Review of Human Acts by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith

*Human Acts* by Han Kang (2017). Published by Hogarth.

I have been wanting to read Human Acts ever since it was originally released in English years ago, but have simply never gotten around to reading the book on my own.

This is one of many examples of things I’ve really wanted to do but somehow managed to procrastinate on for years before actually getting around to do it.

What ended up inspiring me to read it this time though was the fact I’ve been doing an independent study with my graduate program on colonial Korean women’s literature, which made me think about Human Acts again.

Obviously Han Kang isn’t a colonial period figure, and is very much still alive today, but I’ve been revisiting Korean women being published as of late because of the big boom in how this is trendy.

Before, in the colonial period, it was scandalous to be a woman writer and your male contemporaries would constantly nag on you and your character, dubbing you loose and too autobiographical, and we’ve now come to the point where it’s fine to be a woman writer (kind of).

Anyways, I’m rambling. Let’s get into the review!

Fragments of perspectives during and after the Gwangju Uprising and Massacre.

Before I start off this review, I think it’s important to mention that you should either start or finish this book looking up what exactly the Gwangju Uprising and Massacre is.

As someone who dabbles in Korean history academically, it’s important to know that in the period after the Korean War, South Korea wasn’t a democracy.

It was a series of dictatorships, and there were some pretty brutal crackdowns. The Gwangju Massacre is one of them.

Human Acts is a brief book (it only has a little over two hundred pages, and I felt like I flew right through them), but something to note as you continue through it that each chapter represents a different perspective, and they’re not in the same moment of time.

The story begins with a youth named Dong-ho, who witnessed the death of his friend during the Gwangju protests. He continues to go out and work in the hospital where the bodies are. The friend’s sister, too, doesn’t come home, meaning she probably was killed too.

But when Dong-ho stays out after curfew one night, it leads to a shocking death for him, one that doesn’t feel human—although these are human acts. After Dong-ho’s chapter, where we don’t get to know his fate immediately, we switch to the perspective of his friend’s ghost.

Tethered to where his body is stacked on a pile of other bodies, he contemplates what happened and, at the end of his chapter, how his sister and Dong-ho are among the dead too. He is the first to tell us what happened, but this is something that is danced around until the end of the book.

The other chapters skip in time. There’s a reporter, people who watch as the same people who mowed down youths and elderly singing their anthem, are put into prison for what they’ve done to others.

But most of all, this is a novel that ruminates in the ripple effect that was created with the Gwangju Massacre. Even decades later, characters are still traumatized and remembering what happened on the dark nights all of those years ago, and we even finish with Dong-ho’s mother.

Still she remembers her son after all of those years, joining the other mothers who lost their kids in protesting.

She laments about how she let him stay behind with the curfew, which is why he died, and how his siblings grew up to move to Seoul and do things that Dong-ho never got to do.

She also mentions the friend and his sister, how the girl never came home and they assumed her to be lost among the many other youths that had their corpses burned in stacks.

Overall Thoughts

This is an ugly book in the way that it shows how awful the circumstances in Gwangju were at the time. There’s such a bitter and sad tone to all of the events going on, as they were preventable.

People were protesting for rights and didn’t deserve to be killed by their government’s soldiers in the way they were.

In the scene where Dong-ho is working at the hospital where all of the bodies are, checking to see if his friend was brought in, a lot of the corpses were beaten and had to be cleaned because of how poorly they were treated by the soldiers.

Han Kang’s writing in this one feels surgeon like, as it’s precise and doesn’t beat around the bush much. Definitely a must read if you’re interested in Korean history.

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