In recent years, works based on the subject of the 'Gwangju Uprising’ have aroused much attention and discussions among audiences outside of Korea. The famous Uprising Trilogyfilms series for instance: The Attorney(2013), A Taxi Driver(2017) and 1987: When the Day Comes(2018), were all set against the background of the Gwangju Uprising, describing different experiences and stories from the various angles of the characters who participated in this movement.
Korea’s Gwangju Uprising happened from May 18 to 27 in 1980 (it was alternatively called the “May 18 Democratic Uprising”), when the students in Gwangju gathered for a peaceful protest against the military dictatorship. The gathering led to a wave of protest movements, and the military power led by Chun Doo-hwan resorted to violence to suppress the movement. During the ten days starting from May 18, thousands of citizens perished under the authority’s bloody suppression, and many more were caught and tortured and subjected to political trials.
In recent years, more and more literary works and films about this event have appeared in Korea, with the aim of exploring the truth of this historical incident, and analyzing the social fabric and meanings behind it. Among them, Korean writer Han Kang’s novel Human Actsis one of the most outstanding examples.
Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 with her book The Vegetarian. Her recent work Human Acts(published in 2014, Chinese version published in 2017) was based on the subject of the Gwangju Uprising. The author was born in Gwangju, and even though she moved with her family to Seoul a few months before the uprising, she has certain unforgettable memories from her childhood regarding this event, through the experiences of the adults surrounding her at that time.
What I found most interesting about the book is its structure. The book is divided into six chapters, describing the events from the perspectives of six different characters: 15-year-old Dong Ho, his classmate, a female editor who survived the chaos, a male university student who was tortured, and a female worker who lost her son. Every chapter is written as a short story (with the writer’s own account added at the end of the book). The stories are interwoven in different dimensions to create an overall picture of the Gwangju Uprising Movement.
Human Acts does not present a grand historical angle, events or heroes to tell its stories. But rather from a macro point of view, the stories of these ordinary people unfold deeper and deeper into the delicate details in their lives. The work liberates itself from any ideology or position, and stays true to the desires and feelings of the real people in the society of those days. Different societies bear different wounds and scars from their own history, in which indescribable memories and secrets are buried. Some of them might even have become a public taboo. Regarding this, Human Acts provides us with an important reference. For those writers who are willing to scrutinize and reflect upon sensitive and controversial subjects in history, it has undoubtedly opened up a window, not only providing insights into the Gwangju Uprising, but also helping us to reflect upon our own dark corners in the memories of history.
