Remembering Gwangju

I traveled to Gwangju after reading Han Kang’s Human Acts, translated into English by Deborah Smith. The novel, about the massacre of civilians in May 1980 by the military government, is told through the perspectives of various characters: a high school student named Dong-Ho who volunteers to identify corpses, the soul of the boy’s friend, a prisoner being interviewed years later by an academic, a factory girl subjected to torture, and Dong-Ho’s mother. It ends with an epilogue by Han Kang, who