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The first time I ever read a Han Kang book, I was on the train from Connecticut to New York in 2021 to meet someone I’d never met before in a desperate attempt to make friends after moving back in with my parents in the post-grad-school-during-COVID-nightmare slump.
I found Human Acts in my local independent book store, and the cover of it captivated me. I’ve long said that a surefire way to get me to pick up and read a book is to make the cover pretty, and yellow. I will always just a paperback by its cover, and I will never stop. Something about the gingko leaves and the human rib cage grabbed my attention and I couldn’t stop looking at the book. It sat in my bedroom untouched for about two months, but I was headed into the city, and needed a book small enough to carry with me on the train, but long enough I wouldn’t finish it immediately: Human Acts was perfect.
Human Acts is the story of the Gwangju Uprising, known as May 18 in South Korea. It was a series of student-led demonstrations in May of 1980, in response to the coup d’état that led to the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. To be clear, this is information I learned after reading the book in a tizzy because the book was so good but I was missing so much of the context.
Following the implementation of the military dictatorship, martial law was imposed, opposition leaders were arrested, universities were closed and political activities and the press were suppressed. Students in Gwangju began resisting these measures, formed militias, and took control of large sections of the city before the military arrived and began violently responding to the protestors. The South Korean government claimed 165 people were killed, but subsequent scholarship puts that number between 600 and 2,300.
Human Acts takes one of those people, a young boy, Dong-ho, who joined the protests despite being a child and was shot and killed. The first few chapters are focused on this boy, and each subsequent chapter focuses on someone else who was in some way related to the uprising, but as you move forward in the book, you become temporally further from May 1980 through the eyes of the new narrators. Each chapter, there is more about the suppression and covering up of the massacre, with the final chapter being from Dong-ho’s mother’s perspective, and her desire for answers about her son.
This is a narrative style I had never encountered before, and it knocked my little socks off. I loved how real all of the narrators felt. I have read a lot of books, fiction and nonfiction, about war and it’s aftermath and all the gruesome details that come with that, but Human Acts really spoke to the humanity of trying to do what is right and to fight for what you believe in, despite horrifying past trauma.
I finished the whole book in one day, and I spent most of my time with a new friend in a museum thinking about the half of the book I’d read and how much I wanted to just go read more. I was not a good friend that day.
I also feel the need to provide incredible credit to the translator of the book, Deborah Smith. I, clearly, do not speak Korean, so was able to enjoy this book to the fullest possible extent because of Smith’s translation.
Following Human Acts, I decided I needed to read basically everything Han Kang had ever written. And so I started reading The Vegetarian, also translated by Deborah Smith.
The Vegetarian is much smaller in the subject matter it tackles than Human Acts, following a young woman named Yeong-hye, a part time graphic artist who decides to stop eating meat after a horrifically violent dream. The book is told in three parts: The Vegetarian, Mongolian Mark, and Flaming Trees. Each is narrated by a different person, the first by Yeong-hye’s husband, the second by Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, the third by Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye.
What I took away from this book the most is it’s message about women being unable to make their own decisions about their bodies and lifestyles.
Yeong-hye is constantly told that she has to eat meat, that her decision to become a vegetarian and eat less is reflecting poorly on the family, on her husband, and on their community. It is not once discussed why she stopped eating meat, and when she provides her reasoning, no one in her life listens to her. She is at one point force fed by doctors.
Admittedly, I was reading this in the last few months of the Trump presidency, and perhaps bodily autonomy was forefront on my mind, but I couldn’t help but feel that Han Kang had found a way to have a discussion about women’s liberation and decisions and bodily autonomy without making it about abortion: something I usually struggled to do in conversation.
Han Kang’s most recent book, Greek Lessons, I have not been able to read yet, but I plan on doing so as soon as possible.
I have often found that Nobel Literature Prize winning novels do not do it for me. I find the language to up it’s own butt, for lack of a better term, and I find the authors more pre-occupied with making the book sound like a Nobel Prize winning novel, rather than communicating the point of the story. I have extremely little patience for writing that is trying to be pretty and poignant that makes the story anything but.
I am so thrilled Han Kang won in 2024, for a myriad of reasons, beginning and ending with the fact that she is an incredible author and I love her books. One of those reasons in the middle is that she beat out Haruki Murakami for it.