By Katie Magee
Human Acts by Han Kang absolutely broke me and put the pieces right back together, just like one of her previous books I read, The Vegetarian, had. Human Acts is about the Gwangju Uprising which took place in South Korea in 1980. This Uprising lasted for a little over a week, resulting in nearly 600 deaths.
This book is the story of a boy, Dong-ho, who loses his life in the Uprising. Dong-ho is a middle-schooler who works in the Provincial Office during the uprising. His job is to take care of the corpses that are brought there, help families and friends identify their missing loved ones, and try to keep a log of the corpses that are brought in.
Each chapter of this story has a different narrator, all of whom have in common some type of connection to Dong-Ho. Each narrator is also directly or indirectly involved with the Uprising and many of them pass away during it just like Dong-Ho.
Han Kang was born in Gwangju and spent a good bit of her childhood there. She grew up in the aftermath of the Uprising, still witnessing its consequences and how it affected people in that area. Han Kang does a wonderful job of telling this tragic story in a beautiful way, refusing to water down anything and loading it with raw emotion.
“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?” –Han Kang, Human Acts
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