Keepers of secrets

By Kohinoor Dasgupta

Han Kang’s memorable novel about the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980 was published in Korean as The Boy Is Coming in 2014. The American edition (Hogarth), titled Human Acts, was out within two years, during the presidency of Park Geun-hye, the daughter of former President and de facto dictator Park Chung-hee (d. Oct 26, 1979). The Korean novel was translated into English by Deborah Smith.

Smith also wrote an introduction to the novel. For American readers holding their breaths in this precise historical hour, late October of 2024, here is a chilling excerpt from the introduction, which outlines the historical background of Human Acts:

"In early 1980, South Korea was a heap of dry tinder waiting for a spark. Only a few months previously Park Chung-hee, the military strongman who’d ruled since his coup in 1961, had been assassinated by the director of his own security services…

"But the assassination was no victory for democracy. Instead, into Park’s place stepped his protégé Chun Doo-hwan, another army general with firm ideas on how a people should be governed. By May Chun had used the excuse of a rumored North Korean infiltration to expand martial law to the entire country, closing universities, banning political activities, and further curtailing the freedom of the press. After almost two decades of Park Chung-hee, South Korean citizens recognized a dictator when they saw one. In the southern city of Gwangju, student demonstrations had their numbers swelled by those for whom the country’s "miraculous” industrialization had meant backbreaking work in hazardous conditions and for whom recent unionization had led to greater political awareness. Paratroopers were sent in to take over from the police, but their brutality against unarmed citizens resulted in a still greater turnout in support of the civil militias. Together, they managed a brief respite during which the army retreated from the city center.”

In addition, Han Kang’s Acknowledgments point to the work done by South Korean historians, documentary makers, writers and actors down the years to keep the truth of the Gwangju Uprising squarely in their nation’s memory.

Han, who has won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in Gwangju on November 27, 1970. She was nine years old at the time of the Gwangju Uprising. She may or may not be the Writer who closes the novel with a first-person account. Although that chapter is titled 'Epilogue’, it is not clear to me whether it is strictly autobiographical. While the Writer’s state of mind may well mirror Han’s own when she researched the uprising, I do not know for a fact that Han has a personal, poignant link with the boy, Dong-ho, the character who pulls us into the novel during that "brief respite” to which Smith refers in her Introduction. The earnest and innocent boy immediately endears himself to readers, and is the one referenced in the haunting name of the Korean original: The Boy Is Coming.

Did Han’s father work in D middle school in Gwangju and teach Dong-ho, or the real teenager who inspired the character? Before moving to Seoul in January 1980 with his family, did Han’s father sell his hanok to the boy’s father? Is the Epilogue a part of the novel, with the Writer as a character in it, or is it separate from the novel, Han Kang’s personal closure?

Dong-ho is fifteen. He started his third year in middle school in March 1980. At the South Jeolla Provincial Office at Gwangju, during the uprising, the teenager has taken on the duty of maintaining a roster of the recently dead, who are college students and others, including children, all citizens killed by the army.

The soldiers have retreated to the outskirts of Gwangju and are waiting, not for government representatives who would offer apologies and assurances to calm down the inflamed and grieving citizens, but for the arrival of the Paratroopers from the Special Warfare Command.  

Dong-ho is the youngest person volunteering at the Provincial Office. He went there not to help, but to find the body of his friend and classmate Jeong-dae. He did not find him in the mortuaries at Jeonnam University Hospital and the Red Cross hospital.

Jeong-dae and his nineteen-year-old sister Jeong-mi were renting the one-room annex in the courtyard of Dong-ho’s home. Jeong-mi did not return from work on Sunday, March 18. On Monday, Jeong-dae and Dong-ho were out looking for her when soldiers started firing indiscriminately. Although college students were the targets, the public were not spared. The students were protesting martial law, closure of universities, and the ongoing arrests and violent interrogations of students suspected of being leaders. The public had joined the street protests.

Soldiers were firing from rooftops. There were deafening bursts of gunfire. In the melee, Dong-ho was separated from Jeong-dae. Several things happened in a flash: a bullet hit Jeong-dae, there was more ear-splitting gunfire, and Dong-ho bolted. A little later, when Dong-ho was about to dash back to Jeong-dae, a stranger held him back. The soldiers were firing at people who were rushing to help those who had been shot. But when it was safe, Dong-ho, to his bitter shame, did not make his way back to Jeong-dae. Instead, he went home. He did not tell his family that he had witnessed Jeong-dae’s death.

On the next day, Tuesday, May 20, Dong-ho went looking for his friend’s body. He didn’t find Jeong-dae at the Provincial Office either. He did see a disfigured and bloating body whose skirt was identical to one Jeong-mi wore. Dong-ho was not sure that the dead woman was Jeong-mi.

Two women who were a few years older than Dong-ho were dealing with the bodies which had arrived at the Provincial Office. They asked Dong-ho if he would stay awhile and help.

Eun-sook and Seon-ju met not long ago at Jeonnam University Hospital where they had gone to donate blood. Hearing that the Provincial Office, now being run by civilians, was in dire need of volunteers, they came over to help. They got to work preparing bodies for their last rites. Presumably no one else was willing or able to deal with this difficult duty.  

Bodies continue to arrive at the Provincial Office. They are kept in the gymnasium and in the auditorium. Eun-sook and Seon-ju work away. They wipe off blood from the faces of the dead people, they comb their hair, straighten their stiff limbs, lay them on plywood or Styrofoam boards which they had covered with plastic, and finally they cover the bodies with white sheets which they cut out of a roll.

Dong-ho’s brother and mother come to take him home. He cannot leave. He must be the keeper of the souls and the guardian of those forlorn folks whom no one will claim, this boy with the ledger. To make accurate entries he must take a good look at all the faces of young people mutilated with clubs and bayonets or shot to death. He sees them over and over, when he accompanies the distraught people who come looking for missing sons, daughters and grandchildren. He lights and relights scented candles to dissipate the stench of putrid flesh, a stench impossible to dissipate. He wears a surgical mask to keep from gagging. He thinks about what happens after death. He imagines souls lingering in bewilderment. He is himself numb with disbelief and incomprehension. He is not revolted by the disfigured young faces. What revolts him is hearing the national anthem at informal memorial services. When the bereaved have claimed their own, the bodies are placed in coffins and each coffin is covered with the national flag. Dong-ho wonders:

"Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.”

The go-to person, the person who runs around to arrange for coffins and candles at short notice and puts up lists of the dead at the main entrance, is a young college student called Jin-su. With touching sincerity, Jin-su and Dong-ho make sure that the bodies which arrive at the Provincial Office are given a tag and a description: gender, approximate age, clothing, brand of shoes.

Record keeping versus state-sponsored erasure is a powerful theme of Human Acts. Human hearts have no choice, they are record keepers. The bereaved remember, as do eyewitnesses and the survivors of violence.

The novel moves on to 1985. Han brings us up close to a few survivors, Seon-ju and Jin-su among them.  The Gwangju Uprising occurred during a certain period in 1980, but the state made sure that the pro-democracy agitators who survived the uprising were punished by means of purposeful acts of dehumanizing, such as detention, starvation, cruel methods of interrogation, censorship and propaganda.

Some survivors, sensitive and conscientious human beings, and themselves victims, are burdened by guilt for what their decisions may have cost others. Some have a sense of failure and futility. Some are determined to fight the erasure of the Gwangju Uprising. All are aware of the ultimate ostracization: betrayal by their own nation. We see courage and mettle and difficulties with loving.

Over time, memories of the bereaved fade or are frosted over with inaccuracies; over time, eyewitnesses and survivors of violent acts die. Often traumatized survivors are unable to articulate what happened to them and what they witnessed.

Therefore, the acts of Jin-su and Dong-ho were important. The tiniest bit of documentation was a real service for the dead, the living, and for generations to come. Even the efforts of underground publishers of chapbooks, and their sellers, were important because they got information out of Gwangju; even the Writer’s family got hold of a chapbook where she saw a photograph of the dead woman who may have been Jeong-mi.

In their 2017 book Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea (Verso Publications, London 2022), the authors Sok-yong Hwang, Jae-eui Lee and Yong-ho Jeon write how the bloody events went unreported:

"The nine o’clock news that day did not even mention Gwangju. The media turned a blind eye to the catastrophe unfolding in the city. To make matters worse, there were no newspapers that day because it was a Sunday. Completely cut off from the rest of Korea, Gwangju was plunged into terror.”

In Human Acts, on one side there are the survivors and the bereaved who are crushed by memories; on the other are those who are employed by the state to make the victims anonymous and the survivors voiceless. Contrast Dong-ho’s scrupulousness in record keeping with the soldiers’ act of secretly cremating piles of bodies in the outskirts of Gwangju.

Han Kang uses several narrative voices, creating contrasts of tenderness and brutality in human acts. Her even-keeled writing has the sledgehammer effect of those lines of text which roll in complete silence at the very end of documentary films about Wars and monsters. Facts and figures. Dates of death. Silenced voices.