Human Acts

In 1990, a professor requests an interview with a former prisoner of the state. The unnamed prisoner describes the horrors of his imprisonment after the Gwangju Uprising. Jailed with around a hundred other men, they were jammed body-to-body into five cells and continually monitored. The prisoner was repeatedly tortured with a black Monami Biro pen until his hand began to show bone. Afterward, his torturers asked him questions, but no matter how he responded, they beat him. After being returned to his cell, the prisoners sat with their backs straight and their gazes straight ahead. The prisoner remembers his torturous hunger and thirst. The prisoners were only given water three times a day with their scant meals and forced to share this meager fare between two prisoners. The prisoner was partnered with Kim Jin-su, which he’d been grateful for since Jin-su looked more like a shadow than a human.

The prisoner then wonders how it is that Kim Jin-su is now dead while he is still alive, since their experiences were so similar. He challenges the professor’s motives for writing his dissertation, for pursuing this interview: “But when it came to it, this dissertation you were planning to write, was it really going to benefit anyone other than yourself?” (115). He also challenges the professor’s assumption that he can truly analyze or understand what Jin-su went through.

The prisoner remembers Jin-su as having been a young university freshman who took the lead in helping with the dead and wounded during the Gwangju Uprising. He wonders why he stayed behind on the final night. The militia chief had ordered Jin-su to escort the women out of the building around midnight, but Jin-su returned to the Provincial Office afterward. The narrator remembers Dong-ho coming in later that night to sleep with the rest of them, and Jin-su insisting that he surrender at the first available opportunity.

The prisoner had just gone back to university after completing his military service when the Gwangju Uprising began. Because he was older and more experienced than many other members of the civilian militia, he was chosen to be the militia’s leader during their last stand. The prisoner notes that their only plan was to hold out until dawn, when they believed hundreds of thousands of citizens of Gwangju would join their numbers in support. Even though foreign journalists later portrayed this group as knowing their death was certain, the narrator insists that many of them didn’t fully understand the situation they were in and were foolishly optimistic about making it out alive.

When joining the uprising, the narrator felt sublime, bolstered by the strength of his conviction. He remembers how after the crowd was gunned down by soldiers, the acts of altruism shown by citizens inspired him. However, he notes that it’s difficult to ascertain if the children involved had any such conviction, and wonders if any of them even fully understood the dangers they were facing.

The narrator confesses that none of the group in the Provincial Office shot or killed anyone that night. The civilian militia, made up of many children, was not prepared to fire at someone. This was in contrast with the national army, supplied with 800,000 rounds—enough to shoot every citizen of Gwangju twice. Those arrested who weren’t carrying weapons were released in batches, leaving the “violent elements” who had been caught with firearms. These people were tortured as their captors tried to extricate false confessions from them. The prisoner now realizes this was all intended to humiliate them, to prove to them that they could be reduced to nothing but “the carcasses of starving animals” (126). A makeshift military law court was erected on the grounds of the barracks, so a trial could be orchestrated without having to transfer any of the prisoners. The narrator remembers how, despite the guards threatening to shoot them if they made any noise during the trial, the prisoners quietly sang the national anthem together at the beginning. The prisoners then received meaningless sentences, after which the military authorities continued to slowly release them in batches.

Two years after his release, the narrator was making his way home after drinking with an old classmate, when he spied Jin-su eating a bowl of hangover soup in a roadside shack. He stopped to greet him and saw in his face the same haunted marks of suffering that stained his own. Neither returned to university after the uprising, and both struggled to find work. Jin-su confessed he struggled to sleep and turned to alcohol to try and self-medicate.

For the next seven years, the two meet up and drink together. They saw a mirrored image of themselves in each other, struggling to return to a normal, stable life and maintain relationships: “We even despised ourselves. The interrogation room of that summer was knitted into our muscle memory, lodged inside our bodies” (132). The last time the narrator saw Jin-su alive, he invited him up to his room. Jin-su told the narrator that Kim Yeong-chae, his distant relation who was imprisoned with them as a young boy, had been sent to a psychiatric hospital after multiple suicide attempts. After the narrator laid down to sleep, Jin-su continued to babble on about the soul, the fragility of human life, comparing it to glass.

Months later, the narrator saw Jin-su’s obituary and attended his funeral. He tells the professor that he never saw Jin-su’s suicide note, but there had been a photograph next to the note—one of dead bodies in a straight line in the yard of the Provincial Office, taken after the uprising. He tells the professor that he doesn’t know how to explain this photograph. The narrator remembers the night the army came back as they all waited in the Provincial Office. The soldiers took them out into the yard, hands tied behind their backs, and beat them. After an officer worked himself into a frenzy, the younger boys emerged from the building with their hands above their heads, surrendering just as Jin-su instructed them. Among them was Dong-ho. The officer immediately gunned the young boys down, where they fell in a straight line.

At the end of the chapter, the narrator thinks of other atrocities committed throughout human history. He tells the professor that he, too, is a human being, capable of committing such atrocities, and suggests that he look within himself for answers as to how such things are possible.