Previous
Chapter 6: The Boy’s Mother, 2010
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
When the writer was nine, she and her family moved from Gwangju to a suburb of Seoul. As the writer played with her brothers or helps with dinner, she sometimes caught snippets of conversation between her parents and their friends. One time, the writer’s father mentioned a former student of his in Gwangju, a young boy with a talent for creative writing. Even as a child, the writer could tell from the adults’ “awkward, drawn-out silences,” that something terrible had happened to this man.
The writer’s background parallels that of author Han Kang, suggesting that the novelist has written herself into her work in this final chapter. The boy the writer’s father mentions here is likely Dong-ho—a few pages ago, Dong-ho’s mother mentioned her son’s talent for poetry, and the writer’s father, himself a writing teacher, now identifies his student as someone with a talent for creative writing.
Themes
The writer remembers her childhood home as a “typical, old-style hanok,” with its rooms arranged around a central, tiled courtyard, where roses and hollyhocks bloomed. The first winter near Seoul, the writer cannot believe how cold it is, and she finds herself hungry for the heat and flowers of Gwangju.
Though Gwangju eventually became a place of mass death, the writer remembers it before the uprising, when it was a place of warm, colorful life. The presence of hollyhocks in the writer’s old hanok effectively confirms that her family sold their Gwangju house to Dong-ho’s family (as Dong-ho’s house also had tall hollyhocks in the courtyard).
Themes
In the first weeks of that winter, two strange men arrived at the house in Seoul in the middle of the night. They searched the house, and though the writer’s parents never explained what was happening, she knew that her parents’ attempts to be calm concealed their panic. In the next few months, relatives warned her parents that their phone lines might be tapped. And the writer learned that soldiers had shot Dong-ho, the youngest boy in the family who’d bought the Gwangju house from them.
The writer’s experience of the 5:18 massacre to some extent parallels the experience readers have had. In both cases, the writer and readers feel connected to the uprising (while also being at a safe remove). Also in both cases, disorientation, graphic imagery, and fear give way to an understanding that Dong-ho, a bright young boy, was killed in a bout of political violence. More than just describing an event, then, language can also capture how an event might have felt.
Themes
Two years later, the writer’s father returned home from a visit to Gwangju with a photo chapbook of the murdered and missing. After the adults looked at the chapbook, they put it on a high shelf, trying to keep it away from the children. But one evening, when her parents were busy with dinner, the writer snuck the chapbook from the shelf and looked through it. The images she saw there—of young people shot, of a woman whose face has been slashed by a bayonet—broke “something tender deep inside.”
The writer now begins to more explicitly parallel her own life with Dong-ho’s. Early in the novel, Dong-ho described how witnessing violence felt—as if he had been struck by a “phantom bayonet." And in this scene, the writer describes her own connection to the massacre in Gwangju with almost exactly the same language, referencing a bayonet and describing an emotional puncture wound.
Themes
Get the entire Human Acts LitChart as a printable PDF.
Now, in 2013, the writer returns to Gwangju. She sees that the floor of the gym—where Dong-ho and the others once stored corpses—has been dug up. The gingko trees outside have been uprooted, and the only thing that remains on one of the walls is a large, framed version of the Taegukgi. The writer does her best to conjure the coffins that once filled this space. “I started too late,” she thinks. “But I’m here now.”
In 2013, Park Chung-hee’s daughter had recently been elected president, adding new urgency to the writer’s mission. Like Seon-ju, the narrator, and Professor Yoon, the writer wants to amplify the testimony of those who participated in the uprisings (“I’m here now,” she says, determined to bear witness). At the same time, though, the young gingko tree, a favorite of Dong-ho’s, has been uprooted, a reminder that no testimony can ever make up for what has been lost.
Themes
The writer is staying with her younger brother, who still lives in Gwangju. She has not spent time in the city in years, and she is surprised by how developed it has become, how unfamiliar all the streets feel. Even her old hanok has been torn down and replaced with a prefabricated new house. Fortunately, many of the writer’s father’s friends still live in Gwangju, and they help her find pictures of Dong-ho from his middle school records.
Dong-ho’s mother alluded to construction happening across Gwangju, and the writer now sees the effects of this—the home she loved and the history she fears are slowly being erased, replaced by new, less fraught landmarks.
Themes
The writer then visits the exhibit at the 5:18 Research Institute, where she studies old footage from protests and student militia gatherings. She thinks she spots Dong-ho’s face in one of these videos, but because of his “utterly ordinary” features, she cannot be sure.
The 5:18 Research Institute is a real place in Gwangju, one that author Han acknowledges as being central to her writing. “Utterly ordinary” is exactly the same phrase that Eun-sook used to describe the interrogator, reminding readers once again that “ordinary” people are capable of great bravery as well as great harm.
Themes
The writer throws herself into her work, reading every document she can get her hands on and avoiding friends entirely. As she immerses herself in the document, she begins to have nightmares. In some dreams, she imagines that soldiers are chasing her with a bayonet. In other dreams, she learns that all the 5:18 arrestees are going to be executed unless she herself puts an end to it. And in one dream, the writer finds a time machine to return to Gwangju in 1980, only to discover she has programmed the machine incorrectly.
As these haunting dreams suggest, even the writer—despite her temporal and geographic remove—now takes on some measure of blame for Dong-ho’s death (and the deaths of other protestors). The fact that the writer relies so heavily on archival documents once again serves to emphasize that language can play an important role in preserving and shaping historical narratives.
Themes
In January of 2013, the writer attends a wedding. She feels that the bright colors and celebration is incongruous with her thoughts about Dong-ho. The research throbs in her mind: the soldiers who committed brutality “without hesitation and without regret,” the way Chun Doo-hwan’s government found encouragement for violence in the Cambodian government’s genocide of its own people.
Just as mourning took over Dong-ho’s mother’s life, the writer now struggles with her own form of survivor’s guilt. She also begins to see how crowds can provoke brutality across the globe, allowing soldiers to perform horrific acts “without regret.” After all, why would a person “hesitat[e]” to engage in torture when everyone around them is doing the same thing?
Themes
In one interview the writer reads, a survivor compares torture to cancer—in both cases, the memories grow and metastasize, as “life attacks itself.” Whenever the narrator sees police violence, she immediately thinks of Gwangju. And with memories of Gwangju come memories of childhood fear. When she would do her homework as a little girl, lying on her stomach, the writer always wondered whether Dong-ho used to lie like that, too.
This idea that trauma is cancerous echoes Seon-ju’s earlier thought that memories of violence have almost radioactive half-lives. Again, the writer’s own experience of youth is marked by the knowledge that somewhere a few hundred miles to the south, a young boy will never again get the basic experiences of childhood that seem so quotidian to her.
Themes
Eventually, the writer goes to the new house where her old hanok used to be. The new owner is warm at first, speaking in the classic Gwangju dialect, but when she hears the writer’s Seoul speech, this woman grows cold. After some conversation, she tells the writer that the man who sold her the house works as a lecturer at a middling “cram school.” The writer arranges to meet with this man, who is Dong-ho’s middle brother.
Both the new construction where the hanok used to be and the new owner’s sudden coldness demonstrate the ways in which Gwangju has changed. But even as the city Dong-ho lived in is disappearing, those who love him and want to honor his memory—like his middle brother, always grieving—remain.
Themes
The middle brother is initially hesitant to share his story with the writer. But then he thinks about Dong-ho’s mother, and he decides to speak the words that he knows she would want to share with the world. “Please,” the middle brother implores the writer. “Write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.” And he tells her other stories about Dong-ho, too—how they used to have toe wars, and how ticklish Dong-ho was.
When Dong-ho’s middle brother decides to share his family’s story, he does so with the knowledge that written words can protect “memory”—Dong-ho’s body may have been “desecrate[d],” but his story will not be. It is especially important to the middle brother to include the details of Dong-ho’s life before the violence, thus defining him outside of Chun’s state brutality.
Themes
The writer acknowledges that just as there were some especially aggressive soldiers, there were also some soldiers who loathed violence. Like the student militias, these were the soldiers who carried guns but refused to fire them, or pointed them up to the sky to avoid wounding others. The writer wonders if the students in the militia were true victims, or if their commitment to death was their away of avoiding victimhood—of maintaining their dignity even in the most brutal circumstances.
As the narrative nears its end, the writer begins to question the principle—repeated by many characters—that crowds always change behavior. Some soldiers resisted the brutal groupthink around them, for example. And while each protestor found strength from the crowd, they were also all individuals, with families and passions and quirks. Though this novel might be written about Dong-ho, a novel with as much dignity and detail could be written about any one of the protestors shot down at Gwangju.
Themes
“Dong-ho,” the writer thinks, “I need you to take my hand and guide me away from all this. Away to where the light shines through, to where the flowers bloom.” For a moment, the writer imagines Dong-ho guiding her through the gravestones, the snow melting around his trackpants. In reality, though, the writer simply leaves a note for her brother and heads to the graveyard. She remembers the older brother writing to her about burying Dong-ho’s body. The older brother had polished the skull before covering Dong-ho with the Taegukgi, knowing this task would be too painful for their mother.
This section blurs the lines between prose and poetry, between fiction and autobiography, and between life and death. The writer now imagines Dong-ho in the language she has attributed to his mother, calling him into physical being just as his grieving parents do. Importantly, just as Dong-ho empowers his mother to continue living and protesting, he helps the writer finish her story. It is also worth noting that despite his hesitations about the Taegukgi, Dong-ho is buried in it, perhaps a reflection of his family’s faith that his activism would one day right their country’s past wrongs.
Themes
At last, the writer finds Dong-ho’s grave in the Mangwol-dong cemetery. She has brought a few candles, which she now lights. As she kneels before the grave, she realizes that her ankles are getting cold—she is standing in a snowbank. But still she stands there, staring, “mute, at that flame’s wavering outline, fluttering like a bird’s translucent wing.”
At the very beginning of the novel, Dong-ho used candles to deal with death: candles masked the stench of the corpses killed in the massacre, but they also honored the victims’ lives. Now, the writer does the same thing to memorialize her subject, coming to terms with his death by placing a candle by his gravestone. But in mourning and remembering the loss of young Dong-ho, the writer also gives tangible form to his soul—which “flutters” like a “bird,” just as Dong-ho predicted it would.
Themes
