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Taegukgi
Because Chun Doo-hwan’s military government officially came to power on May 17, 1980, the anti-Chun Doo-hwan protests in Gwangju were often collectively known as the May 18 uprising. Under Chun Doo-hwan’s reign, the phrase “5:18” was forbidden in South Korea, as it was seen as seditious. In more recent years, however, May 18 has become a National Day of Remembrance for those lost in the Gwangju massacre. Moreover, as the writer sees when she returns home to Gwangju, there are now a number of buildings dedicated to studying this history, like the 5:18 Research Institute.
5:18 Quotes in Human Acts
The Human Acts quotes below are all either spoken by 5:18 or refer to 5:18. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3: The Editor, 1985
Quotes
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.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4: The Prisoner, 1990
Quotes
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.
Epilogue: The Writer, 2013
Quotes
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?
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5:18 Term Timeline in Human Acts
The timeline below shows where the term 5:18 appears in Human Acts. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Epilogue: The Writer, 2013
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...
(full context)
...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...
(full context)
