Human Acts

How is it, she wonders, that a face can so effectively conceal what lies behind it? How is not indelibly marked by such callousness, brutality, murderousness?

I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them: why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?

the recently unionized factory girls were some of the most vocal and visible agitators for change, the authorities were able to paint the uprising as a Communist plot sparked by North Korean spies, thus legitimizing their brutal crackdown. In the chapter entitled “The Prisoner, 1990,” I paid special attention to diction in the hope that this would highlight the subtle politics of a working-class torture survivor being pressured into revisiting traumatic memories for the sake of a university professor’s academic thesis. And there is also gender politics, with “The Factory Girl, 2002,” featuring a women-only splinter group from the main union, set up to address the fact that female workers were treated more unfairly even than the men.

a region that has a long history of political dissent, and of underrepresentation in the central government.

Her novel, then, is both a personal and political response to these recent developments, and a reminder of the human acts of which we are all capable, the brutal and the tender, the base and the sublime.

She is a writer who takes things deeply to heart, and was anxious that the translation maintain the moral ambivalence of the original, and avoid sensationalizing the sorrow and shame that her hometown was made to bear

The novel is equally unusual in delving into the complex background of the democratization movement, though Han Kang’s style is always to do this obliquely, through the experiences of her characters, rather than presenting a dry historical account.

In the Korean context, such issues can also be connected to animist beliefs and the idea of somatic integrity—that violence done to the body is a violation of the spirit/soul that animates it.

The thread of life is as tough as an ox tendon, so even after I lost you, it had to go on. I had to make myself eat, make myself work, forcing down each day like a mouthful of cold rice, even if it stuck in my throat.

Is it possible to bear witness to the fact that I ended up despising my own body, the very physical stuff of my self? That I willfully destroyed any warmth, any affection whose intensity was more than I could bear, and ran away? To somewhere colder, somewhere safer. Purely to stay alive