By Prof. Sang-young Rhyu, Guest Author

Edited by Chiara Mazidi, Editor-in-Chief Newsletter

Han Kang's Nobel Prize in Literature provided a fresh literary and social awakening for both

South Korea and the international community. Her universal questions about human vulnerability touched hearts worldwide, transcending Korean history. The massacres in Jeju and Gwangju are not phenomena unique to Korea, with many parts of the world still healing from, or experiencing, war and death. The anachronistic declaration of martial law on Dec. 3, 2024 by Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was an incomprehensible shock that stirred up dark memories and painful wounds of state violence. However, South Korean democracy is resilient, and Korean society continues its efforts to properly heal and bid farewell to the darkest periods of its past. The martial law incident served as a good opportunity for many Millennials and Gen Z, both inside and outside South Korea, who were moved by Han Kang's novels to empathize with and learn about Korean history and democracy. The incident became an opportunity to revisit Han Kang's works. South Korea will walk through recovery process, creating a more vibrant and brighter forest of trees.

On October 10, 2024, the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy stated its reasons for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to South Korea’s Han Kang: “She confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.” The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Han Kang came as a fresh international surprise and was a source of national pride for South Koreans. Her novels have posed numerous questions to the international community and humanity at large and have provided a significant opportunity for introspection for Korean society. First, we must ask whether Korean society genuinely deserves to celebrate Han Kang’s Nobel Prize. Regardless of the political climate in South Korea, Han Kang was already recognized by readers both at home and abroad prior to her Nobel prize. But it was not South Korea that first “discovered” Han Kang, who was obscured by Korean realities—it was Europe. Nevertheless, her works were born out of Korea’s historical context and social backdrop. Second, Han Kang has prompted questions about the maturity of Korean democracy, such as exposing a reality where, despite a seemingly successful democratic transition, democracy remains threatened and stagnant in South Korean culture, consciousness and daily life. Third, one might ask, is South Korea truly healing from its historical traumas and moving towards a better society and future? This question is also a universal one, posed to all of humanity, still unable to escape its own frailty. Han Kang’s refusal to hold a Nobel celebration press conference, citing persisting tragedy and suffering from death in wars across the globe, is a symbolic continuation of the message in her novels.

Human Suffering: The Author Cried, and So Did the Readers

In a long-ago interview, Han Kang said that while writing Human Acts (titled 소년이 온다 in Korean), she wrote a single sentence and then wept for three hours. Such was the weight of historical trauma and human suffering she bore. In her work, she assumes the soul of a deceased protagonist, embarking on a lonely and painful journey to heal and escape the trauma of the dead. Many readers shared that they wept incessantly while reading We Do Not Part (작별하지 않는다) and The Vegetarian (채식주의자). Among these were numerous young readers who sympathized with her reflections on humanity without fully knowing the historical context. One European student disclosed that they visited Gwangju after reading her work. Regardless of nationality, some readers cried when Dong-ho’s soul, the protagonist of Human Acts, wanders in search of his friend’s corpse, while others were moved to tears by the story of Dong-ho’s mother, who anxiously waits for her son to return, unaware that he has died. Anger toward the violence inflicted by state power deepened their sorrow. Han Kang’s distinctive, microscopic literary exploration of human suffering has evoked emotional resonance and empathy from countless readers around the world.
On the other hand, more than a few members of South Korea’s older generation of readers have revealed that they find Han Kang’s works uncomfortable and difficult to read. Why might this be? As the Nobel Committee noted, Han’s “poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose,” which may feel unfamiliar to readers accustomed to traditional narrative forms. But that alone might not fully explain their discomfort. Many Korean readers grew up in the era of modernism, a society ruled by concepts like speed, power, competition, collectives, the state, the masses, and history. South Korea’s much-lauded economic growth and democratization were accomplishments of modernism. Culturally speaking, the economic growth of the Park Chung-hee era was a process of unwinding the han (a word that denotes emotions characteristic to Koreans that are closest to sorrow and rage) of poverty, while the democratization under the Kim Dae-Jung era was a process of relieving the han of dictatorship. Concepts such as individuality, common folk, sensitivity, wounds, suffering, pain, and healing were things that were concealed and endured silently. All literary work begins by questioning the essence of humanity, and it is difficult for any piece of literature to be entirely separated from history and society. The novels widely read in South Korean society thus far have clearly depicted the grand currents of history, the ocean of the masses, and the typhoons of power. Works such as Land (토지), Jirisan (지리산), Taebaek Mountain Range (태백산맥), Jang Gil-san (장길산), and Heroic Age (영웅시대) portrayed humanity within the grand flow of history. Western literature did the same. Doctor Zhivago and Les Misérables also pose questions about human dilemmas and placed them within majestic historical waves, which captured readers’ attention.

Yet in Human Acts, the word “history” appears only once, and in We Do Not Part, it appears just twice. The term “masses” (Minjung 민중), which became a symbol of resistance and progress after the Gwangju Uprising, does not appear in either work. Historical events are introduced only briefly, filtered through the protagonist’s memory. Moreover, the message conveyed through the protagonist is not an active or rational claim, but a passive and emotional confession in which the dead strive to heal themselves. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche castigates reality and guides the direction of history through Zarathustra’s voice. But in Human Acts, Dong-ho, and in We Do Not Part, Inseon’s mother, fight their own solitary battles to overcome the wounds history inflicted on them. The young Dong-ho’s internal monologue—questioning why the corpses of those massacred by soldiers of their own country are draped in the national flag—only faintly echoes as a political message within the novel. The scene I found most heart-wrenching was when Dong-ho’s spirit watches as his own corpse decays and burns. He longs for his body to burn completely so he can be freed from this wound and tragedy. Perhaps this is the most literary and symbolic depiction of the historical and social realities of Korea and the human issues that arise within them that the author wanted to convey. As distinctive as the narrative style is, so too is the method of connecting humanity and history. Yet this approach may have introduced Korea’s history more powerfully to the world from a universal human perspective and offered Koreans an opportunity for deeper reflection.

South Korea’s National Anthem and Arirang: Memories Unspoken Yet Unforgettable

In the early dawn of May 27, 1980, in Gwangju, citizens who remained inside the South Jeolla Provincial Office building, which was blockaded by Airborne troops, sang the South Korean national anthem and “Arirang” while awaiting their own end. The national anthem demonstrated that the true owners of the nation are not the military dictators or violent soldiers, but the patriotic democratic citizens. “Arirang,” deeply etched into the culture and history of the Korean people, served as an emotional symbol. In this scene, it expressed anger and sorrow towards the violence perpetrated by the state, as well as frustration and enduring han.
The 1947 Jeju Uprising and the 1980 Gwangju Uprising left deep scars on South Korean society, and for the victims and their families in particular, they remain unbearably painful. For many bereaved families, these tragedies are memories they long preferred not to speak of yet could never forget. During the period of concentrated massacres in Jeju from March 1947 to early 1949, 10,715 people were killed and 3,171 went missing. As a single event, it produced the largest number of casualties in the country, second to the Korean War. During the 10 days of the Gwangju Uprising, 166 people were killed, 54 disappeared, and 3,139 injured. However, it is estimated that both events had more victims than officially recorded, and efforts to locate bodies hidden in secret burial sites continue even now. Additionally, many survivors could not return to normal life due to lasting disabilities, and quite a number took their own lives. In We Do Not Part, Inseon remembers her mother who endured years in which she was not allowed to recover the body of her lost family member. In Human Acts, the survivor Kim Jin-su, who eventually dies by suicide after being tormented by mental illness, is depicted as having a soul as fragile as glass.

The Jeju Uprising was triggered during a March 1st Independence Movement commemoration rally in 1947, which ended in clashes between police and demonstrators, and it finally came to an end only in 1954 after the Korean War. Amid the post-liberation turmoil, the Korean public grew resentful over the ascendancy and tyranny of pro-Japanese police backed by the United States military government, coupled with hardships due to shortages of rice and other essentials, and opposition to the establishment of separate governments in the North and South. Later involvement by the South Korean Workers’ Party (Namrodang) also contributed to large-scale protests. Defining Jeju as a hotbed of leftist forces, the Rhee Syngman government’s military, police, and far-right youth groups carried out massacres. Civilians who fled to Hallasan Mountain to escape the violence became prey to state power and brutality. The Gwangju Uprising was a pro-democracy movement resisting dictatorship, calling for the lifting of martial law, the release of Kim Dae-jung, and the resignation of Chun Doo-hwan. However, Chun’s new military regime crushed the uprising with guns and bayonets before seizing power, delaying Seoul’s Spring of democrati- zation. The martial law forces sent to Gwangju fired a total of 512,626 live rounds of various ammunition and used at least 11 types of weaponry, including M16 rifles, machine guns, grenades, and helicopter-mounted machine guns.

In world history, war, massacre, and death have never ceased. With the rise and fall of empires, the wave of decolonization and the birth of nation-states, and at every turning point of the Cold War, countless acts of violence, slaughter, civil wars and conflicts have erupted on the periphery, some even leading to national division. This violence was justified by various arguments, burying both truths and suffering. The repeated massacres and violence in the Balkans, which began in the early 20th century and continued until recently, also occurred amid the rise and fall of empires and whirlwinds of power, as each ethnic group, fearing its own extinction, killed others for survival. However, the two incidents that occurred in Korea were neither the result of ethnic, religious, or national conflicts, nor tragedies that took place during wartime. Instead, they were cases in which a country’s own military or police massacred its citizens in peacetime to serve the political interests of those in power. The madness of that violence was even more intense, and efforts to conceal it persisted tenaciously over a long period. Accordingly, the victims’ pain and social trauma were inevitably immense.

Pablo Picasso: Guernica (1937) and Massacre in Korea (1951)

During the Spanish Civil War, on April 26, 1937, Nazi forces dropped 24 tons of bombs on the small northern Spanish town of Guernica, killing about 1,500 of its 7,000 inhabitants. The Franco regime, in cooperation with Hitler, launched an air raid on civilian areas held by the Republican opposition. Upon hearing this news, Picasso, who opposed war and violence and empathized with the victims’ suffering, completed his iconic painting, “Guernica.” In the painting, people and horses scream with twisted heads, and a woman is clutching her child while painfully crushed beneath a bull with large horns. It was Picasso’s indictment and expression of anger over the horrors inflicted on helpless civilians by the violence and power struggles between left and right factions vying for political power. His message continued in “Massacre in Korea” (1951), created to expose the civilian killings that occurred during the Korean War. Terrified children and pregnant women are standing at the gun points of heavily armored soldiers standing on the right side of the painting. Here, resistance to war and violence, a warning about humanity’s duality, and empathy and love for life and death are all powerfully depicted. This image is on the cover of The Origins of the Korean War, a book by Bruce Cumings, a professor at the University of Chicago.

Why did Picasso feel such anger toward the violence that occurred in Korea, and why did he empathize with the victims’ suffering? It is likely because resistance to violence, respect for life, and deep questioning and reflection on human nature transcend borders, languages and eras. Fundamental questions about the essence of humanity connect art and literature, link West and East, and unite human beings with one another.

When McCarthyism swept the US in the 1950s, fierce debates also flared in France over the outbreak of the Korean War. Jean-Paul Sartre, who believed that South Korea invaded North Korea, and Albert Camus, who thought that North Korea invaded South Korea, engaged in intense arguments over humanity, power, ideology and religion.

Albert Camus, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, says through the character Tarrou in The Plague (1947), “I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die.” On Oct. 7, 2017, Han Kang wrote in the New York Times that “[w]hile the U.S. talks of war, South Korea shudders,” later in the piece asserting that “in all wars and massacres there is a critical point at which human beings perceive certain other human beings as ‘subhuman.’” In We Do Not Part, Inseon painstakingly interviews an elderly woman who lost her family to a massacre during the Vietnam War to create a documentary film. That woman, too, begins to speak as if she had been waiting a long time to share her hidden story. Perhaps this represents a process of apology and mutual healing between the bereaved families of the Jeju massacre victims and those affected by civilian massacres carried out by South Korean troops in Vietnam. The elderly Vietnamese woman that Inseon meets is, in some sense, like her own mother, who wandered the beaches of Jeju searching for even a fragment of her family’s remains before passing away.

An Uncomfortable Truth: South Korea Still Cannot Say Goodbye

In We Do Not Part, the protagonist Inseon’s mother roams the forests of Hallasan and the beaches of Jeju Island in search of her family’s remains, but ultimately never finds them, departing this world without being able to say goodbye. Inseon, having inherited her deceased mother’s memories, also lives on without parting from her mother. In Human Acts, Han Kang writes, “[a]fter you died I could not hold a funeral- al, and so my life became a funeral.”

The South Korean government enacted special laws regarding the Jeju Uprising and the Gwangju Uprising, aiming to uncover the truth, restore honor, and provide compensation to victims. The Special Act on Discovering the Truth on the Jeju April 3 Incident and the Restoration of Honor of Victims was passed in 2000, and the Special Act on the May 18 Democratization Movement in 1995. As democratization progressed, many previously buried truths and atrocities came to light, and official apologies were released at the presidential and national levels, along with legal and social healing efforts. However, attempts to ideologically denigrate and distort these two events have not completely disappeared. Moreover, it remains questionable whether a genuine process of reflection and healing is taking place in the minds and behavior of many members of society. In particular, outdated historical awareness and perspectives among some core political elites have repeatedly led to anachronistic distortions and the opening of old wounds.

In the mid-2010s, under the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations, Han Kang was placed on a government blacklist as part of a cultural censorship policy and thus excluded from various forms of support. Globally acclaimed film directors such as Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) and Park Chan-wook (Old-boy) were also among the total of 8,931 individuals and 342 organizations targeted. More recently, it was revealed that the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education had classified Han Kang’s The Vegetarian as harmful to youth and removed it from support lists, igniting social controversy. Thus, even though South Korean society has been internationally praised for its successes in economic growth, globalization, and democratization, there remain shadows from which it has yet to properly emerge.

The martial law imposed by President Yoon Suk Yeol on Dec. 3, 2024, lasting for about six hours overnight, dealt a severe blow to South Korea’s proud history of democratization. Though this dark-comedy-like incident was the malevolent and foolish deviation of a tiny, anachronistic power clique, it was enough to remind the nation of the grim memories of state violence it has endured. Certainly, this incident cannot be generalized as a judgment on South Korean democracy as a whole. In fact, it exemplifies how the country’s institutional democracy possesses strong resilience. However, this event also illustrates that democracy, if not vigilantly protected by all its members, cannot be preserved by institutions alone and may regress. We cannot deny that this incident revealed yet another facet of South Korean society still unable to fully say goodbye to its past. Korean democracy is still in the process of healing.

Re-Reading Han Kang: For a Healing Korea

A few years ago, Han Kang mentioned in an interview that she now wants to write brighter stories. In the author’s note on We Do Not Part, she writes, “I hope this will be a novel about profound love.” Trauma, after all, maybe something that cannot be completely healed, something we must live with. But perhaps, like Dong-ho, who wanted his corpse to burn away quickly so he could be free, Korean society now yearns to bid farewell. After hearing news of Han Kang’s Nobel Prize, Dong-ho’s mother visits his grave at the May 18 National Cemetery in Gwangju and, shedding tears, comforts him: now that your pain has been brought to the world’s attention through literature, you can rest peacefully. In doing so, it is as if Dong-ho’s mother finally held his funeral and could at last say goodbye to his soul.

What should we do for a South Korea devoted to healing, recovery, and respect for life? Korean history is marked by deep darkness but just as much by brilliant light. Even in darkness, Korea’s efforts toward healing and respect for life have persisted. Former President Kim Dae-jung, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000, said in an interview shortly after surviving his 1973 abduction, “I will hold no lasting personal grudge or desire for revenge against any individual, including President Park.” After being sentenced to death in September 1980 by the Chun Doo-hwan regime’s fabricated treason conspiracy trial, Kim said in his final statement, “Soon, Korea will be democratized. I hope for no more political retaliation, even then.” This was not an expression of resentment toward the Chun regime, but a plea to his fellow advocates for democracy. Some argue that forgiveness died in the Auschwitz concentration camps, while others claim that forgiving the unforgivable is genuine forgiveness. Kim Dae-jung forgave what could not be forgiven even before the perpetrators offered any apology. In a letter from prison to his son, he wrote, “[o]nly those who are truly strong can forgive.” This spirit formed the moral foundation of Korean democracy and became the nourishment that enabled Korean society to recover and heal through hardships. Chun Doo-hwan, the one ultimately responsible for the Gwangju Uprising, never apologized and died without remorse. It is outrageous and shameful. When perpetrators sincerely apologize, wounds heal more readily, and society matures in a better direction. Even amid this disappointment, South Korea has tenaciously walked the path of healing. Han Kang’s novels can also be regarded as part of this ongoing effort.

The martial law declared in 2024 after 45 years has prompted a rereading of Han Kang’s works. In Human Acts and We Do Not Part, Han Kang converses with the souls of the dead. This martial law was an insult to Korea's history of fighting with itself to forgive and heal the unforgivable. Some undemocratic and arrogant forces mocked forgiveness and healing, ultimately leading to treason and martial law. Voices are growing louder, calling for definitive legal and institutional punishment, saying Korea should no longer forgive. Korean society will have to face a detoxing period, and it is certain that this incident will become a blessing in disguise for a brighter and better future. For proper healing and to prevent tears from falling again, the awakening and efforts of all members of society are required. In the coming months, one can only hope this will be a season not of flowers that bloom briefly and then wither disgracefully but a time of cultivating strong, life-filled roots and stems.

This article was originally published by East Asian Foundation on December 17th, 2024, and the views expressed here are those of the author.