- What are hwa-byung and han? Why does the reviewer mention them?
Hwabyung is a Korean colloquial term for “anger disease.” It describes emotional or physical suffering. Han is used to describe feelings of melancholy. They are almost cultural conditions or cultural mentalities. To be honest I’m not quite sure why the reviewer included it. If I were to guess, perhaps the reviewer included it to draw connections between the Korean and culture and the book. Maybe it was there to communicate the kind of emotion the author intended to evoke from the audience.
- What do they mean when they discuss Kang’s detached style?
Where we would express some emotional response from characters, there is a lack of emotion. The characters narrate the events with objective descriptions, without actually talking about how they feel, or their emotions. The characters seem detached from the events…perhaps because they were so surreal.
- They write that the characters ‘struggle for personal agency among hegemonic power.’ Do you agree? How do you see that manifest in the text?
Yes for sure. The plot revolves around the Gwangju uprising. The Gwangju uprising was the youths resistance against the authoritarian, military rule. It was a fight for freedom. The book describes the challenges and hardships people faced as a result of the uprising, from the perspectives of different stakeholders who were involved.
- ‘Truth telling becomes an ethical burden’: what does that mean, and why might the truth be a burden to the characters?
Realiving tragedies can be very traumatic for victims. When we ask victims to retell these stories, it can be a big ask as it disrupts their progress in their journey of forgetting and moving on. These are memories they would like to forget and move on from. If we ask them to retell them, we prevent them from moving on and forgetting.
I think this relates to the chapter called “The Prisoner.” From my understanding of what happened in this chapter, one of the leaders of one of the troops who rebelled against the military rule is getting interviewed by a professor. It is told from the troop leaders perspective and throughout the novel he recalls what it was like fighting in the uprising, and then his time in prison that followed.
In one part, he narrates the story all the way until the soldiers came, before he stops and says to the professor what happened next I can never say out loud and no one else has the right to ask about because it’s too painful for him to recall.
This is an example of how the author helped the reader empathize with survivors who are unable to use their voice to draw attention to the issue, because it is too traumatic for them to relive.