Human Acts

by Han Kang

TW: Death, Violence, Police brutality, Suicide 

Human Acts begins at the end of the 1980’s Gwangju Uprising. This horrific event was marked by the South Korean government instructing their military forces to massacre pro-democracy student demonstrators. After the shootings, the bodies were brought from the hospital into a gym, laid out in coffins for families to identify. The first section begins with Dong-ho, a civilian boy looking for his best friend, among the bodies in the school gym. 5 more sections follow, each from a different view, that winds deeper into the massacre, repression, and the after effects on the people through the next 30 years. 

Human Acts was first serialized by Han Kang in a Korean literary blog Window (창문) from 2013 to 2014. These serialized publications were later collectively published, becoming Kang’s sixth full length novel published. In 2017, the book was translated into English by Deborah Smith.

Human Acts is the first book I read of Kang’s after seeing nothing but incredible reviews. I read this knowing little, if anything, surrounding the history of the Gwangju Uprising. In an interview with The White Review, an arts and literature magazine, Kang says, “The broad spectrum of humanity, which runs from the sublime to the brutal, has for me been like a difficult homework problem ever since I was a child…How could human beings do such things to one another? On the heels of this first question, another swiftly followed: what can we do in the face of such violence?”

The book begins at the end. Through different characters, their points of view, and various changes in time, Human Acts captures the truth in a ruthless, unflinching way. And yet the book also weaves a line of hope and grace through it. In it, we witness a mother’s undying love for her son, the strength of hope in bleak and unforgiving lives, and the connections made between those who may not have ever met before. It gives these truths to its characters and us, the readers. Kang says “In that way, I was presented with two unsolvable riddles—that of human violence and that of human dignity, stamped on my heart like a seal. HUMAN ACTS forms a record of my fumbling towards those two riddles.”

Dong-ho, a fifteen year old boy at the center of the story, sits under a ginkgo tree. Dong-ho is nearsighted and unable to look away from what’s in front of him. He wishes he couldn’t see the faces of those dead but also won’t let himself close his eyes to turn away from it as well. 

Kang’s writing unflichingly mirrors this unwillingness to look away from the horror. The writing neither backs away from the harsh realities nor waters down the narrative to be more palatable to the reader.

 In an article published in The New Yorker, Kang is interviewed about her new book, Greek Lessons (which I can’t wait to read). In the article she talks about language. She says, “I started my writing career as a poet, and have since harbored mixed emotions about language, an impossible tool. Language is like an arrow that always misses its target by a narrow margin, and is also something that delivers emotions and sensations that are capable of inflicting pain.” 

I’m intrigued about her statement of language being “an impossible tool.” A tool helps carry out a particular function and in this case, it is used to convey physical and mental atrocities. The words act as an arrow in the dark, delivering their message with piercing pain.

Kang employs so many tools of language to convey what happened in the massacre and the after effects. Some sections are narrated in the second person, placing the reader directly into the story. Other chapters switch points of view, tense, and tone. All lead the reader through different emotions and the journeys’ of the characters. The gruesome deaths and subsequent coverups, the devastated families, and government oppression that lasts for years. 

Maybe she says “impossible” because even with everything Kang uses to impart the devastation, there is something left that words can’t capture. Still, while language may be an impossible tool, missing “its target by a narrow margin,” it never fails to impart something that stays with the reader long after they’ve put down the book. The arrows leave their wounds but moments of solidarity and kindness deliver a different kind of pain to the reader and shine a light towards us humans.

Human Acts is uncompromising in its portrayal of the “broad spectrum of humanity.” Intensely raw and visceral.  Every time I pick up a book by Kang, I’m left satisfied. Every time I finish a  book by Kang, I’m left thinking.  

I’ll leave us with this quote:

“Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”