Human Acts by Han Kang
‘It’s been a long time,’ she rasped.
‘I was wondering how you’ve been getting on.’
You didn’t offer to come and visit her in the hospital, so there was no need for her to protest about that. It was pure coincidence that the parcel from Yoon arrived at your office the very next day, yet now these two events seem inextricably entangled, taut as a barbed wire knot. The two of them together are almost more than you can bear.
Making the recording, and seeing Seong-hee.
The recording you need to make before seeing Seong-hee.
Enduring things is what you do best. Gritting your teeth and bearing them.
You still had a year of middle school left when you dropped out to get a job. Aside from the two years you spent in prison, you’ve never been out of work. You have been unfailingly diligent and unfailingly taciturn. Work is a guarantee of solitude. Living a solitary life, you are able to let the regular rhythm of long hours of work followed by brief rest carry you through the days, with no time to fear the outer dark beyond the circle of light.
YOU REMEMBER
The work you did as a teenager, though, was different.
Those were fifteen-hour days with only two days off per month. ‘Weekends’ were non-existent. The wages were half of what the men got paid for the same work, and there was no overtime pay. You took pills to keep you awake, but exhaustion still battered you like a wave. The swelling of your calves and feet as morning wore into afternoon. The guards who insisted on body-searching the female workers every night before they went home. Those hands, which used to linger when they touched your bra. The shame. Hacking coughs. Nosebleeds. Headaches. Clumps of what looked like black threads in the phlegm you hacked up.
We are noble.
That was one of Seong-hee’s favourite sayings. Every Sunday off work she spent attending lectures on labour law at the offices of the Cheonggye Clothing Labour Union, and everything she heard there went into the notes she then used for your meetings. You had no particular apprehensions when you started attending those meetings, given that all Seong-hee said about them was that they were for studying hanja. And technically this was true; you and the other women really did study hanja each time you met. We have to know 1,800 characters if we want to read a newspaper properly. The first task of the evening involved you each writing thirty characters into your notebooks, memorising them as you did so. Then Seong-hee would begin her labour lecture. And that means … we are noble. Seong-hee wasn’t a natural orator, and whenever she lost her train of thought or couldn’t quite recall the word she’d wanted she would use that phrase as a kind of stop-gap. According to the constitution, we are noble. As noble as anyone else. And just like anyone else, we have rights. According to labour law. Her gentle, resonant voice almost put you in mind of a primary school teacher. Jeon Tae-il died for the sake of this law.
The labour union voted against the company-dominated union by a large majority. On the day the strike-breakers and policemen came to arrest its leading members, the hundreds of factory girls who were on their way from their dormitories to the second shift of the day formed a human wall. The oldest were twenty-one or twenty-two; most were still in their teens. There were no proper chants or slogans. Don’t arrest us. You mustn’t arrest us. Strike-breakers charged towards the shouting girls, wielding square wooden clubs. There must have been around a hundred policemen, heavily armed with helmets and shields. Lightweight combat vehicles whose every window was covered with wire mesh. The thought flashed through your mind: what do they need all that for? We can’t fight, we don’t have any weapons.
‘Take off your clothes,’ Seong-hee bellowed. ‘All of us together, let’s all take off our clothes.’ It was impossible to say who was first to respond to this rallying cry, but within moments hundreds of young women were waving their blouses and skirts in the air, shouting ‘Don’t arrest us!’ Everyone held the naked bodies of virginal girls to be something precious, almost sacred, and so the factory girls believed that the men would never violate their privacy by laying hands on them now, young girls standing there in their bras and pants. But the men dragged them down to the dirt floor. Gravel scraped bare flesh, drawing blood. Hair became tangled, underwear torn. You mustn’t, you mustn’t arrest us. Between these ear-splitting cries, the sound of square cudgels slamming into unprotected bodies, of men bundling girls into riot vans.
You were eighteen at the time. Dodging a pair of grasping hands, you slipped and fell onto the gravel, grazing your knees. A plain-clothes policeman stopped in his wild dash forward just long enough to stamp on your stomach and kick you in the side. Lying with your face in the dirt, the girls’ voices seemed to swing between yells and whispers as you drifted in and out of consciousness. You had to be carried to the emergency room of the nearest hospital and treated for an intestinal rupture. You lay there in the hospital bed, listening to the reports come in. After you were discharged you could have resumed the fight, stood shoulder to shoulder with your sisters. Instead, you went back down south to your parents’ home near Gwangju. Once your body had had enough time to heal, you went back up to Incheon and got a job at another textiles factory, but you were laid off within a week. Your name had been put on the blacklist. Your two years’ experience working in a textiles factory was now worth nothing, and one of your relatives had to pull some strings to get you a job as a machinist at a Gwangju dressmaker’s. The pay was even worse than when you’d been a factory girl, but every time you thought of quitting you recalled Seong-hee’s voice: And that means … we are noble. You wrote to her, calling her onni, older sister. I’m getting on fine, onni. But it looks like it’ll be a while before I can learn how to be a proper machinist. It’s not so much that it’s a tricky technique to learn, just that I’m not being taught very well. All the same, I have to have patience, right?
For words like ‘technique’ and ‘patience’, you made the effort to write the hanja rather than just relying on the phonetic hangeul alphabet. You took time over the individual strokes of these characters which you’d learned at the meetings at Seong-hee’s house. The replies, when they did come, were invariably brief: Yes, that’s right. I’m sure you’ll do well in whatever job. This lasted for around a year or two, and then the letters gradually fizzled out.
It took you three years to finally become a machinist. That autumn, when you were twenty-one, a factory girl even younger than you died at a sit-in at the opposition party’s headquarters. The government’s official report stated that she had cut her own wrists with the shards from a bottle of Sprite and jumped from the third floor. You didn’t believe a word of it. Like piecing together a puzzle, you had to peer closely at the photographs that were carried in the government-controlled papers, to read between the lines of the editorials, which condemned the uprising in incensed, strident tones.
You never forgot the face of the plain-clothes policeman who had stamped on you. You never forgot that the government actively trained and supported the strike-breakers, that at the peak of this pyramid of violence stood President Park Chung-hee himself, an army general who had seized power through a military coup. You understood the meaning of emergency measure no. 9, which severely penalised not only calls to repeal the Yushin constitution but practically any criticism of the government, and of the slogan shouted by the scrum of students at the main entrance to the university. You pieced together the newspapers’ oblique strands of misinformation in order to make sense of the subsequent incidents that occurred in Busan and Masan. You were convinced that those smashed phone booths and burnt-out police boxes, the angry mobs hurling stones, formed a pattern. Blanked-out sentences that you had to fill with your imagination.
When President Park was assassinated that October, you asked yourself: now the peak has been lopped off, will the whole pyramid of violence collapse? Will it no longer be possible to arrest screaming, naked factory girls? Will it no longer be permissible to stamp on them and burst their intestines? Through the newspapers, you witnesse
And you saw that bus.
It was a balmy spring day, and the owner of the dressmaker’s had taken his son, a university student, to stay with relatives in Yeongam. Finding yourself with an unexpected free day on your hands, you were strolling the streets when you spotted it, an ordinary bus on its way into the city centre. END MARTIAL LAW. GUARANTEE LABOUR RIGHTS. Yellow Magic Marker screamed out from the white banners which hung out of the bus’s windows. The bus was packed with dozens of girls from the textile factories out in the provincial towns, in their uniforms. Their pale faces put you in mind of mushrooms, which had never seen the sun, and they had their arms thrust out of the windows, banging sticks against the body of the bus as they sang. Their voices carried clearly all the way to where you had stopped in your tracks, and you remember them now as seeming to issue from the throat of some kind of bird.
We are fighters for justice, we are, we are
We live together and die together, we do, we do
We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees
We are fighters for justice
Every syllable so distinct in your memory. Entranced by that song, you stumbled blindly in the direction the bus had taken. A great throng of people had taken to the streets and were heading in the direction of the main square, in front of the Provincial Office. The students, who had been massing in front of their university’s main gate since early spring, were nowhere to be seen. Those filling the streets were the elderly; children of primary school age; factory workers in their uniforms; young office workers, the men wearing ties, the women in skirt suits and high heels; middle-aged men wearing sweaters emblazoned with the logo of the ‘new village’ movement, brandishing long umbrellas as though intending to use them as weapons. At the very front of this snaking column of people, the corpses of two youths who had been gunned down at the station were being pushed, in a handcart, towards the square.
NOW
You climb the narrow stairs and emerge from the underground station. The refreshingly chill blasts of the train’s air conditioning had briefly dried the sweat on your skin, but now the humid air re-congeals on your exposed flesh. It is a sweltering, tropical night. Though it’s now close to midnight, the wind is still heavy with heat.
You stop in front of the information board by the hospital’s entrance. Sliding your hands beneath the straps of your backpack, you quickly scan the timetable for the shuttle bus, see that it only runs during the day. Inhaling a lungful of lukewarm air, you turn away and begin to walk up the hill. Every now and then you wriggle a hand free and wipe away the sticky sweat which has trickled down from your neck.
Someone has spray-painted some crude graffiti on a shop’s lowered shutter. Some guys are lounging under a parasol in front of a twenty-four-hour convenience store, knocking back cans of beer. You look up at the main building of the university hospital, which stands at the very top of the hill. You hear the girls’ song carrying down across the years, from that bus in a past made hazy by time, all the way through to this night. We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees. Let’s join together for a minute’s silence in tribute to those who have already paid the price, let’s follow in their footsteps and fight to the end, because … because we are noble.
You pass through the main gate into the hospital complex, heading along the path which stretches all the way up to the main building, first branching off to the annex and funeral hall. Its soft contours are lined by street lights on both sides. Wreaths are lined up at the entrance to the funeral hall. Near them, young men are silently applying themselves to their cigarettes, yellow armbands over their white shirts.
It’s late, but you are wide awake. The backpack is cutting into your shoulders and your back is drenched with sweat, but you don’t care. You keep on walking, remembered dreams lancing through your mind.
You plummet from the roof of a high-rise building, clad in a suit of armour linked with hundreds of iron scales. Even though your brains are dashed out against the ground, you don’t die. You pick yourself up, climb all the way back up the emergency stairs, walk straight over to the edge of the roof and tip yourself off. Still you don’t die, and it’s back up the stairs to fall one more time. One layer of the dream unpeels, and you’re sufficiently aware of the situation to wonder: What good is a suit of armour if I’m falling from such a great height? You haven’t woken yourself up, though, merely passed through into another layer. You feel the weight of an enormous glacier bearing down on your body. You wish that you were able to flow beneath it, to become fluid, whether sea water, oil, or lava, and shuck off these rigid, impermeable outlines, which encase you like a coffin. Only that way might you find some form of release. Now this layer, too, unseams itself and collapses softly around you, exposing the dream’s ultimate core. You are standing in the street lamp’s cone of ashen light, looking out into the gathering dark.
The dream grows less cruel as you move closer to wakefulness. Sleep grows thin, becomes brittle as writing paper, and eventually crumbles away. In the quiet corners of your conscious mind, memories are waiting. What they call forth cannot strictly be called nightmares.
YOU REMEMBER
And you’ve succeeded, haven’t you? Succeeded in putting it all behind you, in pushing away anyone who, with their insistence on raking up the past, threatened to cause you even the slightest pain.
You remember gritting out through clenched teeth, ‘What right do you have to tell my story to other people?’ You remember Seong-hee’s calm voice asking whether it would really be so difficult for you to make your story public. Not even ten years have proved sufficient for you to forgive her for that, for how serene she’d looked as she neatly dissected all the ways in which you’d failed. If it had been me, I wouldn’t have hidden away. I wouldn’t have let the rest of my life slide by, too busy watching my own back.
You remember the meek voice of the man who had been your husband for eight months. You’re quite pretty, even with your small eyes. That was the first thing he ever said to you. If I were to draw your face, I’d only want a handful of simple lines. A nose, a mouth, and a pair of eyes, a rough sketch on white paper. You remember his eyes, large and moist as a calf’s. You remember the nervous twist of his lips, his bloodshot eyes as he glanced across at you. Don’t look at me like that, he would say. You’re scaring me.
NOW
In the lobby of the main building, where the majority of the wards are, all the lights are off. By contrast, light streams out from the entrance to the emergency department, down the side of the annex. In front of this entrance, one of the ambulances from the provincial hospital is parked, with its emergency lights flashing and its rear doors flung open, as though a critical case was rushed here mere seconds before.
The main doors are wide open; you step through, and begin to walk down the corridor. You hear low, urgent voices alternating with screams, the rough, mechanical inhalations of medical equipment, the squeal of trolleys being wheeled along linoleum floors. You take a seat on one of the backless chairs in reception.
‘What are you here for?’ asks the middle-aged woman behind the counter.
‘I’m visiting someone.’
This isn’t true. You haven’t arranged any meeting. Visiting hours are only in the mornings, and even then, you have no idea whether Seong-hee would even agree to see you.
A middle-aged man in full hiking gear walks slowly in. He is leaning heavily on the arm of another man, who carries what you
The doctor will be here any minute.
You remain perched on the edge of your seat, back rigid, listening to the uninjured man repeat those words like a mantra. The doctor will be here any minute.
YOU REMEMBER
You remember the girl who once told you that she wanted to be a doctor, all those years ago.
It was never going to happen; that much had been obvious to you. Jeong-mi was never going to become one of the smart, self-assured medical professionals who marched briskly in and out of hospital wards. She’d told you about her younger brother, Jeong-dae, about how she needed to keep working until she’d seen him through university. By the time he graduated she would already be in her mid-twenties, and even if she started cramming for the middle school exams straight away … but no, the factory would have chewed her up and spat her out long before then. She already suffered from frequent nosebleeds, and a cough she seemed unable to shake. With legs as skinny as young radishes she darted among the sewing machines, snatching a few minutes of sleep here and there by leaning against a pillar and slipping under with all the abruptness of the anaesthetised. How can you survive in such a din? she’d shouted. I can’t even hear myself think. Eyes wide with fear, stunned by the sewing machines’ almighty clamour, on her very first day in that job.