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Jeong-dae’s Father
The writer’s father is a creative writing teacher in Gwangju. Though he moves the writer and the rest of her family to Seoul just a few months before the Gwangju uprising, the writer’s father stays in touch with old friends in his former city, getting news about the 5:18 protests and the horrors that followed. The writer’s father is likely based on Han Kang’s real father, the celebrated South Korean author Han Seung-won.
The Writer’s Father Quotes in Human Acts
The Human Acts quotes below are all either spoken by The Writer’s Father or refer to The Writer’s Father. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Epilogue: The Writer, 2013 Quotes
As it turned out, none of my relatives died; none were injured or even arrested. But all through that autumn in 1980, my thoughts returned to that tiny room at one end of the kitchen, where I used to lie on my stomach to do my homework, that room with the cold paper floor—had the boy used it to spread out his homework on its cold paper floor, then lie stomach-down just as I had? The middle-school kid I'd heard the grown-ups whispering about. How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?
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The Writer’s Father Character Timeline in Human Acts
The timeline below shows where the character The Writer’s Father appears in Human Acts. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Epilogue: The Writer, 2013
...dinner, she sometimes caught snippets of conversation between her parents and their friends. One time, the writer’s father mentioned a former student of his in Gwangju, a young boy with a talent for...
(full context)
Two years later, the writer’s father returned home from a visit to Gwangju with a photo chapbook of the murdered and...
(full context)
...hanok has been torn down and replaced with a prefabricated new house. Fortunately, many of the writer’s father ’s friends still live in Gwangju, and they help her find pictures of Dong-ho from...
(full context)
