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Chapter 4: The Prisoner, 1990
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Human Acts, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Human Connection
Bodies and Vulnerability
Language, Memory, and Power
Youth, Courage, and Naivety
Afterlife and the Soul
Summary
Analysis
It is 2002, but Seon-ju can’t stop thinking about years ago, when she would spend all her time with Seong-hee and their other labor union friends. Now, reflecting on that time—when they would talk about the moon and lounge around on rooftops—only makes Seong-hee sad. In the present day, in her office, Seon-ju checks her email and smokes a cigarette. Everything feels difficult, as if she is underwater.
More than 20 years have now passed since the Gwangju uprising, but like the narrator and Eun-sook, Seon-ju still feels almost physical pain from her memories. Interestingly, though, Seon-ju did not begin protesting during the 5:18 uprising, as the others did. Her activism started years earlier, with Seong-hee’s group of young female labor organizers.
Themes
In a flashback that she labels as “Up Rising,” Seon-ju remembers the sound of footsteps. She recalls waking up in the middle of the night and hearing a child. Back in the present, Seon-ju thinks about how she ended up in this office. For years, she had worked with Seong-hee in the labor rights organization. Ten years ago, however, she got a call from a man named Yoon. Yoon was hoping to do a “psychological autopsy” on Seon-ju’s old student militia unit, and he wanted her help.
In these poetic, experimental, “Up Rising” sections, Seon-ju reflects on the vague outline of a young boy, one who seems to resemble Dong-ho (or at least an abstracted version of him). The translation of these sections as “Up Rising” is particularly telling: the words testify both to the force of memories when they “rise” to the surface and to Seon-ju’s life of protesting (rising up). In linking these two ideas through language, the “Up Rising” sections suggest that memory is its own form of protest. On a plot level, it is important to note that Yoon is almost certainly the same professor interviewing the unnamed narrator for his aforementioned “psychological autopsy.”
Themes
At first, Seon-ju declined. But after talking to Yoon more recently, she learned that seven of the ten surviving members of the militia had agreed to a series of interviews. When Seon-ju still expressed hesitation, Yoon merely sent her his dissertation and a set of tapes, hoping she could at least record her voice even if she couldn’t bear a sit-down interview. Seon-ju has another flash of the “Up Rising” memory, imagining footsteps and dripping water.
Language was once a tool to hurt Seon-ju and her activist friends, but Yoon’s project—in which he gets survivors to bear witness to the truth of what happened in Gwangju—hopes to reclaim language as a tool of healing and strength. The footsteps and dripping water might allude, however vaguely, to Dong-ho’s morning routine back at his family’s hanok.
Themes
Though Seon-ju works all day categorizing and transcribing various audio and video recordings, the cassette tapes Yoon has sent her to record on still feel overwhelming. Seon-ju’s work focuses on environmental disasters, namely deaths and disease caused by radioactivity. She wonders how Yoon will be able to stand the stories of bayonets and drill bits and cudgels. Already, the first interview described in his dissertation involves torture, as the unnamed interviewee describes being taken captive and brutalized in a nearby university.
Like Eun-sook, Seon-ju has continued her life of activism long after the events at Gwangju. But though Seon-ju now works as an environmental activist, studying the long-lasting effects of radiation, she knows that the realities and impacts of the Gwangju violence are even harder to talk about.
Themes
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The first interviewee survived. In his interview, he explains that though he had never prayed before, his prayers to be released from torture were answered relatively quickly. But he cannot forget the faces of others who were not so lucky, like a pair of college girls gunned down on their campus. These faces haunt his nightmares, just as the dead bodies Seon-ju used to clean and sort at the Gwangju Provincial Office haunt her memories.
As Eun-sook experienced when she went to college, it’s mostly students who hold protests against Chun Doo-hwan. And while students are, in some ways, the most courageous members of society, they’re also the most vulnerable and unprepared. Also of note here is that, as with Eun-sook, the details of corpse decomposition linger in Seon-ju’s mind long after any specific bodies have been buried.
Themes
That night, Seon-ju wakes up long before dawn, disturbed by what she has read. She is almost 42, but she has only lived with a man once, and that only lasted one year. After all, living alone means Seon-ju can wake up whenever she needs to without fear of disturbing another person.
Seon-ju’s hesitancy at sharing space with another person—not to mention physical or emotional intimacy—gestures toward the sexual violence she will later acknowledge having suffered.
Themes
A few days later, Seon-ju is staying late at work when her boss, Park Yeong-ho drops by. Park is cramming, hoping to shut down a nearby nuclear reactor. He wonders why Seon-ju has cranked up the heat in the office so high. All of the other employees are younger than Seon-ju, and they speak to her with a kind of quiet deference. Only Park ever questions her or teases her, calling her “a human search engine.”
Like Eun-sook, Seon-ju spends much of her time alone, desperate to fill the hours to avoid thinking about painful memories. Clearly, her “human search engine” approach to her environmentalist job is one more way Seon-ju has found to distract herself from what happened all those years ago.
Themes
When Park notices that Seon-ju is using the Dictaphone, smoking cigarettes, and drinking coffee, he assumes she is just cramming to meet a deadline, too. Park apologizes for the long hours and meager pay, confessing that he and the other employees are curious about what motivates Seon-ju. Park wonders about Seon-ju’s relationship with Seong-hee, who is “the stuff of legend” to him and other, younger labor organizers. Seon-ju feels too tired to explain her relationship to Seong-hee, or to tell Park about all that she has seen.
Now, Seon-ju’s past work as a labor organizer starts to come into focus. Though she and Seong-hee were both schoolgirls when they began protesting the major factories, they ended up leading a national movement. Even two decades later, Seong-hee remains an important model for progressive activists like Park. But though the stories of such protests seem enviable after the fact, in reality they were more complicated—not just because Seon-ju had to witness great carnage, but also because her relationship with Seong-hee does not seem to have survived these activist actions.
Themes
The “Up Rising” memory comes again, as Seon-ju reflects on the ways she is different from Seong-hee. While Seong-hee believes in a god of some kind, Seon-ju struggles to pray. “I forgive no one,” she vows, “and no one forgives me.”
Seon-ju’s words here almost exactly echo Dong-ho’s anxiety that he will never be “forgiven” for letting Jeong-dae die. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that Seon-ju has this thought soon after the Dong-ho-centric “Up Rising” poem recurs.
Themes
Back in the present, Seon-ju pretends to go home when Park leaves the office. But secretly, she turns around, planning to stay in the office so she can record the tapes for Yoon. Seon-ju has recently learned from the newspapers that Seong-hee is in the hospital. She calls her old friend for the first time in years, and the two talk, only briefly. For her entire life, except for the two years when she was in prison, Seon-ju has buried herself in her work. It feels easier and safer to be solitary. But now, Seon-ju feels a deep need to connect with Seong-hee. For some reason she can’t quite explain, Seon-ju believes that she must record the tapes for Yoon before she can visit Seong-hee in person.
Despite their closeness before and during the labor protests, it is now evident that Seon-ju and Seong-hee are estranged from each other. Moreover, the fact that Seon-ju feels the need to record her testimony for the professor before seeing Seong-hee suggests that their estrangement had something to do with how the two women remembered and discussed their activist history differently.
Themes
Seon-ju thinks back to the factory labor she did as a teenager, which was so physically punishing and exhausting that she had to take pills to stay awake. Back then, the guards would search her every night, lingering on her private parts. There were no weekends, and Seon-ju was always getting sick from the factory fumes. Women only made half of the men’s already-low pay. No wonder that Seon-ju found solace in Seong-hee’s labor rallies, which helped factory workers insist that “we are noble.”
As Seon-ju thinks about her entry into protest, she takes a remarkably intersectional lens. Rather than seeing her conflict with the South Korean government as purely one of citizens vs. their state, Seon-ju sees how class and gender also impact the power structure she is fighting against. And to those marginalized both as women and as working-class factory employees, it’s no wonder that Seong-hee’s declaration of “we are noble” felt so radical.
Themes
When Seong-hee had organized enough laborers to go on strike, she and the other young women formed a human wall in front of the factory. As policemen and strike-breakers approached, Seong-hee instructed the women to take off their clothes—young women’s bodies were sacred, so the activists were sure they would be safe if they were naked. But to everyone’s shock, the police still attacked, dragging the naked girls to the ground and beating them with cudgels. Seon-ju was brutalized so much that her intestines ruptured.
Even as Chun Doo-hwan and his predecessor Park Chung-hee seem to advocate for traditional gender roles, they also disrespect and violate their country’s most longstanding ideas about women’s bodies and purity. It is also worth noting that all of the events Seon-ju reflects on here occurred before the protests at Gwangju. Unlike Dong-ho, Seon-ju knew what she was getting into when she stayed at the Provincial Office that night—she had already lived through a version of the state’s violence.
Themes
After Seon-ju healed, she decided to return home to Gwangju rather than continue to fight with the other factory workers. She was now blacklisted from most factory jobs, so she had to get a job at a dressmaker’s shop. The pay was even worse now, but Seon-ju found comfort from writing back and forth with Seong-hee, taking her time to write in hanja (traditional Chinese) characters as Seong-hee had taught her.
Traditionally, hanja characters would have been used in fancier, upper-class writing. But by teaching themselves to use hanja even without formal education, Seon-ju and Seong-hee find another way to use language as protest, challenging the rigid class divides of their society.
Themes
After three years, Seon-ju finally worked her way up to being a machinist in the dress shop. But as soon as she got this new job, Seon-ju was devastated to learn that a young factory worker had died in the riots, slitting her own wrists in protest. Quickly, Seon-ju begins to link the violence she experienced at her factory to similar incidences in Busan and Masan. She knows that the person responsible for all of this violence is President Park Chung-hee.
Many of the younger characters (from Dong-ho to Yeong-chae to Jeong-dae) seem to have fallen into the protests almost by accident. But Seon-ju has a more expansive, historical way of thinking, as she links her own experience as a factory worker to state violence happening all over the nation.
Themes
That October, Park Chung-hee was assassinated, and soon after, Chun Doo-hwan rose to power as the next president. Rather than lessening the violence, Chun Doo-hwan had even more frightening plans than his predecessor. Seon-ju became glued to newspapers, trying to understand what would happen next. One day, walking along the street, she saw a bus full of young factory girls. They were chanting protest slogans and holding a sign which read “END MARTIAL LAW. GUARANTEE LABOR RIGHTS.”
Park Chung-hee was assassinated in 1979, and Chun Doo-hwan began to slowly accrue power over the next year, so Seon-ju is likely recalling the early months of 1980, just before the 5:18 uprising. In both the words of the newspaper and the block letters of this protest sign, language is a critical tool for gathering young people into a strong, vocal, crowd of protestors.
Themes
Feeling entranced by the chants, Seon-ju followed the bus all the way to the Gwangju Provincial Office. Though the protests in Gwangju had begun with university students, now, the square in the front of Office was filled with people of all ages. At the front of the protest were the bodies of two young people whom soldiers had gunned down.
Though violence was common in the factory riots, flat-out murder was still unusual. In other words, at this point in Chun Doo-hwan’s rise to power, death was not yet normalized—and Seon-ju, like the rest of Gwangju, is still able to fully take in the tragedy and shock of each loss.
Themes
In the present, as Seon-ju approaches a hospital, time seems to blur together. Seon-ju can still hear the girls’ protest song in her head, “carrying down through the years.” Seon-ju enters the hospital while she recalls the words “we are noble,” chanted over and over again. Seon-ju climbs to the roof of the hospital, then jumps off. But rather than dying, Seon-ju revives, only to repeat the process again—this is a recurring nightmare Unfortunately, being awake is not much better. “Memories are waiting,” Seon-ju knows. “What they call forth cannot strictly be called nightmares.”
For Jeong-dae, memories were usually comforting; for the narrator, they were almost impossible to bear. Seon-ju locates herself in the middle of these two figures, finding strength in the recollections of the “we are noble” chant even as she hides from reflecting on the “nightmares” she once lived through.
Themes
Seon-ju once felt proud that she was able to repress her memories—she was angry with Yoon for wanting to dig up her recollections of the past. In fact, her entire falling-out with Seong-hee hinged on this disagreement. Ten years ago, Seong-hee encouraged Seon-ju to make her story public, and Seon-ju was outraged. Now and always, Seon-ju feels that she is failing Seong-hee. For a moment, Seon-ju remembers the man who had been her husband for eight months, his kind eyes and his worried insistence that she sometimes scared him.
The narrator gave his testimony 12 years before Seon-ju considered doing so, suggesting that the professor Yoon has been at this project for more than a decade. If testimony and language were always a big part of Seong-hee’s testimony, it makes sense that she would be hard on Seon-ju for refusing to share her story with the professor. Lastly, Seon-ju’s memories of her husband further hint toward her self-isolation in the years after the uprising.
Themes
In the present, Seon-ju is at the hospital—in reality now instead of in her dreams. As Seon-ju waits for the doctor to arrive, she thinks back to her youth in Gwangju, to a friend named Jeong-mi who had wanted to be a doctor. Seon-ju knew Jeong-mi would never realize this—the factory would destroy her body before she even got time to study for the middle school exams.
Over and over again, characters in the novel have lamented that the violence at Gwangju cut short the lives of young people. But here, Seon-ju adds a new dimension to that narrative, pointing out that the unfair conditions they were protesting were also destroying dreams (like Jeong-mi’s aspiration to be a doctor).
Themes
Seon-ju washes her face, brushes her teeth, and applies lotion. She wonders what Seong-hee will look like—it has been 10 years since they last saw each other, and Seong-hee sounded so different on the phone. Seon-ju recalls moments in their protest days when she and Seong-hee, not caring about propriety, slept curled next to each other for comfort and warmth. Seon-ju remembers that Seong-hee always snored loudly.
Seon-ju’s friendship with Seong-hee signals just how close protestors could become over the course of their activism. Specifically, the image of the two women curled up next to each other echoes the image of Jeong-dae and Jeong-mi, snuggling for warmth in the annex of the hanok.
Themes
Still in the hospital waiting room, Seon-ju falls into a restless sleep. She dreams of the phrases from Yoon’s emails: “testimony. Meaning. Memory. For the future.” Seon-ju knows Yoon wants her to “bear witness” to her own suffering, but how is she supposed to bear witness to the rifle that was pushed up her vagina, to the various abuse so intimate it left her forever unable to have children? How can Seon-ju explain that the violence was horrific enough that she became afraid of touch and affection, even friendship?
There have been several suggestions that much of the soldiers’ violence was gendered, but only now do readers learn the full extent of the sexual assault Seon-ju had to suffer. The scale of this trauma helps make sense of Seon-ju’s hesitancy to give “testimony,” even though she knows words can be a vital form of “memory” and a way to bear “witness.” But no words could suffice to capture the degree of invasion and pain she suffered at the hands of these soldiers.
Themes
When Seon-ju wakes to the sound of a hospital patient moaning, she decides to leave. In the middle of the night, she crosses the damp grass and heads home. As she walks, she thinks again of the two college girls murdered on the grass. With horror, another moment of “Up Rising” comes to Seon-ju—in this moment, the footsteps are just outside her door, coming towards her.
Tragically, this passage makes clear just how much the violence has altered Seon-ju’s experience of the world: even the simple, natural pleasure of grass makes her think of death. Though Seon-ju has yet to mention Dong-ho’s name, footsteps will later become a signifier of the young boy’s tangible presence (or soul) for his mother and the writer.
Themes
Seon-ju recalls driving around with the other female students, begging the residents of Gwangju to at least turn on their lights. The soldiers eventually apprehended them, arresting the various protestors. Because Seon-ju had a gun and was involved in labor rights organizing, they called her “Red Bitch,” insisting that she was a spy from North Korea. The military police interrogated Seon-ju for so long that she could barely think.
The fact that most residents of Gwangju will not even turn on their lights reflects just how terrifying it could be to defy the soldiers. Upsettingly, the interrogators match Seon-ju’s more global view of the protests, linking Seon-ju’s straightforward call for labor rights to the tension of the Korean War 30 years earlier.
Themes
After several years, Seon-ju was able to track down Seong-hee, who had also been in prison. Both women have been gravely aged by their years of arrest and torture. When they reunited, Seong-hee told Seon-ju that Jeong-mi, after protesting and being blacklisted from the factory, had disappeared. Now, Seon-ju struggles to remember the contours of Jeong-mi’s face; all she can think of is the phrase “I want to be a doctor.”
When a young person dies, Seon-ju’s memory of Jeong-mi seems to suggest, those who survive them mourn the innocent life lost. But they also mourn the person that young boy or girl had yet to become—maybe Jeong-mi would have been a doctor, or Jeong-dae would have been taller, or Dong-ho (as his mother will later speculate) would have been a poet.
Themes
In the present, the “Up Rising” memory comes again. Seon-ju recalls that she came back to Gwangju “to die.” At first, the city looked similar, until she noticed the quiet in the streets, the bullet holes in the walls of the Provincial Office. But on a walk one day, Seon-ju noticed a picture of Dong-ho plastered onto a wall of a Catholic Center. She took down the picture as quickly as she could, walking fast to avoid the police’s prying eyes. “You saved me, Dong-ho,” Seon-ju thinks, “you made my blood seethe back to life.”
Dong-ho’s face is a galvanizing image for the activists who knew him, but the photo of this young boy becomes a call to protest even for those who were less personally involved. For Seon-ju, as for Eun-sook decades earlier, the memory of Dong-ho is energizing and even life-“saving.” In remembering Dong-ho, Seong-ju suggests here, she remembers what she is fighting for, and therefore why she must survive to fight.
Themes
In the present, as Seon-ju continues her walk away from the hospital, she thinks back to Dong-ho asking why she and Eun-sook placed the Taegukgi over the dead bodies in the gym. Seon-ju does not remember Eun-sook’s answer, but privately, she thinks it is because they were trying so hard to make the deaths mean something. Seon-ju feels that she can never return to this time again—to a time before she knew what torture felt like. When the “Up Rising” feelings come again, she realizes she might never know who the footsteps belong to.
Part of Chun Doo-hwan’s success in quashing the uprisings was to make them feel pointless—but like the unnamed narrator, Seon-ju is committed to giving meaning to the activists’ lives, both those that continue and those that have been cut short. Fascinatingly, Seon-ju does not assign the young footsteps to Dong-ho. It is possible that by viewing these footsteps as more universal, Seon-ju—always an organizer of giant groups—is placing her story in the context of the thousands of others like herself.
Themes
As she thinks of Dong-ho and Jin-su, Seon-ju reflects that she has “the capacity for neither bravery nor strength.” She blames herself for leaving the factory after she was beaten, and she also blames herself for leaving Seong-hee’s labor movement later in life to go work with this environmental group. Seon-ju knows that one day she will have to face danger head on, and she thinks back to that night on the roof when she was seventeen, eating peaches with her friends and staring at the moon.
Crowds of any size (from the protestors in front of the Provincial Office to the teenaged friend group on Seong-hee’s roof) give “bravery” and “strength” to those who do not have it on their own. And so while Seon-ju cannot find the strength to think about Jin-su and Dong-ho when she is by herself, memories of being with her community give her the energy she needs to honor those two victims of the massacre.
Themes
With the hospital behind her, Seon-ju thinks the thought she has been avoiding: that she is responsible for Dong-ho’s death. If she’d sent him home, begged for him to leave as they ate gimbap together, maybe he would not have stayed and lost his life. Seon-ju walks on, raising her head to the rain. As she walks, she thinks, “don’t die. Just don’t die.”
Like Eun-sook, Jin-su, and later Dong-ho’s mother, Seon-ju blames herself for the fact that Dong-ho stayed behind that fateful night. But rather than seeing this possibility as literally soul crushing, like Jeong-dae did, Seon-ju sees it as a responsibility to keep surviving. As she promises to stay alive and raises her head to the rain, Seon-ju seems newly committed to her causes, fighting for justice and leading out the life that Dong-ho didn’t get to live.
Themes
