Summary
The author shares her personal connection to the Gwangju Uprising. In 1980, she was nine years old, and her family moved from Gwangju to the outskirts of Seoul before the military cracked down on civilian opposition. The adults in Han's family did their best not to let the children overhear discussions about political matters. Nonetheless, Han overheard snippets of conversation regarding the uprising. When she was eleven years old, Han found a hidden photo chapbook and discovered a photo of a woman whose face was slashed by a bayonet. This image haunted her.
As an adult, Han obsessively researched the Gwangju Uprising in order to write Human Acts. She suffered nightmares as a result. She returned to Gwangju and visited the Provincial Office, gym, schools, the 5:18 Research Institute, and her old home. After seeking permission from Dong-ho's brother, Han began writing the novel.
Analysis
Han Kang herself speaks in the novel's final chapter, breaking the fourth wall. This emphasizes the historical nature of this work of fiction. Though the beginning of the book includes a note stating that "this is a work of fiction," the historical events that the novel discusses were very real. The Gwangju Uprising and brutal military suppression forever altered people's lives. As Han highlights throughout the novel, past events can make their way into the present via memory and trauma.
Han lost her innocence at the age of eleven when she found a photograph of a mutilated woman. This woman's face was slashed by a bayonet likely belonging to the military police who attacked civilian protestors in Gwangju. According to Han, witnessing this photograph led to an abrupt disillusionment. The author writes, "Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke." In interviews, Han recounts how she realized what humans are capable of and that she experienced fear at the thought of being a human being herself.
When she visited the gymnasium that once served as a morgue in Gwangju, time flickered between the past and present. This is how she came up with the idea for the book: by sitting near where the historical uprising took place and waiting "until the outlines of the boy's face [solidified]" in her mind. As someone born and raised for the first decade of her life in Gwangju, Han feels irrevocably tied to what happened there. Time does not function chronologically in any of the chapters in Human Acts.
In Chapter 5, the character Seon-ju questions the ethics of someone asking her to "bear witness" to past events that traumatized her in order to spread public awareness. On a similar note, Han contacted the real Dong-ho's brother to ask for permission before writing a novel based on Dong-ho. Han shares in interviews that she took care in how she approached her research for the novel because, in her words, "I did not want to subject the families of the bereaved or those who had been injured to yet another interview, given they had already given their testimony several times. I felt that it would not be right" (Shin).
Han uses anaphora in this chapter for emphasis, rhythm, and heightened emotion. Repeating the word "when," she lists out simultaneous atrocities and civilian responses that occurred in Gwangju. These include descriptions of corpses, people organizing to defend themselves, and the loss of democratic authority.
