Human Acts

How is it, she wonders, that a face can so effectively conceal what lies behind it? How is not indelibly marked by such callousness, brutality, murderousness?

I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them: why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?

If we’d been given a little more time, might we have arrived, eventually, at a moment of understanding? Might we have groped our way toward exchanging a few words, or thoughts?

Wasn’t it lucky that he was shot so he died straightaway, don’t you think that was lucky? A strange fever had burned in his eyes as he begged me to agree with him.

I was worried that the skull would be too much for our mother, so I hurriedly picked it up myself and polished the teeth one by one.

But now, if we can only keep our eyes open, if we can all hold our gazes steady, until the bitter end…

The moment when he appeared to remember that he had a face and a voice, to recollect his own dignity, which seemed the memory of a previous life.

Permission? Yes, you have my permission, but only if you do it properly. Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.

Gwangju had been reborn only to be butchered again in an endless cycle. It was razed to the ground, and raised up anew in a bloodied rebirth.

In other words, “Gwangju” had become another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down, and brutalized, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair.