Human Acts

The writing is beautiful and the translation assured. It follows several people in the aftermath of the Gwangju uprising and subsequent quelling by the army. The aftermath creeps across the years as dark tendrils that still lay hold of those involved.

Sounds like a compelling plot as Kang plays witness to the events of 1980. But these are all bookish quotes objectively examining this second translated work from Kang that makes The Vegetarian seem like a happy fairy tale.

But it had such a profound effect on me. I remember visiting South Korea with my family in the late 80's on vacation. I'm Canadian born and raised with parents that embrace and love their lives here in Canada - perhaps at the expense of a deliberate forgetting, if not tight-lipped stoicism of their pasts in Korea. I remember standing in a train station in Gwangju and seeing plastered on columns everywhere photos of the aftermath. These weren't the photojournalism shots we see of sweeping vistas of destruction taken from a remove, anonymous bodies strewn on a dusty roadway. They were almost pornographic. Close up shots of just what remained of a face, now looking remarkably like a halloween mask, the skull completely staved in from repeated bludgeoning. Gore and viscera displayed in a public transit station, multiple strangers in death for all to examine. Closely. Maybe that's what was in the chapbooks referenced in the book. I see them in my head now.

I'm a tourist. I've spent maybe a year total in South Korea. I have only the most rudimentary understanding of the language. I live a privileged, suburban, middle-class existence so take all my hand-wringing as me-too relevance seeking.

I've taught Dong-ho and kids his age in South Korea in small towns. I've been in the concrete sheds that pass for gymnasiums and walked the dirt packed floors of regional office buildings. I've passed by open fields where communities still burn all their garbage. I've witnessed the intense physicality of Koreans so at odds with the expansive space of Canada and personal boundaries.

And though I've never seen it I can imagine them all dead too. I can imagine 15 year old boys tending to hundreds of dead bodies with a matter of fact resolve. I can imagine teachers tortured, struck and humiliated. I can see them just as easily being the ones torturing, hitting and humiliating. In a country where every male has mandatory military service I see only a thin line between tortured and torturer.

And it just wrecks me. That's what a good writer is supposed to evoke but I can't call what this brings up as enjoyable. Kang dredges up so much of what is ugly and distorted and lays it out in a joyless manner and dares you to look away. I see little in the way of hope, and maybe that's more honest. If you liked The Vegetarian you're going to love Human Acts. It just leaves me cold.