In Han Kang’s Human Acts, she draws upon one of the darkest events that occurred in South Korea, Gwangju uprising that resulted in the death of hundreds of citizens. As a Korean, I am consistently updated upon this issue through education, movies, TV shows, and etc. This shows that it is almost impossible for a nation to fully recover from a dark past as through understanding and constantly reminding ourselves of the dark pasts, we can stop making the same old mistake. Because such dark pasts involved sacrifices from the innocent citizens, it will always be part of a nation’s history.

However, in the Human Acts, Han Kang dealt with an issue of censorship by the government, as seen in chapter three (the editor 1985). From this chapter, we can see the government’s effort to suppress the publication of any knowledge regarding Gwangju uprising, especially because it was the government who caused such problems. We can also infer from this chapter that government censorship actually can make us forget the history to a certain extent, simply because the public won’t have much exposure to the issue. If the Korean government were to erase my knowledge on this, as well as many other government-involved mistakes, I would not only feel violated as my memory would be getting controlled by someone else, but also be ashamed of the government for making all the sacrifices of my ancestors go in vain.

I believe the source of most, if not all, sacrifices are the hopes for a better future for the next generations. In the case of the protesters in this novel, their sole goal was to put an end to a dictatorship such that their children and grandchildren can live more freely. Such sacrifices will always remain in a nation’s history (written documents/memorial park), and if they were to be forgotten, same mistakes would definitely happen again as we would not know the pain and suffering others had to go through to undo the mistakes. Therefore, it is quite clear that remembering the sacrifices and mistakes in the past is almost like our moral duty since without them, we would be rather living under the dictatorship and constant fear of death.

Going back to the novel, from the perspective of a reader, there is a clear distinction between the “good characters” and “bad characters”. The good characters would be people like Eun-Sook who’d taken care of the corpses and Jin-su who’d participated in the protest, and the evil characters would be the dictator (chun doo hwan) and other military leaders. However, from each individual’s perspective, I can assume that Eun-sook would’ve been relieved that she wasn’t killed, somewhat making her selfish. From Chun’s perspective, I can also assume that he’d tried his best to get control of Korea and continue the dictatorship, hence somewhat (very slightly) making him the good guy as his intention was nothing but to make Korea better. What I’m trying to say here is that there isn’t such thing as good and evil because it all depends on the perspective.

Growing up, I’ve always been told to finish all the food I was given as I would need to eat all the leftovers after I die. What this meant for me was that we are still alive after death, though not in the form we are in. Therefore, I believed that although our physical body may not be of significance after we die, our soul would still be there, alive, just like Jeong-dae’s. However, having learned science in middle and high schools, I now believe that we stop being us right after we die, simply because only the interactions between all our organs allow us to be us.

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