Human Acts Quotes

Why would you sing the national anthem for people who've been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn't the nation itself that had murdered them. […]

“But the generals are rebels, they seize power unlawfully. You must have seen it: people being beaten and stabbed in broad daylight, and even shot. The ordinary soldiers were following the orders of their superiors. How can you call them the nation?”

You found this confusing, as though it had answered an entirely different question to the one you wanted to ask. The national anthem rang out like a circular refrain, one verse clashing with another against the constant background of weeping, and you listened with bated breath to the subtle dissonance this created. As though this, finally, might help you understand what the nation really was.

“Let’s go home,” she says. You give your wrist a violent wrench, trying to shake free of her grip. The insistent, desperate strength in that grip is frightening, somehow, making you think of someone drowning. You have to use your other hand to pry her fingers away, one by one. “The army is coming. Let’s go home, now.”

[…] You turn around and call back to her: “We’re going to close up here at six, Mum.” […] You call again, louder this time: “Once we've closed up, I'll come home. I promise.”

[…] “Make sure you do,” she says. “Be back before the sun sets. We’ll all have dinner together.”

Bending down to remove the cloth, your gaze is arrested by the sight of the translucent candle wax creeping down below the bluish flame.

How long do souls linger by the side of their bodies?

Do they really flutter away like some kind of bird? Is that what trembles the edges of the candle flame?

Burning my tongue on a steamed potato my sister gave me, blowing on it hastily and juggling it in my mouth.

Flesh of a watermelon grainy as sugar, the glistening black seeds I didn’t bother to pick out.

Racing back to the house where my sister was waiting, my jacket zipped up over a parcel of chrysanthemum bread, feet entirely numb with cold, the bread blazing hot against my heart.

Yearning to be taller.

To be able to do forty push-ups in a row.

For the time when I would hold a woman in my arms.

I looked on in silence as my face blackened and swelled, my features turned into festering ulcers, the contours that had defined me, that had given me clear edges, crumbled into ambiguity, leaving nothing that could be recognized as me.

As the nights wore on, increasingly more shadows came and pressed up against my own. Our encounters were, as always, poorly improvised things. We were never able to tell who the other was, but could vaguely surmise how long we’d been together for. Every time our shadow boundaries brushed against each other, an echo of some appalling suffering was transmitted to me like an electric shock.

His face was utterly ordinary. Thin lips, no noticeable irregularities to his features. He wore a pale yellow shirt with a wide collar, and his gray suit trousers were held up by a belt. Its buckle gleamed. Had they met by chance in the street, she would have taken him for some run-of-the-mill company manager or section chief.

“Bitch. A bitch like you, in a place like this? Anything could happen, and no one would find out.”

At this point, the force of the slap had already burst the capillaries in her cheek and the man's fingernails had broken her skin. But Eun-sook hadn't known that yet.

Her initial impression is that the pages have been burned. They’ve been thrown onto a fire and left to blacken […]

More than half of the sentences in the ten-page introduction have been scored through. In the thirty or so pages following, this percentage rises so that the vast majority of sentences have aligned through them. From around the fifth page onward, perhaps because drawing a line had become too labor-intensive, entire pages have been blacked out, presumably using an ink roller […]

She recalls sentences roughly darned and patched, places where the forms of words can just about be made out in paragraphs that had been otherwise expunged. You. I. That. Perhaps. Precisely. Everything. You. Why. Gaze. Your eyes. Near and far. That. Vividly. Now. A little more. Vaguely. Why did you. Remember? Gasping for breath in these interstices, tiny islands among language charred out of existence.

As she silently chewed the grains of rice, it occurred to her, as it had before, that there was something shameful about eating. Gripped by this familiar shame, she thought of the dead, for whom the absence of life meant they would never be hungry again. But life still lingered on for her, with hunger still a yoke around her neck. It was that which had tormented her for the past five years—that she could still feel hunger, still salivate at the sight of food.

She could have pressed her hands over her ears, could have screwed her eyes tight shut, shook her head from side to side or moaned in distress. Instead, she simply remembered you, Dong-ho. How you darted away at the stairs when she tried to take you home. Your face frozen with terror, as though escaping this importunate plea was your only hope of survival. Let’s go together, Dong-ho. We ought to leave together, right away. You stood there clinging to the second-floor railing, trembling. When she caught your gaze, Eun-sook saw your eyelids quiver. Because you were afraid. Because you wanted to live.

Certain crowds do not blench at the prospect of looting, murder, and rape, while on the other hand, others display a level of courage and altruism which those making up that same crowd would have had difficulty in achieving as individuals. The author argues that, rather than this latter type of crowd being made-up of especially noble individuals, that nobility which is a fundamental human attribute is able to manifest itself through borrowing strength from the crowd; also, similarly, that the former case is one in which humanity's essential barbarism is exacerbated not by the especially barbaric nature of any of the individuals involved, but through that magnification which occurs naturally in crowds.

Eun-sook closes her eyes. She does not want to see his face.

After you died I couldn’t hold a funeral, so my life became a funeral.

After you were wrapped in a tarpaulin and carted away in a garbage truck.

After sparkling jets of water sprayed unforgivably from the fountain.

Everywhere the lights of the temple shrines are burning.

In the flowers that bloom in spring, in the snowflakes. In the evenings that draw each day to a close. Sparks from the candles, burning in empty drinks bottles.

Scalding tears burn from Eun-sook’s open eyes, but she does not wipe them away. She glares fiercely at the boy’s face, at the movement of his silenced lips.

It wasn’t as though we didn't know how overwhelmingly the army outnumbered us. But the strange thing was, it didn't matter. Ever since the uprising began, I’d felt something coursing through me, as overwhelming as an army.

Conscience.

Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world. The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers’ guns, […] I was startled to discover an absence inside myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean…the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.

Kids crouching beneath the windows, fumbling with their guns and complaining that they were hungry, asking if it was OK for them to quickly run back and fetch the sponge cake and Fanta they'd left in the conference room; what could they possibly have known about death that would have enabled them to make such a choice?

At that moment, I realized what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy, stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.

[…] Watery discharge and sticky puss, foul saliva, blood, tears and snot, piss and shit that soiled your pants. That was all that was left to me. No, that was what I myself had been reduced to. I was nothing but the sum of those parts. The lump of rotting meat from which they oozed was the only “me” there was.

Looking at that boy's life, Jin-su said, what is this thing we call a soul? Just some nonexistent idea? Or something that might as well not exist? Or no, is it like a kind of glass? Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That's the fundamental nature of glass. And that's why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they're good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.

Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. Though what we really were was humans made of glass.

I heard a story about one of the Korean army platoons that fought in Vietnam. How they forced the women, children, and elderly of one particular village into the main hall, and then burned it to the ground. Some of those who claim to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times, when committing such actions and wartime had won them a handsome reward. It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, […] in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the new world, with such a uniform brutality it's as though it is imprinted in our genetic code. I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race.

[…] So tell me, professor, what answers do you have for me? You, a human being just like me.

The repeated words from Yoon’s e-mail, a pianist hammering the same keys, flicker in your mind’s eye like a cursor blinking on a computer screen. Testimony. Meaning. Memory. For the future.

[…] Again, you experienced that moment when the contours of suffering coalesce into clarity, a clarity colder and harder than any nightmare could ever be. The moment when you are forced to acknowledge that what you experienced was no mere dream.

[…] Yoon has asked you to remember. To face up to those memories, to bear witness to them. But how can such a thing be possible?

Some weekend afternoon when the sun-drenched scene outside the window seems unusually still and Dong-ho’s profile flips into your mind, mightn’t the thing flickering in front of your eyes be what they call a soul? In the early hours of the morning, when dreams you can’t remember have left your cheeks wet and the contours of that face jolt into an abrupt clarity, mightn’t that wavering be a soul’s emergence? And the place they emerged from, that they waver back into, would it be as black as night or dusk's coarse weave? Dong-ho, Jin-su, the bodies at your own hands washed and dressed, might they be gathered there in that place, or are they sundered, several, scattered? You are aware that, as an individual, you have the capacity for neither bravery nor strength.

If I demanded that you go home, Dong-ho; if I’d begged, while we sat there eating gimbap, you would have done as I asked, wouldn’t you?

And that’s why you’re coming to me now.

To ask why I’m still alive.

You walk, your eyes red rim seeming carved with some keen blade. Hurrying back to the bright lights of the emergency department.

There’s only one thing for me to say to you, onni.

If you’ll allow me to.

If you'll please allow me.

[…] As you walk along the straight white line that follows the center of the road, you raise your head to the falling rain.

Don’t die.

Just don’t die.

Middle-school boys all had their hair cut short back then, didn’t they, but it seems to have gone out of fashion now. That’s how I knew it had to be you—I’d know that round little chestnut of a head anywhere. It was you, no mistake. Your brother’s handme-down school uniform was like a sack on you, wasn’t it? It took you till the third year to finally grow into it. In the mornings when you slipped out through the main gate with your book bag, and your clothes so neat and clean, ah, I could have gazed on that sight all day. This kid didn’t have any book bag with him; the hands swinging by his sides were empty. Well, he must have put it down somewhere. There was no mistaking those toothpick arms, poking out of your short shirt sleeves […] It was definitely you.

“I don’t like summer but I like summer nights”: that was something you came out with the year you turned eight. I liked the sound of those words, and I remember thinking to myself, he’ll be a poet. Times when you three boys sat out on the bench in the yard, sharing watermelon with your father on hot summer nights. When your tongue groped for the sticky sweet remnants smeared around your mouth.

There was something meek and gentle about those single-lidded half-moon eyes. The traces of infancy still lingered in the soft line of his jaw. It was a face so utterly ordinary you could easily have mistaken it for that of another, a face whose characteristics would be forgotten the moment you turned away from it.

As it turned out, none of my relatives died; none were injured or even arrested. But all through that autumn in 1980, my thoughts returned to that tiny room at one end of the kitchen, where I used to lie on my stomach to do my homework, that room with the cold paper floor—had the boy used it to spread out his homework on its cold paper floor, then lie stomach-down just as I had? The middle-school kid I'd heard the grown-ups whispering about. How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?

Permission? Yes, you have my permission, but only if you do it properly. Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again […]

Whenever we had a toe war, I always won.

He was really ticklish, you see.

All I had to do was poke his foot with my big toe and he’d start squirming.

At first I couldn’t tell whether he was grimacing like that because he was ticklish, or because it really hurt…

But then he would turn bright red and laugh.

I didn’t pray. I didn't close my eyes, or observe a minute silence. The candles burned steadily. Their orange flames undulating soundlessly, gradually being sucked into the center and hollowed out. Only then did I notice how incredibly cold my ankles were. Without realizing it, I’d been kneeling in a snowdrift that covered Dong-ho’s grave. The snow had soaked through my socks, seeping in right through to my skin. I stared, mute, at that flame’s wavering outline, fluttering like a bird’s translucent wing.