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Chapter 4: The Prisoner, 1990
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Human Acts, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Human Connection
Bodies and Vulnerability
Language, Memory, and Power
Youth, Courage, and Naivety
Afterlife and the Soul
Summary
Analysis
It is 2002, but Seon-ju can’t stop thinking about years ago, when she would spend all her time with Seong-hee and their other labor union friends. Now, reflecting on that time—when they would talk about the moon and lounge around on rooftops—only makes Seong-hee sad. In the present day, in her office, Seon-ju checks her email and smokes a cigarette. Everything feels difficult, as if she is underwater.
More than 20 years have now passed since the Gwangju uprising, but like the narrator and Eun-sook, Seon-ju still feels almost physical pain from her memories. Interestingly, though, Seon-ju did not begin protesting during the 5:18 uprising, as the others did. Her activism started years earlier, with Seong-hee’s group of young female labor organizers.
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In a flashback that she labels as “Up Rising,” Seon-ju remembers the sound of footsteps. She recalls waking up in the middle of the night and hearing a child. Back in the present, Seon-ju thinks about how she ended up in this office. For years, she had worked with Seong-hee in the labor rights organization. Ten years ago, however, she got a call from a man named Yoon. Yoon was hoping to do a “psychological autopsy” on Seon-ju’s old student militia unit, and he wanted her help.
In these poetic, experimental, “Up Rising” sections, Seon-ju reflects on the vague outline of a young boy, one who seems to resemble Dong-ho (or at least an abstracted version of him). The translation of these sections as “Up Rising” is particularly telling: the words testify both to the force of memories when they “rise” to the surface and to Seon-ju’s life of protesting (rising up). In linking these two ideas through language, the “Up Rising” sections suggest that memory is its own form of protest. On a plot level, it is important to note that Yoon is almost certainly the same professor interviewing the unnamed narrator for his aforementioned “psychological autopsy.”
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At first, Seon-ju declined. But after talking to Yoon more recently, she learned that seven of the ten surviving members of the militia had agreed to a series of interviews. When Seon-ju still expressed hesitation, Yoon merely sent her his dissertation and a set of tapes, hoping she could at least record her voice even if she couldn’t bear a sit-down interview. Seon-ju has another flash of the “Up Rising” memory, imagining footsteps and dripping water.
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Though Seon-ju works all day categorizing and transcribing various audio and video recordings, the cassette tapes Yoon has sent her to record on still feel overwhelming. Seon-ju’s work focuses on environmental disasters, namely deaths and disease caused by radioactivity. She wonders how Yoon will be able to stand the stories of bayonets and drill bits and cudgels. Already, the first interview described in his dissertation involves torture, as the unnamed interviewee describes being taken captive and brutalized in a nearby university.
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The first interviewee survived. In his interview, he explains that though he had never prayed before, his prayers to be released from torture were answered relatively quickly. But he cannot forget the faces of others who were not so lucky, like a pair of college girls gunned down on their campus. These faces haunt his nightmares, just as the dead bodies Seon-ju used to clean and sort at the Gwangju Provincial Office haunt her memories.
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That night, Seon-ju wakes up long before dawn, disturbed by what she has read. She is almost 42, but she has only lived with a man once, and that only lasted one year. After all, living alone means Seon-ju can wake up whenever she needs to without fear of disturbing another person.
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A few days later, Seon-ju is staying late at work when her boss, Park Yeong-ho drops by. Park is cramming, hoping to shut down a nearby nuclear reactor. He wonders why Seon-ju has cranked up the heat in the office so high. All of the other employees are younger than Seon-ju, and they speak to her with a kind of quiet deference. Only Park ever questions her or teases her, calling her “a human search engine.”
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When Park notices that Seon-ju is using the Dictaphone, smoking cigarettes, and drinking coffee, he assumes she is just cramming to meet a deadline, too. Park apologizes for the long hours and meager pay, confessing that he and the other employees are curious about what motivates Seon-ju. Park wonders about Seon-ju’s relationship with Seong-hee, who is “the stuff of legend” to him and other, younger labor organizers. Seon-ju feels too tired to explain her relationship to Seong-hee, or to tell Park about all that she has seen.
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The “Up Rising” memory comes again, as Seon-ju reflects on the ways she is different from Seong-hee. While Seong-hee believes in a god of some kind, Seon-ju struggles to pray. “I forgive no one,” she vows, “and no one forgives me.”
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Back in the present, Seon-ju pretends to go home when Park leaves the office. But secretly, she turns around, planning to stay in the office so she can record the tapes for Yoon. Seon-ju has recently learned from the newspapers that Seong-hee is in the hospital. She calls her old friend for the first time in years, and the two talk, only briefly. For her entire life, except for the two years when she was in prison, Seon-ju has buried herself in her work. It feels easier and safer to be solitary. But now, Seon-ju feels a deep need to connect with Seong-hee. For some reason she can’t quite explain, Seon-ju believes that she must record the tapes for Yoon before she can visit Seong-hee in person.
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Seon-ju thinks back to the factory labor she did as a teenager, which was so physically punishing and exhausting that she had to take pills to stay awake. Back then, the guards would search her every night, lingering on her private parts. There were no weekends, and Seon-ju was always getting sick from the factory fumes. Women only made half of the men’s already-low pay. No wonder that Seon-ju found solace in Seong-hee’s labor rallies, which helped factory workers insist that “we are noble.”
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When Seong-hee had organized enough laborers to go on strike, she and the other young women formed a human wall in front of the factory. As policemen and strike-breakers approached, Seong-hee instructed the women to take off their clothes—young women’s bodies were sacred, so the activists were sure they would be safe if they were naked. But to everyone’s shock, the police still attacked, dragging the naked girls to the ground and beating them with cudgels. Seon-ju was brutalized so much that her intestines ruptured.
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After Seon-ju healed, she decided to return home to Gwangju rather than continue to fight with the other factory workers. She was now blacklisted from most factory jobs, so she had to get a job at a dressmaker’s shop. The pay was even worse now, but Seon-ju found comfort from writing back and forth with Seong-hee, taking her time to write in hanja (traditional Chinese) characters as Seong-hee had taught her.
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After three years, Seon-ju finally worked her way up to being a machinist in the dress shop. But as soon as she got this new job, Seon-ju was devastated to learn that a young factory worker had died in the riots, slitting her own wrists in protest. Quickly, Seon-ju begins to link the violence she experienced at her factory to similar incidences in Busan and Masan. She knows that the person responsible for all of this violence is President Park Chung-hee.
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That October, Park Chung-hee was assassinated, and soon after, Chun Doo-hwan rose to power as the next president. Rather than lessening the violence, Chun Doo-hwan had even more frightening plans than his predecessor. Seon-ju became glued to newspapers, trying to understand what would happen next. One day, walking along the street, she saw a bus full of young factory girls. They were chanting protest slogans and holding a sign which read “END MARTIAL LAW. GUARANTEE LABOR RIGHTS.”
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Feeling entranced by the chants, Seon-ju followed the bus all the way to the Gwangju Provincial Office. Though the protests in Gwangju had begun with university students, now, the square in the front of Office was filled with people of all ages. At the front of the protest were the bodies of two young people whom soldiers had gunned down.
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In the present, as Seon-ju approaches a hospital, time seems to blur together. Seon-ju can still hear the girls’ protest song in her head, “carrying down through the years.” Seon-ju enters the hospital while she recalls the words “we are noble,” chanted over and over again. Seon-ju climbs to the roof of the hospital, then jumps off. But rather than dying, Seon-ju revives, only to repeat the process again—this is a recurring nightmare Unfortunately, being awake is not much better. “Memories are waiting,” Seon-ju knows. “What they call forth cannot strictly be called nightmares.”
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Seon-ju once felt proud that she was able to repress her memories—she was angry with Yoon for wanting to dig up her recollections of the past. In fact, her entire falling-out with Seong-hee hinged on this disagreement. Ten years ago, Seong-hee encouraged Seon-ju to make her story public, and Seon-ju was outraged. Now and always, Seon-ju feels that she is failing Seong-hee. For a moment, Seon-ju remembers the man who had been her husband for eight months, his kind eyes and his worried insistence that she sometimes scared him.
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In the present, Seon-ju is at the hospital—in reality now instead of in her dreams. As Seon-ju waits for the doctor to arrive, she thinks back to her youth in Gwangju, to a friend named Jeong-mi who had wanted to be a doctor. Seon-ju knew Jeong-mi would never realize this—the factory would destroy her body before she even got time to study for the middle school exams.
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Seon-ju washes her face, brushes her teeth, and applies lotion. She wonders what Seong-hee will look like—it has been 10 years since they last saw each other, and Seong-hee sounded so different on the phone. Seon-ju recalls moments in their protest days when she and Seong-hee, not caring about propriety, slept curled next to each other for comfort and warmth. Seon-ju remembers that Seong-hee always snored loudly.
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Still in the hospital waiting room, Seon-ju falls into a restless sleep. She dreams of the phrases from Yoon’s emails: “testimony. Meaning. Memory. For the future.” Seon-ju knows Yoon wants her to “bear witness” to her own suffering, but how is she supposed to bear witness to the rifle that was pushed up her vagina, to the various abuse so intimate it left her forever unable to have children? How can Seon-ju explain that the violence was horrific enough that she became afraid of touch and affection, even friendship?
When Seon-ju wakes to the sound of a hospital patient moaning, she decides to leave. In the middle of the night, she crosses the damp grass and heads home. As she walks, she thinks again of the two college girls murdered on the grass. With horror, another moment of “Up Rising” comes to Seon-ju—in this moment, the footsteps are just outside her door, coming towards her.
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Seon-ju recalls driving around with the other female students, begging the residents of Gwangju to at least turn on their lights. The soldiers eventually apprehended them, arresting the various protestors. Because Seon-ju had a gun and was involved in labor rights organizing, they called her “Red Bitch,” insisting that she was a spy from North Korea. The military police interrogated Seon-ju for so long that she could barely think.
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After several years, Seon-ju was able to track down Seong-hee, who had also been in prison. Both women have been gravely aged by their years of arrest and torture. When they reunited, Seong-hee told Seon-ju that Jeong-mi, after protesting and being blacklisted from the factory, had disappeared. Now, Seon-ju struggles to remember the contours of Jeong-mi’s face; all she can think of is the phrase “I want to be a doctor.”
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In the present, the “Up Rising” memory comes again. Seon-ju recalls that she came back to Gwangju “to die.” At first, the city looked similar, until she noticed the quiet in the streets, the bullet holes in the walls of the Provincial Office. But on a walk one day, Seon-ju noticed a picture of Dong-ho plastered onto a wall of a Catholic Center. She took down the picture as quickly as she could, walking fast to avoid the police’s prying eyes. “You saved me, Dong-ho,” Seon-ju thinks, “you made my blood seethe back to life.”
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In the present, as Seon-ju continues her walk away from the hospital, she thinks back to Dong-ho asking why she and Eun-sook placed the Taegukgi over the dead bodies in the gym. Seon-ju does not remember Eun-sook’s answer, but privately, she thinks it is because they were trying so hard to make the deaths mean something. Seon-ju feels that she can never return to this time again—to a time before she knew what torture felt like. When the “Up Rising” feelings come again, she realizes she might never know who the footsteps belong to.
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As she thinks of Dong-ho and Jin-su, Seon-ju reflects that she has “the capacity for neither bravery nor strength.” She blames herself for leaving the factory after she was beaten, and she also blames herself for leaving Seong-hee’s labor movement later in life to go work with this environmental group. Seon-ju knows that one day she will have to face danger head on, and she thinks back to that night on the roof when she was seventeen, eating peaches with her friends and staring at the moon.
With the hospital behind her, Seon-ju thinks the thought she has been avoiding: that she is responsible for Dong-ho’s death. If she’d sent him home, begged for him to leave as they ate gimbap together, maybe he would not have stayed and lost his life. Seon-ju walks on, raising her head to the rain. As she walks, she thinks, “don’t die. Just don’t die.”
