to appease the state.
Throughout the novel, Han Kang connects literacy with humanity. Among the blacked-out lines of Eun-sook's manuscript, she makes out a few words "in paragraphs that had been otherwise expunged." These words gasp "for breath in these interstices," the narrator states, comparing them as well to "tiny islands among language charred out of existence." Record-keeping also plays an important role in this novel, and the extreme censorship taking place will impact knowledge for generations to come.
Since this chapter centers on a manuscript for a collection of plays, it gives the title of the novel extra significance. In theater, an "act" refers to a fundamental narrative framework. The title Human Acts thus lends a note of theatricality to the state's actions as well as to how people are forced to react and perform.
