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Chapter 6: The Boy’s Mother, 2010
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
When the writer was nine, she and her family moved from Gwangju to a suburb of Seoul. As the writer played with her brothers or helps with 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 creative writing. Even as a child, the writer could tell from the adults’ “awkward, drawn-out silences,” that something terrible had happened to this man.
The writer’s background parallels that of author Han Kang, suggesting that the novelist has written herself into her work in this final chapter. The boy the writer’s father mentions here is likely Dong-ho—a few pages ago, Dong-ho’s mother mentioned her son’s talent for poetry, and the writer’s father, himself a writing teacher, now identifies his student as someone with a talent for creative writing.
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The writer remembers her childhood home as a “typical, old-style hanok,” with its rooms arranged around a central, tiled courtyard, where roses and hollyhocks bloomed. The first winter near Seoul, the writer cannot believe how cold it is, and she finds herself hungry for the heat and flowers of Gwangju.
Though Gwangju eventually became a place of mass death, the writer remembers it before the uprising, when it was a place of warm, colorful life. The presence of hollyhocks in the writer’s old hanok effectively confirms that her family sold their Gwangju house to Dong-ho’s family (as Dong-ho’s house also had tall hollyhocks in the courtyard).
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In the first weeks of that winter, two strange men arrived at the house in Seoul in the middle of the night. They searched the house, and though the writer’s parents never explained what was happening, she knew that her parents’ attempts to be calm concealed their panic. In the next few months, relatives warned her parents that their phone lines might be tapped. And the writer learned that soldiers had shot Dong-ho, the youngest boy in the family who’d bought the Gwangju house from them.
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Two years later, the writer’s father returned home from a visit to Gwangju with a photo chapbook of the murdered and missing. After the adults looked at the chapbook, they put it on a high shelf, trying to keep it away from the children. But one evening, when her parents were busy with dinner, the writer snuck the chapbook from the shelf and looked through it. The images she saw there—of young people shot, of a woman whose face has been slashed by a bayonet—broke “something tender deep inside.”
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Now, in 2013, the writer returns to Gwangju. She sees that the floor of the gym—where Dong-ho and the others once stored corpses—has been dug up. The gingko trees outside have been uprooted, and the only thing that remains on one of the walls is a large, framed version of the Taegukgi. The writer does her best to conjure the coffins that once filled this space. “I started too late,” she thinks. “But I’m here now.”
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The writer is staying with her younger brother, who still lives in Gwangju. She has not spent time in the city in years, and she is surprised by how developed it has become, how unfamiliar all the streets feel. Even her old 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 his middle school records.
The writer then visits the exhibit at the 5:18 Research Institute, where she studies old footage from protests and student militia gatherings. She thinks she spots Dong-ho’s face in one of these videos, but because of his “utterly ordinary” features, she cannot be sure.
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The writer throws herself into her work, reading every document she can get her hands on and avoiding friends entirely. As she immerses herself in the document, she begins to have nightmares. In some dreams, she imagines that soldiers are chasing her with a bayonet. In other dreams, she learns that all the 5:18 arrestees are going to be executed unless she herself puts an end to it. And in one dream, the writer finds a time machine to return to Gwangju in 1980, only to discover she has programmed the machine incorrectly.
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In January of 2013, the writer attends a wedding. She feels that the bright colors and celebration is incongruous with her thoughts about Dong-ho. The research throbs in her mind: the soldiers who committed brutality “without hesitation and without regret,” the way Chun Doo-hwan’s government found encouragement for violence in the Cambodian government’s genocide of its own people.
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In one interview the writer reads, a survivor compares torture to cancer—in both cases, the memories grow and metastasize, as “life attacks itself.” Whenever the narrator sees police violence, she immediately thinks of Gwangju. And with memories of Gwangju come memories of childhood fear. When she would do her homework as a little girl, lying on her stomach, the writer always wondered whether Dong-ho used to lie like that, too.
Eventually, the writer goes to the new house where her old hanok used to be. The new owner is warm at first, speaking in the classic Gwangju dialect, but when she hears the writer’s Seoul speech, this woman grows cold. After some conversation, she tells the writer that the man who sold her the house works as a lecturer at a middling “cram school.” The writer arranges to meet with this man, who is Dong-ho’s middle brother.
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The middle brother is initially hesitant to share his story with the writer. But then he thinks about Dong-ho’s mother, and he decides to speak the words that he knows she would want to share with the world. “Please,” the middle brother implores the writer. “Write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.” And he tells her other stories about Dong-ho, too—how they used to have toe wars, and how ticklish Dong-ho was.
The writer acknowledges that just as there were some especially aggressive soldiers, there were also some soldiers who loathed violence. Like the student militias, these were the soldiers who carried guns but refused to fire them, or pointed them up to the sky to avoid wounding others. The writer wonders if the students in the militia were true victims, or if their commitment to death was their away of avoiding victimhood—of maintaining their dignity even in the most brutal circumstances.
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“Dong-ho,” the writer thinks, “I need you to take my hand and guide me away from all this. Away to where the light shines through, to where the flowers bloom.” For a moment, the writer imagines Dong-ho guiding her through the gravestones, the snow melting around his trackpants. In reality, though, the writer simply leaves a note for her brother and heads to the graveyard. She remembers the older brother writing to her about burying Dong-ho’s body. The older brother had polished the skull before covering Dong-ho with the Taegukgi, knowing this task would be too painful for their mother.
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At last, the writer finds Dong-ho’s grave in the Mangwol-dong cemetery. She has brought a few candles, which she now lights. As she kneels before the grave, she realizes that her ankles are getting cold—she is standing in a snowbank. But still she stands there, staring, “mute, at that flame’s wavering outline, fluttering like a bird’s translucent wing.”
