In May 1980, South Korea was under military dictatorship after years of authoritarian rule. Citizens in the city of Gwangju protested martial law and demanded democracy. The military responded with horrifying force: soldiers beat, shot, tortured, and massacred civilians, many of them young students. The state then attempted to suppress and distort the truth, labeling protesters as communist agitators while censoring reports about the killings. Even decades later, the true death toll remains disputed.
Now I am not going to lie to you and tell you that I was familiar with South Korea political history before reading this book. I knew almost nothing about the Gwangju uprising, and I think that actually made reading Human Acts even more devastating because I realized how easily entire massacres can disappear from global consciousness when they are not spoken about or remembered outside the countries directly affected by them. Han Kang does not approach violence through politics first, but through humanity. She is not interested in reducing people to numbers, casualties, or “historical events.” Every victim in this book feels painfully real. These are students, children, parents, workers, people who had favorite songs and friendships and dreams before becoming victims of state violence.
While reading this book, I could not stop thinking about how history keeps repeating itself across different countries and generations. The language changes, the governments change, the flags change, but the patterns remain terrifyingly similar: civilians being dehumanized, protests being labeled as threats, governments controlling narratives, and ordinary people paying the price of political violence. Reading this during the current sociopolitical crisis in Gaza and Lebanon and other different parts of the world suffering through war and a violent regime made parts of this book feel unbearable because it captures something universal about collective suffering. The grief of families searching for bodies. The impossibility of processing violence while it is still actively happening. The way media and governments can turn human beings into statistics until the world becomes emotionally numb to suffering. I genuinely think Human Acts is one of those books that transcends its historical setting. Yes, it is specifically about Gwangju in 1980, but it can be applied to almost every violent historical event because at its core it is about the aftermath of dehumanization and the importance of remembering the dead as people rather than political symbols.