Human Acts

Written in second-person perspective, this chapter follows Seon-ju, exploring her difficult life. It alternates between her present-day life as a 42-year-old woman, her memories, and her interior thoughts and questions. Seon-ju works as a transcriber for an environmental group. She has a reoccurring dream of standing in the light of a streetlamp, with darkness surrounding her. She must stay perfectly still because she does not know what dangers await in the darkness. Due to her trauma and nightmares, Seon-ju prefers sleeping alone. She had one failed marriage, and feels repulsed by and fearful of men.

In the opening section, Seon-ju remembers a night when she was at Seong-hee’s house. Seong-hee said the moon was called the “eye of the night” (141), and this image frightened Seon-ju. She also remembers factory work she did as a teenager. The labor conditions were terrible: 15-hour work days, sexual harassment, half the wages of men. This job is where she first met Seong-hee, who held meetings for women to study hanja (Chinese characters) and listen to labor lectures, repeating that “…we are noble. As noble as anyone else” (159). When the labor union voted against the company-dominated union, strikebreakers and police came to detain the instigators. The factory girls created a human wall to protest against the arrests. At Seong-hee’s command, the girls stripped down to their underwear, believing that the men would not harm them in a vulnerable state. But the police brutally beat them, and Seon-ju had an intestinal rupture. She went home to Gwangju after her discharge from the hospital and found work as a machinist. There, she met Jeong-mi, who dreamed of becoming a doctor.

In the present, Seon-ju is alone in her office smoking a cigarette and working late. She looks at a Dictaphone in front of her, next to several small cassettes, and struggles with a decision. She’s been contacted by Yoon, a professor who is interviewing people involved in the Gwangju Uprising for his dissertation, describing his focus as a “psychological autopsy.” When he first contacted Seon-ju, she turned him down, but he sent her a copy of his dissertation anyway. Now, he has sent her a package with the recorder and tapes, requesting that she record her testimony and return it to him, promising to keep her anonymity. She gets out the dissertation, which she has locked in a drawer, and reads the first transcript. It is a description of a person’s experience being arrested, unaware of where they’d been taken. One day, they are released at random, and the person sees that they had been imprisoned in the university the whole time.

Just then, Park Yeong-ho, Seon-ju’s team leader, walks in on her working late. He tells her that everyone in the office is curious about her; he then asks her about her involvement in the labor movement, and if it had anything to do with her time in prison. Seon-ju admits that she knew Kim Seong-hee, but says nothing of her time in prison.

Taking the recorder and tapes with her, Seon-ju goes to the hospital where she knows Seong-hee is. Although she hasn’t been in communication with Seong-hee in years, she called her when she heard she was dying. Seon-ju remembers Seong-hee asking her to share her story after the Gwangju Uprising, but she refused. She considers Yoon’s request but feels that it is impossible to face these horrifying memories. For Seon-ju, these memories include sexual abuse that caused permanent damage, rendering her unable to bear children. Soldiers called her “Red Bitch” because of her involvement in the labor movement, and demanded a false confession that she was a spy from the Northern communists.

Leaving the hospital, Seon-ju decides to return the unused recorder and tapes to Yoon. At the last minute, she turns back to the hospital, thinking that the only thing she wants to tell Seong-hee before she leaves is “Don’t die.”