Human Acts by Han Kang
Past single-storey houses and larger tenement buildings, a piano academy and a shop selling engraved seals, I finally arrived at the end of the street. The three-storey concrete building standing on the site of the former quarry was something of an eyesore. Our old hanok had been pulled down, and in its place was a two-storey prefab – a shop, selling fixtures and fittings.
What had I been expecting? I hung around in front of that shop for a long time, as though I’d arranged to meet someone there.
Yesterday, the day after that visit to the site of the old house, I made an early start. I went first to the 5.18 Research Institute at Jeonnam University, and the related Cultural Foundation. The main entrance to the military police head-quarters, where the central intelligence agency had been stationed since the 1970s and where torture had been carried out, was locked, making it impossible to go inside.
In the afternoon I went to D middle school. At first I’d thought of looking through the yearbooks for the boy’s photo, but then I remembered that, of course, he’d never made it to graduation. I called up the retired art teacher, who’d spent his entire working life at that school and was an old friend of my father’s, and he arranged permission for me to look through the school’s records, where they kept a photograph of every former student. There I saw his face for the first time. There was something meek and gentle about those single-lidded half-moon eyes. The traces of infancy still lingered in the soft line of his jaw. It was a face so utterly ordinary you could easily have mistaken it for that of another, a face whose characteristics would be forgotten the moment you turned away from it.
When I left the staffroom and crossed the exercise yard, streaks of white were just beginning to appear in the leaden sky. By the time I reached the school gates the snow was coming down in earnest. I brushed away the flakes clinging to my eyelashes, hailed a taxi and, when one pulled over, asked him to take me back to Jeonnam University. I seemed to recall having seen a similar face in the exhibition hall at the 5.18 Institute.
The exhibition featured several small wall-mounted screens, each one showing a different video on a loop. Since I couldn’t remember in what context I’d seen the face, I had to go round and watch each video from the beginning. It was when they were showing one of the earliest marches, when the bodies of the youths who had been gunned down at the station were being pushed in a handcart, that I spotted the figure of what was surely another middle-schooler. The boy was standing at some distance from the head of the column, staring at the corpses with the stunned look of someone who had just been struck in the face. This had all happened in late spring, yet he was hugging himself as if for warmth. The scene skipped on in a matter of seconds, so I stood and waited for the film to return to the beginning. I watched the whole thing two, three, four times. The boy’s face was every bit as generic, as mistakable as the one from the school records. I just couldn’t be sure. Perhaps, back then, boys with short hair in school uniform all looked much the same? Perhaps they all had such gentle single-lidded eyes. Such skinny gangling limbs, poised for the growth spurt into manhood.
My initial intention was to read each and every document I could get my hands on. From early December onwards I abandoned all other work, even avoided seeing friends if I possibly could, just obsessively ploughed through reams of documents. After two months of this, by the time January was drawing to a close, I felt unable to continue.
It was because of the dreams.
In one dream I was being chased by a gang of soldiers. My breathing grew ragged as they gained on me. One of them shoved me in the back and knocked me onto my front. As soon as I rolled over and looked up at my attacker, he thrust his bayonet into my chest, smack bang into my solar plexus. At two o’clock in the morning I jerked awake, sat bolt upright and placed my hand on my breastbone. I spent the next five minutes struggling to breathe. When I passed my hand over my face my palm came away glistening; I hadn’t even been aware that I was crying.
A few days later someone came to see me. ‘In the thirty-three years between 1980 and now,’ this person said, ‘dozens of 5.18 arrestees have been held in secret underground rooms. Tomorrow, at three o’clock in the afternoon, and without any of this having been made public, they are all due to be executed.’ In the dream it was eight o’clock in the evening – only nineteen hours remaining until the the planned execution. How could I stop it from happening? The person who had told me all this had disappeared somewhere, and I was standing in the middle of the street clutching my mobile phone, totally at a loss. Should I call someone official, some kind of authority, and let them know what was about to take place? Even once I’d informed them, would they be able to stop it from going ahead? Why had this knowledge come to me of all people, someone who had no power whatsoever? Where should I go, how can I … as these words were smouldering inside my mouth, my eyes snapped open. Another dream. Just a dream. As I eased my clenched fists open I was muttering to myself in the darkness, only a dream, only a dream.
Another dream: someone makes me a present of a handheld radio. This is a time machine, they tell me, explaining that you are supposed to enter a given year, month and day in the digital panel. I key in ‘5.18.1980’. After all, if I wanted to describe it in a book then what better way than to actually experience it for myself? But the next moment I find myself standing alone at the intersection by Gwanghwamun station. The vast streets are deserted. Of course, because it’s only the time that changes. And I’m in Seoul, not Gwangju. I’d set the date to May so it ought to be spring, yet the streets were as cold and desolate as certain days in November. Frighteningly still.
A wedding I was obliged to attend took me out of the house for the first time in a long while. January 2013, and the streets of Seoul were just as they had been in my dream of a few days before. The wedding hall was festooned with glittering chandeliers. There was something shockingly incongruous about the people there, their flamboyant clothes, the way they were laughing as though nothing was wrong. How was such a scene possible, when so many people had died? I bumped into a critic, who jokingly took me to task for not having sent him my story collection. I couldn’t make sense of it. Not with so many dead. Unable to come up with a good enough excuse not to join the others for lunch after the ceremony, I simply chose my moment and slipped away.
The sky was so clear, the recent snow seemed scarcely believable. Oblique shafts of afternoon sunlight slant in through the windows of the gymnasium.
I stand up, chilled by the concrete seating, descend the stairs, open the door and step outside. I stare at the huge scaffolding filling my field of vision, at the corner of white wall it leaves exposed. I’m waiting. No one is going to come, but still I wait. No one even knows I’m here, but I’m waiting all the same.
I remember the winter when I was twenty, when I went alone to the hilltop cemetery in Mangwol-dong for the first time. I walked among the graves, looking for him. At the time, I didn’t know his family name. The only information I had was that he was called Dong-ho, a name that had easily lodged itself in my memory as it was similar to that of my uncle. And also that he had died at fifteen.
I missed the last bus going back to the city centre, so I had to walk along the darkening road with the wind at my back. After I’d been walking for some time I realised that I’d unconsciously placed my right hand on the left-hand side of my chest. As though my heart had fissured open. As though this were something I could carry around with me in perfectly safety, as long as I held it tight.
There were soldiers who were especially cruel.
When I first started poring over the documents, what had proved most incomprehensible was that this bloodshed had been committed again and again, and with no attempt to bring the perpetrators before the authorities. Acts of violence committed in broad daylight, without hesitation and without regret. Commanding officers who would have encouraged, no, even demanded such displays of brutality.
In autumn 1979, when the democratic uprising in the southern cities of Bus
I read an interview with someone who had been tortured; they described the after-effects as ‘similar to those experienced by victims of radioactive poisoning.’ Radioactive matter lingers for decades in muscle and bone, causing chromosomes to mutate. Cells turn cancerous, life attacks itself. Even if the victim dies, even if their body is cremated, leaving nothing but the charred remains of bone, that substance cannot be obliterated.
In January 2009, when an illegal raid by riot police on activists and tenants protesting their forced eviction from central Seoul left six dead, I remember being glued to the television, watching the towers burning in the middle of the night and surprising myself with the words that sprang from my mouth: But that’s Gwangju. In other words, ‘Gwangju’ had become another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down and brutalised, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair. The radioactive spread is ongoing. Gwangju had been reborn only to be butchered again in an endless cycle. It was razed to the ground, and raised up anew in a bloodied rebirth.
And there is still that young woman’s face.
That young woman whose photograph had made such a terrible impression on my eleven-year-old eyes, dead with a bayonet wound from her cheek to her throat, one eye cracked open and the other closed.
When those wretched corpses were lying in the waiting room of the bus terminal, sprawled in front of the train station; when the soldiers fell upon passers-by, beat them, stripped them to their underwear and forced them into a truck; when even the youths who’d stayed quietly at home were ferreted out and arrested; when the roads into the city were blockaded, and the phone lines were cut; when live shells were fired at crowds protesting with no other weapon than their naked bodies; when the main road became littered with a hundred corpses in the space of twenty minutes; when the rumour that the whole city would be massacred struck terror into the populace; when ordinary civilians gathered in twos and threes to defend the bridge and the local primary school, armed with the antiquated rifles they’d found at the army reserves’ training camp; when civil self-government was instated at the Provincial Office, after the authority of the central government had leaked away like an ebb tide.
While all this was going on, I was busy riding the bus in Suyuri. When I returned home and opened the front gate, I bent down to pick up the evening edition of D newspaper. Crossing the long, narrow yard, I read the lead article. GWANGJU IN STATE OF ANARCHY FOR FIFTH DAY. Blackened buildings. Trucks filled with men wearing white bandannas. The atmosphere inside the house was both subdued and unsettled. They’re not working, the phones still aren’t working. Mum kept on trying to put a call through to her family, who lived near Daein market.
As it turned out, none of my relatives died; none were injured or even arrested. But all through that autumn in 1980, my thoughts returned to that tiny room at one end of the kitchen, where I used to lie on my stomach to do my homework, that room with the cold paper floor – had the boy used to spread out his homework on its cold paper floor, then lie stomach-down just as I had? The middle-school kid I’d heard the grown-ups whispering about. How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?
After loitering near the site of the home fixtures store now occupying the site of my family’s old house, I eventually stepped inside. The proprietor, a woman in her fifties wearing a lilac jumper, looked up from her newspaper.
‘Can I help you, love?’
Having left this city when I was still young, for me its dialect was inextricably associated with my family; now that I was back, it stirred up an oddly discomfiting pathos to find perfect strangers reminding me of family members.
‘There used to be a hanok on this spot …when did this building go up?’ Just as I’d been thrown by the woman’s dialect, so she seemed unsettled by mine, and the air of friendly camaraderie dissipated.
‘You were hoping to visit the previous inhabitants?’ she responded, having switched to scrupulously formal Seoul speech. I said yes; any other answer would have been too complicated. ‘That house was demolished the year before last.’ The woman’s voice was completely flat. ‘There was an old woman living there alone; after she died her son decided there was no way he could rent out such an old house, so he had it pulled down. This current building is only temporary. We signed a lease for two years, and after that we’ll leave.’
I asked if she’d met the old woman’s son in person.
‘When we signed the contract, yes. Apparently he’s a lecturer at one of the big cram schools. All the same, the pay can’t be that good if he could only afford to put up a temporary building like this, could it?’
After I left the shop, I walked along the main road for some time before stopping to hail a taxi. The driver took me to this study institute which the woman had mentioned, and I flicked through the brochure until I found the staff photos. It wasn’t difficult to identify the boy’s older brother: a middle-aged science lecturer with thick-lensed glasses. He was wearing a brown tie with a white shirt, and his hair was streaked with grey.
*
‘I can maybe spare thirty minutes,’ he said, when we spoke on the phone later that day, ‘if you come to my classroom tomorrow at five thirty, but that’s all. I hope you understand. Sometimes the students rush their dinner so they can turn up early; in that case, even thirty minutes might not be possible.’
That night, I walk down into the subway in front of the scaffolded Provincial Office and emerge on the other side of the street. Pounding music spills out into the night-time streets, neon signs blaring as I walk against the flow of the crowd all the way to the after-school study institute, a big one specifically for cramming for the university entrance exams. I head to the information desk on the ground floor. My gaze skims over the brochures displayed there, the colour leaflets advertising public lectures, the timetable for private courses.
I’m sorry. I thought I’d be able to finish the previous class early; in fact it went on longer than usual.
Please have a seat. Can I get you something to drink?
Yes, I knew the previous owner was one of Dong-ho’s teachers.
I hadn’t realised you would know our story.
To be honest, I was in two minds about the whole thing. At first I was worried that I didn’t have anything to say, that it would be awkward to meet like this. But then I thought, what would my mother have done if she were still alive?
Well, I’ll tell you: she would have agreed to meet you without a second’s thought. She would have sat you down and made you listen to Dong-ho’s story all the way through to the end. You wouldn’t have been able to stop her if you’d tried. She lived thirty years with those words inside her. But I’m not like her, I can’t dredge the past up again the way she would have.
Permission? Yes, you have my permission, but only if you do it properly. Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.
In the small guest room near the
Whenever we had a toe war, I always won.
He was really ticklish, you see.
All I had to do was poke his foot with my big toe and he’d start squirming.
At first I couldn’t tell whether he was grimacing like that because he was ticklish, or because it really hurt …
But then he would turn bright red and laugh.
Just as there were some soldiers who were especially cruel, so there were others who were especially non-aggressive.
There were paratroopers who carried the wounded on their backs all the way to the hospital and set them down on the steps before hastening back to their posts. There were soldiers who, when the order was given to fire on the crowd, pointed the barrels of their guns up into the air so they wouldn’t hit anyone. When the soldiers formed a wall in front of the corpses lined up outside the Provincial Office, blocking them from the view of the foreign news cameras, and gave a rousing chorus of an army song, there was one of their number who kept his mouth conspicuously shut.