I am so glad that we are reading human acts in english. I’m not sure if I already mentioned this in my previous posts but I usually don’t really enjoy reading, but I have really enjoyed this book. It’s written using very poetic language, giving very vivid and gruesome details, which has made it especially impactful. I think the author did a really good job in communicating the extent to which Gwangju was changed forever after the Gwangju uprisings and the extreme levels of trauma endured by those involved. Besides the research on the issue in class and on the human acts slides, I have also done some of my own research to understand the Gwangju uprising, since before studying this text I hadn’t heard of it. None of my research communicated the horrors of the Gwangju uprising nearly as well as the book did. Especially as time passes (in the book), and people (characters) don’t seem to heal from the tragedy, it shows it’s audience the long term damage it has caused.
On a brighter note, I have noticed that the few specific incidents described on wikipedia, seem to be making minor cameos in the book. For example, Dong Ho describes a deaf man being clubbed to death at the beginning of the book and then the old man comes in to the provincial office to see if the deaf man was his grandson. According to wikipedia, the first death was 29 year old Kim Gyeong-cheol who was deaf. He was clubbed to death by the army while passing by the scene.